Sublime: This Argentinian film delivers on the promise of its title

Time for love and friends

Manuel (Martin Miller) is the most ordinary 16-year-old. He spends evenings at the beach with his girlfriend Azul Mazzeo, takes his gang of friends into the woods and finds them whenever he can to play their band’s first hits.

But Manuel’s most special relationship is with his best friend, Felipe (Teo Inama Chiabrando). Like brothers, those who are close do not let go and share each other’s closeness from early childhood. At the dawn of adulthood, this connection gradually takes on a new color and causes suspicion in Manuel. Do the feelings she has for Felipe stop at friendship?

“No, nothing has changed…”

“How could my eyes not see you? How could I be so close without reacting? I didn’t wake up in time, I got stuck in the middle of the road. I don’t know if I should wait or run. Don’t go, please don’t go without knowing what you mean to me.”

As he gazes at the twilight horizon from the desert beach, Manuel writes these words in a crumpled notebook. The first fragments, the sentences, become the lyrics of the song, Ça ne change rien, whose sweeping melody echoes the film by Argentine Mariano Bassini.

But the young man’s clumsy romanticism takes on a completely different meaning when the director’s camera lingers on the hesitant look Manuel gives his friend Felipe. Finally, can he really say that nothing has changed?

“…everything, everything will go on!”

In fact, everything has changed: Manuel and Felipe are no longer really children, so they are not adults. Shaken by their first romantic feelings, which they experience very differently, the two boys seem to go their separate ways.

It is this progressive distance shooting that shines Mariano Biasini, because it is precisely in paradox that the sublime as well as the tragic is born. Indeed, above all, their ever-increasing closeness forces the two teenagers to separate in order to avoid the initial shame and protect themselves from it. At the very moment when the innocent intimacy of childhood is broken and gone, the whole framework of their friendship is shaken.

Unlike Close, whose break was marked by violence and brutal distancing, this slow and progressive break seems perfectly suited to the clumsy and melancholic ballads of Manuel and Felipe’s band. But as in words It doesn’t change anything A sweet note of hope written by a devastated Manuel remains.

For his first film as a director, Talented Mariano Biasini invited a troupe of novice actors, all larger than life. In infancy, they seduce with their natural acting sensibility, which the filmmaker delicately takes to intimacy.

Awarded at international festivals in Seattle, San Francisco and San Sebastian, Sublime was also the talk of the prestigious Berlinale, where it was nominated in no less than 3 categories. An initiator of universal value and a love story, wonderful Indeed, it achieves a degree of beauty that its title hopes will not touch the heart of its viewers.

Sublime will hit theaters from May 17.