Al Mar (Spanish) [The Sea]

This movie was simply weird. I went in really wanting to like it, but the pretentious, overly poetic atmosphere, along with the choppy editing that jumps back and forth in little five- to ten-second bursts, made the whole thing feel stretched out for absolutely no reason. It was way too self-indulgent, if you ask me. Honestly, this could’ve been cut into a fifteen-minute short without losing a thing. I also still have no idea what was going on with the women dancing along the beach while this overwrought, flowery narration played over it. The story moves at a snail’s pace toward a confrontation you can spot coming from a mile away, and it only gets more boring as it approaches. By the time it finally happened, I’d completely checked out as a viewer, even though the film has two genuinely good-looking guys in the lead roles.

The premise is pretty straightforward. Lorena and Diego are attempting to make a new life for themselves in a small coastal town, both anxiously beginning new jobs—she’s a baker and he’s a teacher. Separately, they each meet a thoughtful young man named Vicente, and his love of art pulls them both toward him. Lorena brings him into a film project she’s working on, while Diego is drawn to him in a way that makes it increasingly difficult to keep burying his attraction to men, something that has quietly been straining his marriage all along. So as Diego and Vicente begin something on the side, with Diego constantly doubting himself and never fully embracing it, it’s inevitable that everything will eventually come out. The three take a weekend camping trip, where Lorena kisses Vicente and later finds Diego and Vicente having sex. She’s devastated at first and goes home, but then the strange ending has her basically accepting the entire situation, leaving you to wonder whether the three of them are about to become a throuple.

There’s also this odd subplot that runs through the film from the beginning, involving women who are deeply connected to nature and the universe—sort of an earthy, almost Aztec island thing connected to the sea—and it even divides the movie into chapters. But that storyline gets completely abandoned and never resolved, since there isn’t a final chapter to wrap it up. The romance between the two men also feels seriously underdeveloped. They’ve hardly spent any meaningful time together before Vicente is already tossing around the word “us.” You want to care about what they’re going through, but honestly, they’re both so irritating to watch that it’s hard to feel much of anything for either of them. The wife has her own strange subplot too, roaming around in nature collecting leaves, which just made no sense to me. You’d assume it all leads to her catching them together near the end, and it sort of does, except then she comes up behind the two guys sitting on the beach and starts passionately kissing them both. After that, all three strip down and walk hand in hand into the ocean. Seriously, what was the point of any of it? I honestly think I could take this same footage, cut it into a fifteen-minute short, and make it land much harder emotionally. Sometimes filmmakers need to get out of their own heads a little. (2.5/10)