Duino

Duino

There are countless love stories around the world, but for a heterosexual person, the options are diverse. However, for those who, for the first time, fall in love with a person of the same gender, particularly those who matured in the twentieth century, the situation is somewhat different. So many of those stories end in despair that it becomes rather easy to begin crafting one’s story to find the emotions appealing. Gay and bisexuals are more likely to face the heartbreak of unreturned affection, and making one’s feelings known also presented a challenge a long time ago, but how many of us actually end up using that as a scapegoat? The phrase itself speaks volumes. It implies that people avoid the target due to the fear of hope and end up losing something valuable.

Argentinean director Juan Pablo Di Pace plays the cinematic character Matias, who is a fortysomething filmmaker who finds it rather hard to narrate stories about his first love since he has practiced idolizing it for far too long. This love for his first partner has led him to contemplate writing about it in fiction, but he feels uneasy. He tries to avoid memories and feels that there were certain things he should have taken care of earlier. An unexpected invitation forces him to make a decision for the future, which he hasn’t been able to do so far, and he understands that he needs to revisit the past and attempt to live in it.

Duino, mentioned in the title, is a village on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in Italy and his location was the United World College of the Adriatic, which young Matias (Santiago Madrussan) won a scholarship. A very leggy and painful intervention makes this socially awkward and shy boy get up on stage when a girl he doesn’t know asks him to dance, and somehow his dancing style charms a bunch of strangers the most memorable one being Alex Morgan, a rich Swiss student who seems to have his sights set on making Matias into a Fred Astaire. As they go about the local ruins of the castle and even make fun of cut scenes from Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, a strong bond forms between the two. Summers go by supremely until one day Alexander is involved in some expulsion and Matias till now has managed to maintain silence.

Switzerland will be worth the trip as he gets to spend this Christmas with his friend in what seems a budding romance, but complications arise as Alexander’s sister’s flirtations prove to be a problem. At the same time, Matias deals with the factors of the past and his troubled parent-child relationship which adds to the focus of other areas of affection for the youth looking to pave their way in life. One can intuit the heightened feelings of Alexander in him towards the later end as he lacked love in the first instance but can sorting one situation help him out with the other?

Matias’s history goes alongside with the retelling of the events of the present, when the director demands to make additional shooting which brings tension in his relationship with the producer Paolo (Juan Cruz Márquez de la Serna). They’re all in a frantic race against time with a festival date hovering, and Paolo appears to be wishing to avoid any conflicts as even if he accedes, Matias would surely keep complaining anyway. There’s no easy way to this business, which requires a fair amount of practice eventually though, one has to accept and embrace the flaws in their creation.

Can Matias become more forgiving with his history as it is imperfect? Over the course of di Pace’s tale, the intricate intertwining of fiction and memory, art and life undergoes subtle changes, which also results from the author’s own life and which challenges us all to reevaluate the overly reductive plots that we all so easily cling to.

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