Photo: Alexis Dos Santo's Glue
Glue is no landmark, but there's a striking candor to Alexis Dos Santos's artful doodle about a boy and his seething hormones in Argentina's dreary Patagonia region that recalls some of the seminal works of the New Queer Cinema movement. The writer-director's camera is as fluid and sticky as the sexuality of his characters, coolly traveling with Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) as he rides to and from excursions with his buddy Nacho (Nahuel Viale), pulling back as the boy's bike swings around obstructions only to become distracted by the sight of an older man sunbathing on a park bench. Much like the improvisational charms of the film's young cast (one uses a glass shower door to practice kissing her fantasy lover; another puts on the mask of a cat as a pretext to cuddle against his friend), Dos Santos's aesthetic is a great enticement, sinuously slip-sliding between DV and Super 8 as if it were traveling between states of consciousness, approximating through bold movements and angles the raptures and depressions of adolescence. Ed Gonzalez
Glue is no landmark, but there's a striking candor to Alexis Dos Santos's artful doodle about a boy and his seething hormones in Argentina's dreary Patagonia region that recalls some of the seminal works of the New Queer Cinema movement. The writer-director's camera is as fluid and sticky as the sexuality of his characters, coolly traveling with Lucas (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) as he rides to and from excursions with his buddy Nacho (Nahuel Viale), pulling back as the boy's bike swings around obstructions only to become distracted by the sight of an older man sunbathing on a park bench. Much like the improvisational charms of the film's young cast (one uses a glass shower door to practice kissing her fantasy lover; another puts on the mask of a cat as a pretext to cuddle against his friend), Dos Santos's aesthetic is a great enticement, sinuously slip-sliding between DV and Super 8 as if it were traveling between states of consciousness, approximating through bold movements and angles the raptures and depressions of adolescence. Ed Gonzalez
