Note sur le film : Mon meilleur ami

Mi Mejor Amigo
Titre anglais : Mon meilleur ami
Réalisé par Martín Deus
1h 30min, Argentine, 2018

I’d like to highly recommend this sincere friendship-drama from Argentina but I spent most of the movie blinded by the tattooed-bad-boy beauty of Lautaro Rodríguez‘s character Caíto that I mostly overlooked the film’s not insubstantial flaws.

It’s a credit to the screenplay, the sensitive direction, and the performances that Angelo Mutti Spinetta‘s Lolo wasn’t quite as dick-whipped as I was.

But after it was all over, I couldn’t help but feel that most of the resources available to director Martín Deus ? the capable young actors; the older ones, too; the scenario itself; but especially the Patagonian landscape ? had been squandered.

Deus might have felt that way himself because the bathetic montage accompanied by mediocre Argentine folk-pop seemed to be struggling to end the film on some kind of coherent and appropriately serious note. But it failed, I’m afraid, as sketchy and insubstantial as most of the rest of the film’s characterizations.

What didn’t fail was the cinematography of Sebastián Gallo who made every interior frame feel like a precious candid and one particularly well-directed and written scene in which Lolo’s mom, played by Mariana Anghileri, unsuccessfully encourages her son to come out to her.

Spinetta plays the entire scene with his hand over his face. He never really does come out and we feel strongly that he can’t, if not why. And that plays exactly right.

So, a promising feature and performances from everyone but didn’t stick the landing.