Vintage coming-of-age drama from Argentina, though it's largely set in Spain. The setup is quite promising: Martin, an Argentine screenwriter who lives in Madrid and a distant, withholding dad if there ever was one, reluctantly takes charge of his 19-year-old son, Hache (pron. "Aché," the equivalent of "Junior"), after the latter unwisely mixes whiskey with a street drug called "dog" and ends up in the hospital. Martin, solitary and self-absorbed by nature, seems to be at a loss, but Martin's friend and collaborator Dante, a hedonistic gay actor, and Martin's clingy, coke-addled girlfriend Alicia (the fabulous Cecilia Roth of "All About My Mother") are delighted to have a handsome new playmate.
Trouble comes (for the characters—and the viewer, IMHO) when the scene shifts to a luxurious villa in Almería, in the south (not unlike the modernist pueblo where Bardot and Michel Piccoli hole up in Godard's "Contempt"). An evening of drinking, doping and cynical philosophizing, presumably for the benefit of the directionless young Hache, has tragic consequences that seemed, to me at least, both predictable and contrived. Despite a charmingly redemptive final scene in which Hache finally comes into his own, the film never recaptured my attention after that. A couple of our Spanish Facebook friends really talked this one up; part of the problem may be that the subtitles can't keep pace with the dialogue, which, in these melodramatic final scenes, just comes off as pretentious and banal
Trouble comes (for the characters—and the viewer, IMHO) when the scene shifts to a luxurious villa in Almería, in the south (not unlike the modernist pueblo where Bardot and Michel Piccoli hole up in Godard's "Contempt"). An evening of drinking, doping and cynical philosophizing, presumably for the benefit of the directionless young Hache, has tragic consequences that seemed, to me at least, both predictable and contrived. Despite a charmingly redemptive final scene in which Hache finally comes into his own, the film never recaptured my attention after that. A couple of our Spanish Facebook friends really talked this one up; part of the problem may be that the subtitles can't keep pace with the dialogue, which, in these melodramatic final scenes, just comes off as pretentious and banal