Off Screen

A queer drama that builds a fictional story out of an unfinished play by García Lorca, of which barely four pages survive. The plot is mirrored across three stories: one follows a young gay man's entry into the Casino de Granada and his relationship with the unfinished play. Another centers on the story of the La Barraca collaborator Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, and how he tries to keep the play from being lost. The third is the life of a gay historian who receives a legacy from his grandfather and serves as the link that holds the plot together.

In my humble opinion, what this second feature by its directors shows me is that they are not ready to condense a story into under a hundred minutes. Their work is mainly in series; this is a film that could serve as an example of a four-episode miniseries. Its plot dissolves like a sugar cube half an hour into the running time. There is a large number of characters who are pointless to the story and add nothing new, leading us to a film full of expository dialogue and filler sequences. Its style, excessively inflated, pompous and deafening, results in an excess of prosopopoeic imagery with no criterion behind the shot planning. The use of film symbolism is repeated and persistent.

A feature film of today's entertainment cinema.