My Best Friend

Lorenzo (Angelo Mutti Spinetta) is a closeted gay teen attending high school, keeping his head down among peers about his sexuality. A good student—smart, assertive, and caring—Lorenzo is having sex with a girl from school just to take some pressure off his abstinence from gay intimacy. While this may sound like the setup for a movie about first love and a painful coming out, that’s not quite what happens here. Lorenzo’s quiet routines are disrupted when his father agrees to take in Caito (Lautaro Rodriguez), the troubled son of an ailing friend. The heavily-tattooed, initially reserved Caito brings unease into the house, and Lorenzo is tasked with keeping an eye on the adolescent. A non-romantic odd-couple relationship blossoms between the two, partly defined by Lorenzo’s efforts to keep his friend out of trouble. At the same time, however, Lorenzo is falling for Caito, telegraphed only through the former’s occasional nanny-sniping when Caito demonstrates minor thoughtlessness. Writer-director Martín Deus circles around the more obvious tropes in a story about boys experiencing emotional intimacy for the first time, opting instead for a complex character study of Lorenzo as he deals with the conflicting inner forces he has long avoided or sublimated. Deus creates a narrow world in which strong feelings are kept under wraps by all sides: at the dinner table, while camping, and with other kids who are ambivalent about Lorenzo’s company. But he opts for airiness and sunshine once Lorenzo and Caito become pals, opening up the world with the promise of a disruptive love. Recommended. (T. Keogh)