The first sunny day in what seems forever, with contrasting deep shadows, fits the movie's stark overexposure of Kodak 35 mm B/N [blanco y negro, black and white]. Most everyone at the relatively well attended early afternoon screening left lukewarm, at best. "Not much content (though terrific photography)"; "Very slow," "Inconclusive," "Hard to
read subtitles," "Badly translated [by Claudia Prado]," "Was it AIDS he had?" I, on the other hand, sort of liked the effort and applaud its rare eighty-minute cutoff, but it certainly won't make any commercial go of it, aside perhaps from gay theaters.

A downsiding of last year's Suddenly/Tan de repente by
the Argentine Diego Lerman, Mexico's A Thousand Clouds of Peace/Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo won as Best
Feature in Berlin 2003 and is now an official selection for Sundance. Writer-director Julián Hernández' theme is that love is a lonely, hurting emotion but that, counter to all evidence, its devotees live in vision and in hope. Not so much
soft-core despite a bit of groping and two brief full-frontals, one of them self-consciously reflected in a mirror, as a strikingly photographed diary and essay, the film follows young Gerardo (Juan Carlos Ortuño) from abandonment by Bruno (Juan Carlos Torres) through real and memory experience in an infernal barrio bajo, to final collapse and maybe beatification-reunification.

Too mannered even for such sanely shortish length, and
evocative rather of North African settings than the polluted Mexican capital, Diego Arizmendi's chiaroscuro cinematography works for a while, with open aperture and limited, shifting focal planes, elongated nighttime shadows on rutted roads and textured walls, and sunlit almost visionary traffic overpasses through glum slums. People here do not so
much speak as they voiceover thoughts to unmoving lips.

The film and its world are restrictively masculine, not of male prostitution -- though money is offered, sometimes accepted, as a token or a help -- but of searching (not cruising) homosexuality, centered from a poolhall with bright playing surfaces, extending on to sad, brutal encounters against walls or in littered construction sites or dismal apartments. Women do appear, to offer tenderness, but in such a milieu their effect is nil -- the hopeful neighbor on a bridge; two flea-market record-album saleswomen (Llane Fragoso and Pilar Ruíz); a pregnant café waitress who wants her second baby to have a chance; Gerardo's young mother, moved to tears by his leaving his studies for a catch-as-catch-can life. Hairline already slightly receding, Bruno fails to keep a five o'clock appointment with crew-cut Gerardo, but the few years older lover's voice crops up over numerous quick flashbacks and -forwards. He is not to be found here, or there, or in Ciudad Azteca, for, more experienced, he knows that sooner or later love must hurt, that the other will suffer. "No quiero
lastimarte." Their love will not die, but he must go; the beloved will be saddened but live in a far lesser evil, and one day they will reunite. To fume-spewing traffic and cold elevated night trains, Bruno searches, hoping, blinded to nameless souls who cross his path offering their own love, loneliness, anguish.

"We love others because of what we ourselves put into
them," philosophizes one such young soul, pathetic and
half-drunk. But Bruno hears only the repeated lyrics of the record album: "A fearless man swore he'd love me to death. His eyes nailed [or deceived] my soul. I became a woman blinded by passion." Telephone numbers written down but never called, understanding offered but not accepted, to almost no musical score but a faint beating heart, Bruno seeks and does not yield, though one questions a soupy concluding vision of "finding."

Thirty-two years old and a director of plays, operas and seven previous shorts for his Morelos Cinematographic Cooperative, Hernández does not gather momentum here sufficient for a feature. Idea and technique (including time-spanning pans) are of some interest but, in the end, not enough. 

(Released by Strand Releasing; not rated by MPAA.)