Beginners

A really delightful drama with superb performances and a great editing.

The movie works well, but there are some details in the story told that, to me, make little sense. Am sorry.

Generally, I don't really like films that are too apologetic, that is, films that use cinema to advocate and defend causes, political ideas, social movements. It's OK to be part of the plot of a movie, but to make a movie for defense/publicity of these ideas is another very different thing. When I started to see this movie, I was scared to find just another movie defending the gay lobby, and its social and political flags.

Well, now that I'm done, I'm relieved that my fears didn't go beyond that. The film has a fairly regular script, which seeks to tell an interesting story, focused on how a man begins a very passionate relationship with a charming Frenchwoman he has just met. He was very depressed because of the recent death of his father, and while the film tells us how the couple evolves in their new relationship, it also tells us how was, lately, the relationship between him and his father who, shortly after widowing, decides to tell his son that he is sick and is going to die of cancer and, moreover, that despite having been married, he has been a homosexual all his life, suffering at the cost of that secret and having a secret boyfriend.

The strong point of the film is not only the dramatic story told (I never felt it was a comedy, as some say, despite having few funny moments in between), but also the original way in which it is told to us, with flashbacks and in a very visual way, using photographs and a very visual and interesting narrative style. There are certain moments when I felt that the narrator (the son) was actually presenting slides to the audience, which is us. And with that, I felt that Mike Mills, the director, took a calculated risk, and it turned out very well. Unfortunately, I felt that the homosexual subplot is not as credible. I simply cannot conceive how such a sick and elderly man would be in a loving relationship wit...