Peter Bradshaw 

Año Uña

The twist to this movie is that everything is presented as a narrative "slideshow" succession of still photographs, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  


Director Jonás Cuarón, 29-year-old son of Alfonso Cuarón, has had an interesting idea. He has made a movie about a Mexican kid and the hopeless romantic crush he gets on a twentysomething American student staying with his family. The twist is that everything is presented as a narrative "slideshow" succession of still photographs taken by Cuarón himself. Friends and family act out the roles, with characters' dialogue added to the soundtrack in real time and internal monologues in a kind of spoken "thinks" bubble. The effect is not so much Chris Marker, more like a photo-love story in a teen magazine. But it's entertaining - and startling how quickly you forget you are watching still images. The brain acclimatises. Diego Cataño plays 14-year-old Diego, the horny teen obsessed with whingey US student Molly, played by Eireann Harper - also the movie's producer and editor. As with Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation - also about a young American being cute and vulnerable abroad - there are signs of self-indulgence. The cardinal sin of this kind of movie, however, is to be boring. Cuarón Jr does not commit it.

 

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