Review of Lost Embrace (2004) by Yrsa F — 06 Mar 2005

It's been just over a year since I began my new career as a pretend movie critic. Despite the fact that the pay sucks and I'm under constant pressure to satisfy the demands of my small but loyal fan base, here I am, 75 reviews later, still churning them out.

So last night I rented a movie: "Donnie Darko - Director's Cut". I think this was the first "new release" movie I've rented since I started writing reviews. Since I see almost everything that I have any interest in seeing in the theatre, my rare rentals are usually old favorites which I rent mainly for the purpose of trying to inflict my taste on others. So after watching "Donnie Darko", I had a decision to make: should I only review movies that I see in the theatre or should I review rentals too? And my decision is this: rentals don't count. So no review. And for consistency's sake, I've also deleted the mini-review of "Two Brothers", which I saw on a plane. Planes don't count either. Only theatres count.

So let's see how much I can write without talking about the movie I'm supposed to be reviewing. I guess that ought to do it.

I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel lately trying to find a movie which seems like it might be worth leaving my couch for. I didn't feel all that enthusiastic about "Lost Embrace", but at least it's playing nearby. It's about this guy named Ariel who works in his mother's lingerie store in a mall in Buenos Aires. The mall is filled with family-run businesses of all ethnic persuasions: the Italian-run electronics store, the Asian feng-shui store, the Jewish fabric store. Ariel doesn't seem to do any real work; he mostly just assists the hot owner of the adjacent Internet cafe with trying on her potential purchases.

Ariel wants desperately to move to Europe, so he runs around gathering documents from his grandmother to try to get a Polish passport. Ariel's father lives in Israel, where he moved to fight in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 shortly after Ariel was born, never to return. Ariel hates his father for abandoning the family but Ariel's mother wants him to visit his father on a kibbutz in Israel.

So this is all about as exciting as it sounds. Around this point, I finished off my bag of extra-buttery popcorn and soon drifted off into a sound sleep, as if my popcorn were laced with a generous dose of Nyquil. I actually had a real dose of Nyquil before going to bed last night and it didn't knock me out nearly as effectively as this somnolent movie did.

But, as best as I could tell, nothing much happened after I stopped watching anyway. I'd open my eyes every few minutes, read a few subtitles, think about how much I needed a Coke, and then drift back off to sleep. Once I dreamt that I was still watching the movie, but then I woke up and realized that my eyes had been closed the entire time. Another time, I woke up to find that there were two rows of subtitles, and it took me a while to realize that the row I was reading was not in English. But I might have dreamt that too. The next thing I knew, Ariel's father was in town and his grandmother started singing him an old song and things were wrapping up.

And none too soon for me. OK, granted I slept through maybe 40% of this film, but even before that, things were mind-numbingly boring anyway. None of the characters were the least bit interesting, with the exception of the grandmother. If I was supposed to be swept up by some sort of quirky slice-of-life charm, it was completely lost on me.

If you're thinking of seeing this movie, I'd recommend that you stay home and rent "Donnie Darko" instead. And then maybe you can explain it to me.