Dioses

My second film on Saturday was the Peruvian feature "Dioses", from sophomore writer/director Josue Mendez.    While ultimately a social commentary film on the state of the class system in Peru, Mendez uses the device of a dysfunctional family to convey his themes - a 19-year old son who is in love with his vapid, beautiful older sister, and their uber-rich father who has just brought to their summer home a gorgeous, treasure-seeking 20-something from the poor side of the tracks.

The first act mostly plays out with 19-yr old Diego dolefully watching his sister get trashed at parties and make out with numerous hot young Peruvian guys, while more peripheral characters such as the father and the new girlfriend establish themselves.  At the same time, the continued development of the kitchen staff as real characters slowly triggers our realization that this story has less to do with families and more with the perversion of wealth - they become the quiet, but accepting witnesses to the ridiculous lives lived by their employers.     

The Diego-swooning goes on for quite a bit too long (I'll leave aside a number of other plot elements), until the sister (Andrea) leaves the country at her father's insistence to have an illegitimate child.  Diego leaves the summer house in a fit of desperation, borrowing a room in the slums from his long-time kitchen-dwelling mother figure, and there has an epiphany of sorts about real life in Peru.  The metaphor complete, his obsession with sis vanishes as his knowledge/experience of the plight of real people grows, and in the final scene we see him acting very normally (talking to a pretty girl no less!) at a party thrown by his dad to celebrate the arrival home of his (dad's) new child - the illegitimate son that he has pretended to sire while taking a long vacation with treasure seeker.

Not sure if I've given a sense of this film.  I had a couple of problems with it, initially, just that it felt like an episode of the Hills, with the vacuous blond rich partying for lack of anything better to do.   This story is so tired in today's media culture.   And while I think the metaphor of the dysfunctional family (representing the incestuous almost-nobility of the wealthy class) is/was a good one, the way it was written, directed, and performed didn't work for me.    Diego just furrowed his brow and sobbed for most of an hour, and sis Andrea, though better performed overall, was so one-dimensional that even as a symbol she was ultimately boring to watch.  

And while the first act was drawn out, the final act was way too rushed - all of Diego's changes, his realization about himself and the world, happen off screen....we see him looking at a dirty toilet in his borrowed slum house, and in the next scene it is six months later, and we hear that he has spent the interim time going to a local poor high school for his final term, presumably to connect with the people of Peru and distance himself from his family.   But good film shows the key changes, it doesn't tell you about them.   And neither the showing nor the telling needed to be done so abruptly. 

So, while it definitely had some appealing elements (interesting to see Lima, for example, and to gain some insight into the social realities of Peru) Dioses falls short of getting a recommendation.