by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Juan Pablo Di Pace, Santiago Madrussan, Oscar Morgan, August Wittgenstein, Julia Bender, Krista Kosonen
Intro:
… exists on a similar bicurious wavelength as films like Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name and Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory, mixing the former’s rosy recollections of past love with the latter’s examination of how art becomes a vehicle for our ventricle bruises.
At some point, everyone wonders what the Director’s Cut of their life would look like, right? What decisions you would change, what people you would interact with, how you’d interact with them… if only you had access to that level of editing equipment.
It’s the kind of thought exercise that drives some mad because, disregarding causality and how all those decisions lead to where you are now… there’s still that curiosity about what might’ve been, even if that change ends up changing everything else.
It’s a dilemma that often crops up in the film editing process, and it’s one that threatens to drive director Matias (Juan Pablo Di Pace, who also co-directs) mad. He’s one perfect shot away from his ideal ending, which stings even more as the film in question is a dramatization of his own experiences at the United World College of the Adriatic… and a potential love that got away.
The chemistry between the younger Matias (Santiago Madrussan) and Swedish trust fund kid Alexander (Oscar Morgan), right from the start, is too cute for words. Surrounded by so much wayward theatre kid energy (again, right from the start), their budding friendship is punctuated by moments where Matias, however fleetingly, wonders… is this just a friendship?
That feeling is amplified once their parents start interacting, bonding over Christmas in a way that shatters any and all language barriers between Alexander’s British-Swedish family and Matias’ Argentinian parents. It is joyous seeing them all get along this well, bolstered by how right Matias and Alex’s pairing feels… but it’s undercut with something troublesome. Nothing nefarious or immediately toxic, but something that tinges all those same lovingly wholesome exchanges – heteronormativity.
Hearing Alexander talk about his parents wanting to send him off to military school, and setting up his sister Kathrine (Julia Bender) with Matias, shows the underpinning that there is a specific kind of ‘normal’ that is expected of everyone involved. Men get married to women; that’s ‘just the way things are’. And with that foundation of what counts as normal, anything that deviates from it is… well, we don’t think about it. After all, these kids are normal… right?
Couched within this romance-that-wasn’t story is an underlying tragedy of what becomes of a person’s happiness when it’s societally enforced to be steered in just the one direction. Even more so than the scenes between Matias and Alexander, it’s a key moment between Matias and his mother Roma (Araceli González); in a single monologue, Roma lays out the hard facts about parenthood and the external pressures that are built on the seemingly-benign heteronormative model.
All of this swirls around in the older Matias’ noggin, seeing his film as his only chance to give this story… to give himself, the ending he deserves. But that’s the danger of playing around with one’s own memory – it stops being about what really happened, and what you wish had happened. It’s nice to relive bygone days of impromptu tango dancing and quoting of Monty Python, but the past is a foreign country without an immigration policy; only visitors. And trying to put down roots only serves to mess with the natural architecture. “Memory is sneaky. It’s inaccurate.”, in Matias’ own words, and as melancholic as the tone becomes, there’s a nice little bow of acceptance that makes it sit easier.
Duino exists on a similar bicurious wavelength as films like Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name and Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory, mixing the former’s rosy recollections of past love with the latter’s examination of how art becomes a vehicle for our ventricle bruises. It effectively conveys the bliss of young love, while being careful to appraise the internal and external expectations that become symptomatic of lovesickness. It does well with its familiar ideas about the way our memory compartmentalises our experiences, both good and bad, and its declarations regarding the result of treating heterosexuality as the strict ‘norm’ hit with a wallop.
