Leo's Room (2009)
6/10
Interesting but half baked
31 March 2013
Warning: Spoilers
They say that avocados are an acquire taste, the same we can say about this type of movies. The slow timing, the great length of the scenes with a lot of silences, very scarce dialog, the favorite way to make movies by Ingmar Bergman, by Antonioni... you really have to accept those premises if you decide to watch this film.

It has a great deal of excellence thanks to everybody involved in it, since obviously they filmed it with a very restricted budget. It seems the lighting they used was the natural ambiance light and if the scene came out too dark, too bad, no way they would re shoot it, but exactly those no-no's (for a Hollywood production) helped in this case to get the necessary atmosphere to develop the story with great intimacy and naturalness. It was filmed, practically, as a documentary.

All the actors were true professionals, save, maybe, the mother of the protagonist, that for some reason gave a wrong feeling to her phrasing, almost as if she was reading the lines.

I truly believe that this movie could benefit enormously if they take it back to the editing room and cut about half an hour, because some of the scenes are unnecessarily too long for no reason whatsoever.

*****Spoilers ahead *****

I have the feeling at the conclusion of the story, that the director --or the producer or whoever decided about the ending-- panicked with the idea that the protagonist would end up being homosexual and happy as such, so they decided all of a sudden, after all that inner torture and knuckle biting throughout the whole movie, that, after all, our guy happened to be heterosexual (bisexual?) but since the ending is left totally open we'll never know what his true sexual orientation was.
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