Anahí Berneri's promising feature debut (based on Pablo Pérez's autobiographical novel) is at once unsentimental and sympathetic; she evinces rare insight into a gay man's life and sexuality without cringing, passing judgment, or wallowing in pity.
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First-time director Anahí Berneri, who wrote this involving, if slow-moving, film with Pablo Pérez (based on Pérez’s own diaries), doesn't shy away from the whippings, rope work and carefully calibrated humiliation that make up a good night of dungeon play. Yet A Year Without Love isn't a sex movie (so don’t expect one), but a studied examination of how one man folds jarring events into the everyday fabric of his life.
An Argentine writer dying of AIDS searches for a medical cure and some human warmth in the hospitals and S&M clubs of Buenos Aires in dignified, thoughtful drama A Year Without Love.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
A Year Without Love is only Berneri's third feature yet is an elegant, economical work.
The unusually explicit dungeon scenes with Pablo, a leather daddy and a fellow slave may whip a rather specialized audience into a frenzy. But for others, A Year Without Love will be a less pleasurably painful experience.
Abrasive but affecting.
San Francisco Chronicle by Peter Hartlaub
It's a weighty and visually interesting movie that unfortunately doesn't have a strong message beyond its overwhelming bleakness.