Taekwondo

seen at the London Flare Festival on 20 March 2017

Marco Berger and Martín Farina direct Gabriel Epstein as Germán and Lucas Papa as Fernando in this Argentinian about a group of male friends who spend a customary vacation together chewing the fat about their relationships with girlfriends and other women, and joshing with each other in the way of long established and mostly affectionate friendship.

The location for this holiday is an extensive villa owned by Fernando's family, endowed with pool, spa, tennis court and many bedrooms, so Fernando is nominally the host. Germán is the newcomer, a friend Fernando has made at his taekwondo class, and invited by him to join the crowd when his own vacation plans have fallen through. The complication is that Germán is gay and quite attracted to Fernando, but he is unsure of Fernando's attitude to him and very aware that the rest of the crowd is determinedly straight. The casual bragging, joking and occasional serious discussion of problems with women, and the unselfconscious ease with nudity both leave Germán non-plussed.

The film is an attractive study in homo-social camaraderie and its subtle difference from gay sensibilities. The blithe sexism, the long-standing joke that one of their number is probably gay, the extent to which the men feel sex-starved by the absence of women for even a few days, are all lightly drawn in the sunny atmosphere of hedonism, while Germán's confusion about Fernando and his natural reticence provide an amusing contrast. At least two of Fernando's friends guess Germán's interest, leading one to a quite poisonous attempt to destabilise things, and the other to ask Fernando a good-humoured but completely open-ended question about him. The resolution of his own uncertainties is left tantalisingly until the last moments of the film

It's a delightful and attractive piece, filmed often in extreme close-up and from unusual angles emphasising the sheer physicality of young men relaxing together (there is virtually no indication of how they usually spend their time or earn their living) - essentially an amusing and sunny social comedy.