Director Antonio Banderas showed up to introduce his film "Summer Rain" ("El Camino de los ingleses") Wednesday night at the Rose Wagner. I really can't tell you much about what he said. I was distracted by the fact he is even more beautiful in person than he is on the screen.
The acting is quite good and the characters are 20ish people we've been or have known and maybe still know. The lead is a young man, Miguelito who just had a kidney removed and wants to be a poet, his girlfriend Luli (María Ruiz) who wants to travel the world with a ballet troupe, there's the rich boy Paco (Félix Gómez) who doesn't seem to have any ambition, his girlfriend, "The Body," whom his father wants him to get rid of and Babirusa (Raúl Arévalo) a hothead who worships Bruce Lee and just might love the fat, easy girl who will have sex with anyone. On the side there are "The Dwarf," an old friend who joined the paratroopers, and a slightly older man who wants Luli and offers to pay for her ballet schooling if she will dump Miguelito for him. I musn't slight the narrator either, I'm not certain who the actor is, since I didn't catch the character's name, but he sits in the bar and watches the main character's lives he is a radio weatherman and overnight dj whose poetic remarks offer a frame for the movie.
This aside, "Summer Rain" is a beautifully filmed coming-of-age story with beautiful* actors (all of who were born about the time the story takes place in the late 1970s), but has many of the weaknesses of first films/novels/albums. One of these weaknesses is that this exuberant, youthful film is a tragedy, no one gets a happy ending which is a shame.
An actor who is always worth looking at, Banderas just might also be a director worth watching.
*overused adjective alert, no more of that word in this posting
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