The cumulative effect of this movie very much exceeded my expectations after the first 15 minutes. I was pretty worried during the film’s opening that I was in for 100 minutes of teenage angst, artfully filtered and tritely narrated. Fortunately, Alexis Dos Santos appears to be a gifted director, and he creates some very real and sympathetic subjects with character types that are difficult to portray in any kind of fresh way: the ambiguously gay virgin, his seemingly white-trash mother, the dorky girl friend, the absent neglectful father, the straight(er) guy friend, snotty sibling, etc. I didn’t have much of a reason to be optimistic during Lucas’ prologue, where he asks deep questions like “If my parents made love a month before I was conceived, would it be me being born? or another boy?” and “do girls like sucking dick?” He wants to get laid so that he will “stop waking up all sticky.” I thought I was watching a Larry Clark film for a moment, or maybe a Gummo outtake. I’m not sure if Dos Santos actually just made a good film with a weak opening, or if he intentionally structured this like a typical coming-of-age bore in order to make the rest seem so transcendent of the genre. Or, he is critiquing the genre.
Well, perhaps the film didn’t immediately get better after the opening. I didn’t actually appreciate any of the characters until about halfway through. I initially thought the film was focusing on Lucas’ repressed homosexuality, and that Dos Santos was using his friends Nacho and Andrea as the vehicles to express the realization. But, like Lucas’ delusions of successful songwriting and rock-n-rolling, and his parents’ delusions of being able to fix a crumbling family, Lucas just seems like he’s doing what he’s suppose to do, wondering things that he’s supposed to wonder at his age. His experimentation with Nacho is less an example of homosexuality than an exploration that every straight man wants, but represses. Lucas is so likable because he is ballsy and goes after what he wants. I like Dos Santos, too, for ballsiness. Argentinean cinema is getting progressively more exciting with every new filmmaker that I am acquainted with from the country. Considering their Malbec wine, Argentina is beginning to rival Thailand as my number one fantasy destination to have a ‘dinner and a movie’ date.
I think some of the marketing would have you to believe Glue‘s main focus is a repressed/untapped/uncertain homosexuality, but I think it’s more complex than that. Or, at least, I think it’s ultimately more than just that.
It’s also considerably more rounded than something by Larry Clark, who in my book is merely an exploitationist.
I agree with both of these. I thought I was in for something Clark-esque in the beginning but it went beyond him quite a bit, and I think it’s definitely more complex than homosexuality vs. hetero/bi/whatever. The opening half hour, though, considering superficial things like Lucas’ frame, or his internal questions about Nacho’s armpit hair coupled with questions about when he would finally sleep with a girl, made me think that the film would be about his self-discovery as a queen, and I was rolling my eyes. But from this point, it went against these early expectations, and was about so much more, indeed.