A Year Without Love
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Carlos Echevarría, Javier van de Couter, Juan Minujín, Mimí Ardú, Osmar NúñezDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Original Language), Unknown
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-13
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Strand Releasing
Movie Reviews of A Year Without Love
Movie Review: " I wanted a masculine man to dominate me"
Summary: 4 Stars
In A Year Without Love is a gritty, hard-edged movie about desire, illness and longing. Spanish director Anahi Berneri takes us into the leather - fetish - S & M underworld of Buenos Aires - yes, it does exist! And in the process conjures up one man's search for love in a world where it seems as though it's almost impossible to connect.
A Year Without Love is set in 1996, just as the new AIDS cocktails were being released. Unfortunately, the handsome thirty-year-old writer and poet Pablo (Juan Minujin) is suspicious of the drugs that might stave off the AIDS-related illnesses that are slowly killing him. Determined to maintain his health through natural remedies, Pablo embarks on a series of herbal remedies.
In realty, he's racing against time as a crippling illness - in the form of pneumonia - threatens to take hold of him. Living in a state of denial, he lives with his aunt in a rather squalid little apartment and is supported by his father. He meanders through life, disengaged from his sexual partners, his family, his feelings about a former lover and the disease that he suffers from.
By day Pablo teaches French lessons and by night he trolls the streets of Buenos Aires looking for love in porn theatres and sex clubs, sometimes frequenting the local disco with is best friend. He takes out a personal advertisement in the local rag, hoping to connect with a dominant masculine man and eventually ends up joining a private S&M club where he becomes a sort of voyeur, never really participating but never really staying on the sidelines.
The sex scenes actually make up a small portion of the film and ironically serve to highlight the fact that Pablo does find love in the most unusual place. The dark and furtive jump cut editing doesn't hide the fact that these are all scenes of hard-core bondage, whippings, fisting and dungeon play and they are all very graphic, and may be too much for some viewers. Yet these scenes are important because they show how dangerously Pablo is living on the edge and how he is tries to morph this behaviour into the fabric of his everyday life.
The sexy Juan Minujin is really very good as Pablo; his performance is restrained, quiet and he really manages to capture the vulnerable, wasted and desperate look of someone who is living on borrowed time. Frustration, longing and hope are all part of Pablo's daily life, and a fierce sense of defiance at his illness and at his life.
There's a real naturalness to this film, you really believe in Pablo's struggles and that he's living with this disease and the S/M sections of the film are never glamorized or sugarcoated. Dreamlike and judicious, they realistically suggest their meaning to Pablo without being manipulative or gratuitous.
As we leave Pablo, we see that he doesn't always get what he wants; his disease is in remission, yet his search for love is left somewhat ambiguous. He has to fight to stave off pain, loneliness and dependency, and his diary about his life is a testament to this - yet what he ends up with is a type of newfound resiliency and a reinvigorated ability to finally go out there into the world. Mike Leonard June 06.
Summary of A Year Without Love
The story of pablo a young writer who is looking for the love of his life. He places personal ads cruises the gay scene of buenos aires & falls in with some people who introduce him to the s & m practices and leather fetishism. Pablo seeks to eroticize his pain and to tame the monster lurking within. Studio: Strand Releasing Release Date: 11/25/2008 Run time: 95 minutesSimilar DVD Movies
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