Leap Year (Año Bisiesto) (2011) directed by Michael Rowe
I was browsing through Netflix and came across this movie with a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes so I decided to give it a shot. I thought it was quite good despite being pretty disbursing. It goes to show that sex in films doesn't have to be there just to be shocking or to titillate audiences, but is often crucial in telling the story.
Laura is a 25 year old journalist who moved away from her family in the countryside and lives in a quiet apartment in Mexico City. Its drab walls and dilapidated state reveal quite a bit about Laura herself. She lives a desperately lonely life, almost never leaving the apartment with the exception of picking up guys to bring back. In fact, aside from a very brief scene at a supermarket in the beginning of the movie, the entire film is shot in this apartment and its effect is almost claustrophobic. We watch Laura do what essentially boils down to nothing; eating instant noodles in front of the TV, reading a book while eating ice cream, playing Tetris on her laptop, sitting on a toilet, looking out her window, random chatter on the phone. This is her daily routine and it is utterly depressing. On the wall is a calendar for February where the 29th is marked in red. Every day she crosses off a date leading to that day. The significance of that date to Laura and what is to happen is slowly revealed as the film progresses.
There are two scenes from these early moments that tell quite a bit about Laura and the movie, one very subtle and one very obvious. One is a simple one where she is typing on her laptop and picks her nose for a brief second. Now this may not seem significant, but how many times have you seen someone actually stick a finger in his or her nose in a movie? Hours of unused footage get cut on the editing room floor for every movie and Leap Year is only 94 minutes long, yet 20 seconds are spent on this scene and tens of minutes on her sitting around doing nothing revealing the enormity of her current condition. Everybody in the world picks their nose but you never see it on film because, well, why would directors want you to see that? I think what director Michael Rowe is trying to get across is the plain ordinariness of Laura's life.
In the other scene, Laura peeks out of her window into her neighbor's apartment where she watches a young couple together. She watches them sitting on the couch drinking beers, which doesn't seem much until you compare it to her own lonely existence. She desperately wants this intimacy and so she masturbates watching them through her window. Here she equates their intimacy and human connection through the pleasures of sex which helps explain her behavior with men.
We watch her get dressed up to go out and in the next scene we see her in bed having sex with a man. We never really get to see his face because he isn't important. The experience is impersonal and ultimately unfulfilling. In the morning, the man tries to quietly get dressed and sneak out. With her back to him, he does not realize that Laura is awake. She lays there in awkward silence waiting for him to leave. In another encounter with a different man, after having sex he gets off of her, sits by himself on the edge of the bed and calls his wife telling her he will be home soon.
It is not until she picks up Arturo that things change. Their first encounter is almost animalistic, doggystyle with him slapping her ass a couple times. Something else is different too, he actually wants to talk to her afterwords which takes Laura by surprise. She still sees men, and the intimacy she craves, as solely sexual. In a telling composition, after having sex for the second time Arturo is standing above the bed with his penis in the center of the picture with his head chopped off at the top of the screen as if to say he is as irrelevant as the rest of her men. He tries to engage her in casual chit chat, asking her if there's anything she'd like to know about him. She simply says no. Yet there is something in these encounters that draws her to him.
The two begin a sexual relationship that is centered around Arturo's penchant for rough sex and Laura's willingness to take the punishment. Each encounter grows more and more extreme to the point where even Arturo must wonder where fantasy ends and reality begins. It becomes clear that Laura's desire to be punished is linked to a deeper rooted issue. These scenes of sadomasochistic sex reminded me a lot of In the Realm of the Senses both in their overt sexual nature and psychological ramifications.
I have never really been shocked by sex in film. It could be all the porn I watch (just kidding, sort of) but the extreme sexuality of the film didn't really bother me, not even the water sports which from what I could tell looked real. I was however noticeably uncomfortable with their last encounter where nothing truly bad happens, but Laura's desire for suffering is unnerving.
The film is full of shocking sex but unlike In the Realm of the Senses I didn't find Leap Year to be shocking just for the hell of it. I thought these scenes worked quite well in showing Laura's desperate and lonely state of mind. I suppose some viewers may be turned off by the BDSM aspects of the film, but people don't realize that much of what you see in Leap Year are actual things that people do and/or fantasize about. It's just sex after all.
Grade: A-
I was browsing through Netflix and came across this movie with a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes so I decided to give it a shot. I thought it was quite good despite being pretty disbursing. It goes to show that sex in films doesn't have to be there just to be shocking or to titillate audiences, but is often crucial in telling the story.
Laura is a 25 year old journalist who moved away from her family in the countryside and lives in a quiet apartment in Mexico City. Its drab walls and dilapidated state reveal quite a bit about Laura herself. She lives a desperately lonely life, almost never leaving the apartment with the exception of picking up guys to bring back. In fact, aside from a very brief scene at a supermarket in the beginning of the movie, the entire film is shot in this apartment and its effect is almost claustrophobic. We watch Laura do what essentially boils down to nothing; eating instant noodles in front of the TV, reading a book while eating ice cream, playing Tetris on her laptop, sitting on a toilet, looking out her window, random chatter on the phone. This is her daily routine and it is utterly depressing. On the wall is a calendar for February where the 29th is marked in red. Every day she crosses off a date leading to that day. The significance of that date to Laura and what is to happen is slowly revealed as the film progresses.
There are two scenes from these early moments that tell quite a bit about Laura and the movie, one very subtle and one very obvious. One is a simple one where she is typing on her laptop and picks her nose for a brief second. Now this may not seem significant, but how many times have you seen someone actually stick a finger in his or her nose in a movie? Hours of unused footage get cut on the editing room floor for every movie and Leap Year is only 94 minutes long, yet 20 seconds are spent on this scene and tens of minutes on her sitting around doing nothing revealing the enormity of her current condition. Everybody in the world picks their nose but you never see it on film because, well, why would directors want you to see that? I think what director Michael Rowe is trying to get across is the plain ordinariness of Laura's life.
In the other scene, Laura peeks out of her window into her neighbor's apartment where she watches a young couple together. She watches them sitting on the couch drinking beers, which doesn't seem much until you compare it to her own lonely existence. She desperately wants this intimacy and so she masturbates watching them through her window. Here she equates their intimacy and human connection through the pleasures of sex which helps explain her behavior with men.
We watch her get dressed up to go out and in the next scene we see her in bed having sex with a man. We never really get to see his face because he isn't important. The experience is impersonal and ultimately unfulfilling. In the morning, the man tries to quietly get dressed and sneak out. With her back to him, he does not realize that Laura is awake. She lays there in awkward silence waiting for him to leave. In another encounter with a different man, after having sex he gets off of her, sits by himself on the edge of the bed and calls his wife telling her he will be home soon.
It is not until she picks up Arturo that things change. Their first encounter is almost animalistic, doggystyle with him slapping her ass a couple times. Something else is different too, he actually wants to talk to her afterwords which takes Laura by surprise. She still sees men, and the intimacy she craves, as solely sexual. In a telling composition, after having sex for the second time Arturo is standing above the bed with his penis in the center of the picture with his head chopped off at the top of the screen as if to say he is as irrelevant as the rest of her men. He tries to engage her in casual chit chat, asking her if there's anything she'd like to know about him. She simply says no. Yet there is something in these encounters that draws her to him.
The two begin a sexual relationship that is centered around Arturo's penchant for rough sex and Laura's willingness to take the punishment. Each encounter grows more and more extreme to the point where even Arturo must wonder where fantasy ends and reality begins. It becomes clear that Laura's desire to be punished is linked to a deeper rooted issue. These scenes of sadomasochistic sex reminded me a lot of In the Realm of the Senses both in their overt sexual nature and psychological ramifications.
I have never really been shocked by sex in film. It could be all the porn I watch (just kidding, sort of) but the extreme sexuality of the film didn't really bother me, not even the water sports which from what I could tell looked real. I was however noticeably uncomfortable with their last encounter where nothing truly bad happens, but Laura's desire for suffering is unnerving.
The film is full of shocking sex but unlike In the Realm of the Senses I didn't find Leap Year to be shocking just for the hell of it. I thought these scenes worked quite well in showing Laura's desperate and lonely state of mind. I suppose some viewers may be turned off by the BDSM aspects of the film, but people don't realize that much of what you see in Leap Year are actual things that people do and/or fantasize about. It's just sex after all.
Grade: A-
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