SYNOPSICS
Año bisiesto (2010) is a Spanish movie. Michael Rowe has directed this movie. Mónica Del Carmen,Gustavo Sánchez Parra,Marco Zapata,Diego Chas are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2010. Año bisiesto (2010) is considered one of the best Drama,Romance movie in India and around the world.
A psychodrama, shot almost entirely in a seedy one-room apartment, which details the grinding routine of Laura (Mónica del Carmen), a 25-year-old freelance journalist, who lives a very isolated life in her small apartment rarely venturing out besides getting men home from nightclubs and never going beyond one night in bed. Until she meets the quiet, inscrutable Arturo (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) and the pair enter into an intense, violent sexual relationship. The story focuses on the fascinating evolution of their relationship. As days go by, she crosses out the days on a calendar, revealing her secret past to her lover. It takes place in February on a leap year.
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Año bisiesto (2010) Reviews
Extreme.... happiness
Judging by the reviews here, there seems to be a lot of animosity, a lot of grief and lot of misunderstanding about this film. Leap Year, is by it's very nature, exactly that. It's a film about a desperately sad and lonely woman who, through her own sex drive, ends up making a massive jump forward in her life. Emotionally and temporally. It is a film for everyone who has felt the extremities of sexual pleasure and pain, the extremities of desperation, the extremities of loneliness and the extremities of depression. Laura is a lonely woman with a job as a writer. She spends her time alone doing journalism and fantasising about personal relationships. Compulsively lying to her family to show herself as more interesting than she thinks she is. Needing positive emotional intensity. She lives emotionally vicariously off the young couple opposite her flat - she masturbates while watching them doing everyday tasks, feeding off the closeness they have but that she has never experienced. Closeness and understanding turn her on, they fuel her. She goes out most evenings and pulls random men back to her flat, sleeping with them but gaining nothing. They all leave in the morning with barely a word. She has no idea how to snare men any other way than through sex. To her, sex is the portal to emotional fulfillment. Here is her main failing. She ends up meeting Arturo who has quite advanced sexual tastes. He likes spanking, he likes asphyxiation, he likes knife play and urolagnia. Because she is desperate to be close to him and because he shows a constant interest in her, she goes along with everything. And here is an important point. She does not go along with him because she is forced to but because she finds she enjoys it. There is no point in the film where she is forced to do anything beyond her will. Every time he buzzes her flat she knows what's coming. She runs to the window, throws the keys out, undresses and waits. The intensity, the vibe between them, the emotional extremity turns her on so much and gives her the emotional closeness she always fantasised about that she wants more. When Arturo urinates on her, and asks her afterwards what it was like, she smiles and says "it was warm". It felt good to her because it was personal, because it was private, taboo, shunned by many, but something explicit to them (a point clearly understood by the BBFC who did not cut this scene even though they are normally outspoken again urinating on women in pornography). This brings me to the next point - this is not porn. Laura is a plain girl. She is not a porn actress or model. She is plump, she is normal, she is a lonely girl going through depressive motions desperately looking for understanding. This film is not meant to titillate, which is the point of pornography. It is not meant for the viewer. It is about Laura. It is her film. It is a snapshot of her existence. Nothing is glossy or embellished. The flat, her, her sex life, her job. Everything is matte, plain and wanting. The film's pièce de résistance is the final scene. Laura has been marking days off her calendar to her decided day of suicide, 29th February, the same day her father died. Arturo asks her "what kind of person dies on February 29th?" to which she answers "those that have to". She is convinced she cannot - will not - live beyond this day. She marks it in a big red block on her calendar. A stop, an end point, unseeable beyond. She agrees with Arturo on the ultimate close sexual high - she will be killed by him during sex that night when she outlines to him in a highly erotic scene exactly what she wants him to do to her while she masturbates him. When the evening comes and her brother invades her space because he has broken up with his boyfriend, she wakes up the next day alive and in the same white dress as the night before. She looks at the calendar, realising February has ended, and turns over to March. A new month. A month she thought she'd never see. Each day blank and for her to fill with what she chooses. She is in control once again - maybe more than ever. If you've ever been depressed, felt extreme loneliness or understand the highs and lows of sexual experimentation and intensity, this is a film for you. It ticks so many boxes so beautifully..... but for everyone else it will likely just seem exploitative. It is far more than that indeed: a very beautiful, dark and emotive piece of film-making.
Humanity at its rawest
Laura is a normal woman, living in a normal apartment, has a normal job, is normal looking but is abnormally depressed. It's never verbalized but her obsession with the day her father died combined with when she tells Arturo when she lost her virginity (12 years old) and then how she says "it's none of your business" when he asks her who with - is a dead giveaway, to me at least, that it was at her father's hands. The long silences between her answers and the questions give it away too. This is the heart of the movie - her painfully normal life combined with her painfully abnormal obsession with submissive sex and her father's death, as well as his highly probable molestation of her. All of that dictates her ultimate goal; to die on February 29th., the same day her father died. She plans on manipulating Arturo's weakness for dominance and BDSM, thus having him do the deed for her. Probably because suicide is a sin for Catholics. All the little but strategically placed details like a picture of Mary, Laura praying etc. - all of that makes this movie that much more interesting. It may not be high budget but it addresses so many things about humanity in general; loneliness, abuse, the normalcy of everyday life, religion, pain, love.... it's just the whole rainbow of humanity in one, low profile and modest movie from Mexico. The acting is raw and oh so real - if I ever saw an actress that deserves more attention than she is getting it's Monica del Carmen. Awesome job Monica! Hollywood! You can learn a lot from this one - and that's saying a lot coming from someone who usually ONLY watches Hollywood-made movies. p.s. this may look like a porn movie to those who take everything at face value but it really isn't. A face-value-black-and-white outlook on life usually just means lack of maturity and lack of life experience. Nothing wrong with that - but this movie definitely isn't for people like that.
Even the Cockroach Gives a Top Performance
A bleak study of loneliness set in a claustrophobic apartment in Mexico City featuring a fearless performance, or a masochistic one, take your pick, by Monica Del Carmen as Laura. Laura spends most of her days and nights in her joyless apartment spying on her neighbors and inventing relationships with them in her mind. She occasionally goes out to clubs and brings home men for unrewarding sex. They invariably leave her lonelier than before. She meets Arturo (Armando Hernandez) who brings a sado-masochistic satisfaction to her sexual life. Meanwhile she ominously checks off the dates of her calendar toward the end of the month marked in red. This film is as explicit as it needs to be and Laura's world is not easy to view. Director Michael Rowe has achieved the film he sat out to make, I'm sure, and the totality of the realism can be uncomfortable as it should be. By setting the movie entirely in the small apartment and by the astonishingly natural performance of Ms. Del Carmen, you feel, smell, and know this movie like it was a fever dream. You want to give Laura a big hug at the end. Not for the squeamish or near squeamish.
not fancy
"Leap Year" is simple, albeit brilliant filmmaking. There is very little, if any, "coverage" for each and every shot. No close-ups, no pans, no dolly shots, no cranes, no over-the-shoulder, and no reaction shots. The camera remains still and static throughout - time and time again simply letting the drama unfold before our eyes. We are nothing more than a voyeur. It's a bold choice - perhaps born out of budget necessity - but it nonetheless works. What's makes every shot absolutely fascinating is called "life." Human behavior. The success of this film is a tribute to the director, his belief in the story, and most of all, the trust he was able to get from his actors. Although the camera rarely moves, it tells the story better than most Hollywood directors with a much bigger budget ever could.
Great movie
Laura's character is so complex. We see her living a superfluous life when she interacts with other characters, except for her brother Raul and a guy named Arturo. We descend to the darkest levels of the human psyche along with the main character and that exploration is highly successful by the director. The film is linear, with no jumps in time as does Inarritu or Guillermo Arriaga, and also includes sex scenes which are pretty explicit. Although it seems the movie is just porn, it goes beyond sex. The aesthetic is like simple and I think the merit of the movie is the story and how it show us the life of a lonely woman living on a big city. So, after painful and rough journey, perhaps it is possible to find hope and redemption. A great Mexican film.