J Paul Johnson
Duino, the directorial debut of Juan Pablo Di Pace and Andrés Pepe Estrada, is a film steeped in memory. Di Pace is an established Argentinian actor (Mamma Mia!); Estrada, a Spanish composer and editor: Duino is the result of their close collaboration as writers and directors, based in part on events from Di Pace’s own life. The story is told both in a narrative present, where Di Pace plays a version of himself, making a film about his youth, and in flashback, as that younger version of the filmmaker’s experience unfolds. It’s a story that relies in no small part on reverie and melancholy, contrasting a lively set in 1997 past with the rueful self-reflection of the present day.
Di Pace, in the film’s present, plays Matias, a filmmaker deeply immersed in the craft of storytelling. His need to tell his own story, truthfully and directly, is jeopardized by his own fragmented memory—specifics come to him during filming that alter his carefully-constructed plans—and by pressing external demands as well. He’s behind schedule and over budget and his crew is starting to rebel. His best friend, Paolo (Juan Cruz Márquez de la Serna), is also his producer; he’s grown impatient with Matias’ slow progress as festival deadlines loom and is wondering if the director has it in him to complete the project.
The film Matias is making is also called Duino, named for the town where in 1997 he attended the United World College of the Adriatic, and where his experiences were formative. These scenes—some of them shot with the effect of late-’90s style VHS camcorder footage—make for a delightful, high-spirited, and engaging narrative in and of themselves. Young Matias (played in the flashbacks by Santiago Madrussan) is a naïve young Argentinian arriving at the school for the first time, where he is pulled in quickly to a tight circle of memorable friends. Among them is a brash and funny student from Sweden, Alexander (Oscar Morgan), a rogue with a rebel streak on whom Matias develops a crush.
Every scene that unfolds in Duino at school does so with the energy and verve of youth. Matias and Alexander’s classmates are a lively and diverse bunch, full of artistic talent and optimistic dreams. Matias’ character is by comparison with his classmates introverted and unsure of himself, his thoughts and feelings expressed not with words or actions but more typically by subtle glances and gestures. When his childhood friend Paolo (played in these flashbacks by Tomás Kirzner) arrives for a visit, the camcorder footage he records picks up on Matias’ crush on Alexander, but soon Alexander’s pranks get him expelled from the school. Only when Matias is invited to spend Christmas at Alexander’s family home in Sweden will he have a chance to express his feelings.
On that fateful vacation, Matias meets Alexander’s parents and sister, and his own parents find themselves there too, all the way from Argentina. It’s a moment where Matias’ unresolved attraction for Alexander results in a touching, anguished coming out. When Matias leaves Sweden with his parents, he leaves behind a love he never could quite fully express. Di Pace and Estrada’s handling of all of these scenes is engaging and convincing, full of the deep passion of youth and the steep pang of unrequited love. The gimmick of filtering some of it through a VHS-style effects filter doesn’t degrade the strong emotions registered, and the young cast—especially the ebullient, exuberant Morgan as the sweet Swedish prince—is a delight.
The narrative present, where the adult filmmaker Matias is struggling to complete his cinematic bildungsroman, is by comparison less engaging. The stakes are high, certainly, for adult-Matias-the-emerging-filmmaker, but the film has some difficulty conveying them. There are, for instance, some lovely storyboard drawings Matias fiddles with resorting as he contemplates a festival edit of his film, yet there does not feel like there’s any great consequence to whatever choice he makes as a result. When, in the film’s third act, he returns to Alexander’s home in Sweden for the first time in decades to attend a wedding, his reunions lack any real energy or revelation, and, to be blunt, little happens in a narrative sense other than continued reminiscence.
The plot in this sense reminds more than a little of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, though there the adult filmmaker had already become a success (and there was no complication of his being gay and conflicted about his passions). In that film too, a filmmaker returns for the first time in decades to the scene of his most ardent childhood passions. It’s a film that may well depend on sentiment, but it nails its ending, with a gift from a childhood mentor that speaks volumes to their shared love of cinema. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Duino to that modern-day classic, but its final act would benefit from some kind of meaningful gesture or revelation that gave it more heft. My First Film, though made under very different circumstance, is similar: it, too, would be every bit as moving if not more so were it unmoored from the weight of its meta-narrative structure.
Duino‘s story of adolescent longing is lovingly told with a strong cast and a sprightly tale, but its meta-narrative structure of presenting it through an adult filmmaker’s flashbacks ultimately doesn’t do the past justice. Simply presenting the story of young Matias and his developing, conflicted attraction with Duino‘s youthful cast would make by itself for an excellent coming-of-age film, uncluttered by and untethered from the complication of it being either a flashback or film being created by its adult protagonist. The 1997 sequences are that good. And by comparison, those set in the present day are professional and competent but largely without the same degree of energy or passion.
