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Beloved/Friend

1999, Movie, NR, 91 mins

Beloved/Friend: Review

BELOVED/FRIEND | AMI/AMANT | AMIC/AMAT | AMIGO/AMANTE
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Plenty of suds, not much substance. Aging university professor Jaume (Josep Maria Pou) has a heavy crush on David (David Selas), a surly but brilliant scholarship student who earns extra cash as a prostitute. David has been dating 19-year-old Alba (Irene Montala), the daughter of Jaume's old friend Pere (Mario Gas); Pere is also the great, unrequited love of Jaume's life. When Alba announces she's pregnant with David's child, Pere and his wife Fanny (Rosa Maria Sarda) encourage their daughter to terminate the pregnancy. David was once a student of Pere's as well, and Pere despises the egotistical younger man; erstwhile 60s radical Fanny suspects she wasted her life by settling for bourgeois domesticity. Jaume, meanwhile, is suffering from some unnamed terminal illness and hasn't much longer to live; he wants Alba to have David's child so he can die knowing that some vestige of David's beauty and brilliance have been left to posterity. The movie starts out as a passable meditation on the graying of a generation (albeit one filled with a barely concealed jealous hatred of the young), but soon bogs down in ridiculous melodramatics and tacky story-telling. Spanish director Ventura Pons resorts to TV soap-opera conventions to handle the surfeit of action crammed into a single day, returning to each overbaked story line with a quick recap of dialogue spoken only minutes before. And each time creepy Jaume launches into one of his self-serving monologues, it's accompanied by a slow dolly-in and plaintive piano music tinkling away on the soundtrack. The result is a chatty, overcrowded film that nevertheless feels empty and has nothing very coherent to say -- an unintentional parody of the kind of overwrought melodrama Pedro Almodovar once reworked to far better effect. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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