It’s a drama, it’s a slick flick, and it’s “pretty-bad.” When does a non-judgmental style simply become exploitation? That’s a question still to be answered. The only sure thing is that this seductive Spanish film will successfully separate teenagers from the price of admission in their wallets.

 

His relationship with his girlfriend is nothing more than carnal, a situation she finds nearly unbearable, and when he gives her a gold chain that he has obviously stolen from a friend, this is the last straw, and she leaves him.  At first he finds it impossible to speak to his brother about his brother’s hesitations about marriage, but then he does eventually reach out to his brother, and helps to make the wedding a success. Presumably, this is supposed to represent some kind of personal growth on Tano’s part, but it is peanuts, in the context of everything else that occurs.

The film is very entertaining, in an irresponsible and exploitative way. That, to my mind, is the saddest part of all. Teenage rebelliousness has existed forever, but the nihilism depicted here is something more disturbing. It is the dislocation of a society moving headlong into a new century, when Grandma still lives in a peasant world of superstition, while the teen is living in a world of drugs and petty theft at the shopping mall. Yet, we are never asked to reflect on this social schizophrenia in any meaningful way during the film, we are just invited to enjoy watching the teens have sex and play their deadly pranks as though it were all a big joke.  To my mind, this is cruel treatment of the characters and careless irresponsibility toward the young audience.

What are the ethical responsibilities of a filmmaker that presents such drowning, amoral characters as sexy role models for the young people of his country? I don’t know, but I have a feeling that we don’t discuss this enough. Perhaps the filmmaker would claim that he does not mean for these characters to be role models, and that his audience will be sophisticated enough to perceive the underlying sadness of these boys, but I would not be convinced and I think the film’s official website proves otherwise. I don’t think we should allow filmmakers to get away with such disingenuous cop-outs. To be fair, there is some attempt to depict the inevitable consequences for the boys’ actions, both for them and for their victims, but it is overwhelmed by the unreasonably sympathetic characterizations and fawning rationales for their irresponsibility.