Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Daniel Werner
Starring: Romina Ricci, Renato Quattordio, Rafael Ferro
Amor Bandido, a curious erotic thriller debut from Argentinian
Daniel Andres Werner (with script support from
Diego Avalos), pointedly opens in flashforward of a young person
fleeing from a dilapidated abode before desperately scrambling through
grey twilighted woods from as yet unseen assailants. Deliberately
exploiting genre familiarity, the scene proceeds to offer a crucial
flourish: the young person is a boy, man. The slight wrinkle intrigues as
convention has trained us to expect a girl/young woman running scared in
such scenarios, and via its twisty, sexy plot
Amor Bandido goes on to build upon this prearranged
juxtaposition, negotiating our expectations of gender dynamics in a film
that if not wholly successful is nonetheless exhilaratingly transgressive
and morally challenging.
The boy in question is Joan (Renato Quattordio), a 16-year-old who
goes to an exclusive school for posh nobs. Joan's overbearing dad is
something to do with something important while his sot mum, as genre
tradition dictates, is unhappy in the relationship and spends the days
bitterly sloshing martini about the palatial abode. No wonder, then, that
Joan is on the lookout for escapism, and, as he is a heterosexual teen boy
hopelessly at the mercy of hormones which at that age can only be
described as "raging," no wonder he becomes infatuated with his art
teacher Luciana (Romina Ricci), whose pulchritudinous image is in
the Mediterranean mould of Carla Gugino and God Penelope Cruz. Joan's
juvenility is demonstrated chiefly by the diorama of Poseidon he is making
(A+ for effort, maybe a B- for realisation) but also his desperate,
unanswered texts to "Lu": "When can I see you again?", "Are you there?",
"I MISS YOU!" *clenched teeth emoji*. A few scenes later we meet Luciana,
who Werner playfully films in slo-motion, platforming her hotness with
bouncing hair and swinging shoulders (haha, watching the scene again I
just noticed a background kid licking his lips as she passes!). It can't
be the same Lu, can it?!
Before you can say Rod "should probably be locked up" Liddle it turns out
that it IS the same Lu. Initially (and, in a larger sense, throughout)
Werner keeps the exact nature of LuJoan mysterious: Lu has handed in her
notice that day, coats down Joan in class, but then meets the boy, via a
classic trope of schoolboy fantasy, in a storeroom for a tentative snog.
Who's zooming who, we wonder, as Joan professes his adoration for
her, and Luciana accordingly manipulates him into meeting her after school
at a hastily scribbled address. They duly abscond to the isolated shack in
the woods which we saw Joan escape in terror from in the opening...
My notes from the start of the film approve of what I assumed was a
subversion of the male gaze: we gratuitously see Joan in the shower, his
body displayed in the same objective manner of a thousand female horror
victims, and despite Luciana's hegemonic attractiveness, she is filmed
covered up in a black-widow cool pine trouser suit. Take that, Laura
Mulvey. However, when they reach the cabin this paradigm changes
immediately, along with the temperature of the movie: we're talking hot
hot hot! In Amor Bandido's second act we see JoanLu's relationship consummated over and over in
extended sequences which operate within explicit Erotic Thriller
parameters, bathing Quattordio's impressive morphology in becoming light
(the pivotal difference between representations of sex in pornography and
the erotic thriller: porn sex is positioned desire wherein the audience is
functionally invited to imagine themselves within the narrative, whereas
the erotic thriller contrives an aspirational remove; you dream that you
could have sex this candle lit and satin sheeted, this dangerously
abandoned). Which, let's face it, is a bit of a problem when you consider
that Joan is 16, and the age of consent in Argentina is a prohibitive
eighteen. I'm not sure what the law is regarding duty of care in the
country but I can tell you that if Lu were a teacher in the UK (even
though the age of consent is 16) then she'd be right in the shit.
Within the context of this particular film, a grey area is cast which is
compounded by the considered construction of Joan as an innocent. On the
way, Lu buys him a single can of beer which he sips from like a kid as she
dances in the car headlights (a clear nod to Van Sant's
To Die For), and his desperate romanticism is framed as post-pubescent idiocy (it
helps that he looks like a mini George Osborne). However, the sex is
depicted as cool and, well, sexy, with sensuous shadows and whispered
intimacy. Yes, we can make jokes about how greedily burying his face
between the legs of this objectively beautiful woman must have been
torture for Joan, etc, but he demonstrably does not have the maturity or
emotional experience to steer the lopsided dynamic. The film teases this
dichotomy, at once establishing Joan as a young 16 alongside offering the
visual pleasure of a stylised sex spectacle akin to that of
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). What is further
discomfiting is that an extra layer of manipulation is present, because
due to the strange people she knows who drop by, her sporadic disappearing
acts and the present reminder of the horror trope opening, Luciana's
motives are under suspicion. The chicanery imbues the sex with further
connotations of exploitation.
About that first scene... Applying its conscious gender reversals to the
film at large, would the paragraph above read the same if Joan (pronounced
Jo-hann) had been a Joan (pronounced Joan), i.e., a girl? It's a question
which Amor Bandido clumsily posits in its second half, as
things go to pot and propose a more realistic reason as to why Luciana and
her cohorts are interested in this little nerd with his obscenely rich
paterfamilias... We are given a bitter palette cleanser to all the prior
sexy sex with a rape scene presented in unflinching, limited shots that
contrast the sybarism of earlier, along with some middle-aged incest to
boot. Honestly, it's all a bit much, and the exploitation bingo card fills
up too rapidly, overriding the film's credibility (SPOILER: hang on, so Luciana, an educated professional employed by an exclusive
academy, is in a sexual relationship with her maybe brother and is willing
to risk everything for extortion? Alright). Still, within the liminality
of Amor Bandido's genre hybridity (it's almost an anthology of modes: noir, sex
thriller, hicksploitation) too much is always preferable to too little.
And however far an intriguing by-product of the film's horny rush they may
be, the queasy implications of the central relationship are intriguing and
uncomfortably linger beyond Amor Bandido's bildungsroman conclusions.
Amor Bandido is on US VOD/DVD now.
A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
