(2014, 110 min)
Country: Mexico
Director: Sergio Tovar Velarde
Studio: Breaking Glass Pictures
Language: Spanish w/subtitles
SYNOPSIS: Four Moons offers up four stories about love and self-acceptance. An eleven year-old boy struggles to keep secret the attraction he feels towards his male cousin. Two former childhood friends reunite and start a relationship that gets complicated due to the fear of getting caught. A long-term gay relationship is in jeopardy when a third man comes along. An old family man is obsessed with a young male prostitute and tries to raise the money to afford the experience.
REVIEW:
One new couple is trying to get things together. One longtime couple is trying not to break apart. One paunchy, white-bearded man in a towel is trying to get some satisfaction in a steam room. And one angelic 11-year-old is learning that his priest doesn’t want to hear about a young boy’s sexual stirrings. With those stories, Sergio Tovar Velarde’s “4 Moons” (“Cuatro Lunas”) paints a spirited and sensitive portrait of gay boys and men in 21st-century Mexico.
Strikingly photographed by Yannick Nolin, with occasional full-frontal male nudity, graphic sexual encounters and rooms full of bare buttocks (a sex club scene), this quiet romantic drama never soars but keeps its sense of humor and its balance while taking its subject matter for granted in the best possible way.
Alonso Echánove is particularly sympathetic as the bearded man, who turns out to be a noted poet — the kind to whom colleges dedicate special days — with a loving wife, grown daughters and little grandchildren.
Maybe it’s unrealistic to have a supposedly straight young man (Gustavo Egelhaaf) realize that he’s gay and invite his new boyfriend over to meet his parents, to whom he’s just come out, in a single scene, but it’s a nice concept.
The film’s tone flirts with smugness, though it never crosses the line. At the end, the boy (Gabriel Santoyo) who visited the priest shows off his culinary talents to his parents, topping every entree with a single, perfect strawberry, and his narrow-minded father struggles to embrace the revelation that his only son is gay.
-- Review by Anita Cates, New York Times - Movie Review (http://www.nytimes.com)
