Saturday, 2 July 2022

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #301: 3some (2009).

 

Jose (Adriana Ugarte), Marcos (Nilo Zimmerman) and Jaime (Biel Duran) are arts classmates at a Spanish university. To help Marcos with his impotence, Jaime sets him up with Jose, whose portrait Jaime has agreed to paint for their course. Once Jose and Marcos get acquainted, Jaime joins the fold and they have a menage a trois which exposes, among other more physical things, their shared and subjective dreams and feelings. Soon, however, Marcos and Jose become rather uncomfortable with the situation, and Jaime refuses to give Jose his portrait of her once he completes it, which deepens the estrangement.

This very erotic Spanish romantic drama from director Salvador Gonzalez Ruiz and writer Enrique Urbizu and based on Almudina Grandes' novel is very strongly reminiscent of Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001) and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003) as a sexually-charged coming-of-age film with twenty-somethings. But while it initially has considerable spice and charm, for me it peaks (in more ways than one) about forty minutes in. I had no problem at all with the sexual content; in fact, admittedly I watched it primarily for that. But those scenes are so frank and daring yet tactful, and so stuck together in one section of the film, the rest just didn't come close to being as vivid for me. The two afore-mentioned films were more cohesive and effectively sensual for me because they spread their racy content throughout their durations with adequate gaps in between and also touched on other topics rarely explored in such films like politics and bourgeois culture. This one, meanwhile, has flavour that lasts about as long as bubblegum's for me.

The three principals have adequate chemistry together and give understated, natural and (given the content, brave) performances, but for me 3some collapses under the burden of its narrative and the misjudged rendering of that. I also thought it needed more of a soundtrack. 6/10.

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