Anyone who wasn’t born yesterday knows that every gay man doesn’t look like Montgomery Clift or Rock Hudson. Some look like Dom DeLuise, and they like to have dirty pig sex with other big, hairy men. They may look dangerous, but they’re really cute and cuddly inside, and as such they like to refer to themselves as “bears.”
In Luis Miguel Albaladejo’s Bear Cub, one such bear takes his nephew—a would-be bear cub according to his own mother—into his home for several weeks. But after the woman lands in jail somewhere near the Indian border, the arrangement becomes permanent and soon Pedro (José Luis García Pérez) is trying to win custody of the sensitive Bernardo (David Castillo) after the boy’s estranged grandmother, Doña Teresa (Empar Ferrer), enters the picture.
Bear Cub isn’t as shrill as you might expect for a story about two cultures trying to meet each other halfway, and its frank depiction of bear-on-bear sex is refreshing. But as it sets out to prove that Pedro can be a good father despite all the drugs and anonymous sex, the film gives way under the strain of too many agendas. A last-act contrivance fleshes out Pedro’s secretiveness, but unlike Hugh Grant’s lothario from the similarly themed About a Boy , the man never really turns inward. Pérez is great, but he’s no match for the soapy Hallmark-card ending that betrays his character in order to hawk a trite we-are-family message.
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