Leap Year (2011)
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Likely to come as a galloping shock to some poor unexpecting VOD user settling in for a dull Amy Adams-goes-to-Ireland romcom of the same name, writer-director Michael Rowe's intensely disturbing Mexican art film Leap Year takes place completely inside the grungy, bunker-like apartment of a harrowingly lonely woman named Laura (Monica del Carmen). A freelance business writer who telecommutes to work and spends most of her off hours on the phone with her mother and younger brother, Laura only goes outside to buy groceries and hook a string of one-night-stands, each less interested in speaking a full sentence to her than the last. On her phone calls home, our eager-to-please protagonist imagines a vast social life, including gay friends, kind and gentle lovers, and luxurious steak dinners in place of Ramen, bad soap operas, and the occasional fuck buddy. And as filmed by Rowe and DP Juan Maniel Sepulveda, Laura's apartment is lit to not only accentuate a sense of self-imposed exile but to suggest a grim, treacherous interior life uglier than any of the degrading acts Laura physically suffers through.
Though none of Laura's suitors treat her like a lady, nor like a human being for that matter, the more brutal and astonishing acts of humiliation come along in Laura's whiplash, sadomasochistic trysts with Arturo (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), a seemingly kind-hearted philanderer. What begins as a slap across the face and some choking in flagrante dilecto eventually evolves into games of startling sexual brutality, wherein Laura submits to being burned by cigarettes, whipped by belts, and pissed on while she masturbates on her living room floor. In the film's penultimate jaw-dropper, she lays out, step-by-step, how Arturo will butcher her mid-coitus and then dispose of her body while she gives him perhaps the most furious handjob ever put to film.
Indeed, the only intimacy Laura seems to truly enjoy is that which is shared by her neighbors across the way, whom she constantly spies on and every so often masturbates to. The muted light from the window that faces their window is about as tasteful a metaphor for Laura's outlook on life as the film offers; most night scenes seem to be lit only by single bulbs, moonlight, or the glow of the television screen. There is a focused sense of aesthetic here and though Rowe's artistry seems at worst a bit cagey and at best immensely promising, it's hard to shake the look of this film and the gloomy subtleness of the script, which the director co-wrote with Lucia Carreras. Of the most prominent mysteries that seem to float in Laura's emotional ether, her relationship with her late father and the importance of the day he died (she crosses out days on a calendar leading up to that day) are the most ominous and the most potentially devastating.
An unexpected Camera D'Or winner at Cannes in 2010, Leap Year may indeed have to live under the shadow of Carlos Reygadas's towering, maniacal Battle in Heaven, but it maps its own chilling course, getting profound use out of the three or four dingy rooms of Laura's apartment through the filmmaker's dark, evocative style. Born Australian but raised in Mexico, Rowe, along with Reygadas, Carlos Carrera, Jorge Michel Grau and the largely unsung Amat Escalante, helps define a more nuanced national cinematic identity that one might not grasp through the admittedly brilliant, versatile careers of Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro, nor through the faux-humanistic preaching of Alejandro González Iñárritu. There's a mood in the films of many of these directors of decay, of a lawlessness born out of nation-wide moral atrophy, but unlike Grau's wicked We Are What We Are, Leap Year ends with a quiet, heartbreaking moment of hope, a premonition of the sun shining brightly on Laura for the first time in lord knows how long.
Though none of Laura's suitors treat her like a lady, nor like a human being for that matter, the more brutal and astonishing acts of humiliation come along in Laura's whiplash, sadomasochistic trysts with Arturo (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), a seemingly kind-hearted philanderer. What begins as a slap across the face and some choking in flagrante dilecto eventually evolves into games of startling sexual brutality, wherein Laura submits to being burned by cigarettes, whipped by belts, and pissed on while she masturbates on her living room floor. In the film's penultimate jaw-dropper, she lays out, step-by-step, how Arturo will butcher her mid-coitus and then dispose of her body while she gives him perhaps the most furious handjob ever put to film.
Indeed, the only intimacy Laura seems to truly enjoy is that which is shared by her neighbors across the way, whom she constantly spies on and every so often masturbates to. The muted light from the window that faces their window is about as tasteful a metaphor for Laura's outlook on life as the film offers; most night scenes seem to be lit only by single bulbs, moonlight, or the glow of the television screen. There is a focused sense of aesthetic here and though Rowe's artistry seems at worst a bit cagey and at best immensely promising, it's hard to shake the look of this film and the gloomy subtleness of the script, which the director co-wrote with Lucia Carreras. Of the most prominent mysteries that seem to float in Laura's emotional ether, her relationship with her late father and the importance of the day he died (she crosses out days on a calendar leading up to that day) are the most ominous and the most potentially devastating.
An unexpected Camera D'Or winner at Cannes in 2010, Leap Year may indeed have to live under the shadow of Carlos Reygadas's towering, maniacal Battle in Heaven, but it maps its own chilling course, getting profound use out of the three or four dingy rooms of Laura's apartment through the filmmaker's dark, evocative style. Born Australian but raised in Mexico, Rowe, along with Reygadas, Carlos Carrera, Jorge Michel Grau and the largely unsung Amat Escalante, helps define a more nuanced national cinematic identity that one might not grasp through the admittedly brilliant, versatile careers of Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro, nor through the faux-humanistic preaching of Alejandro González Iñárritu. There's a mood in the films of many of these directors of decay, of a lawlessness born out of nation-wide moral atrophy, but unlike Grau's wicked We Are What We Are, Leap Year ends with a quiet, heartbreaking moment of hope, a premonition of the sun shining brightly on Laura for the first time in lord knows how long.
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