Jimenez makes a youthful film about sex, lies and literature that has the awkward charm of first love.
Bonsai(Bonsái)
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Chile, Argentina, Portugal · 2011
1h 35m
Director Cristián Jiménez
Starring Diego Noguera, Nathalia Galgani, Gabriela Arancibia, Cristóbal Briceño
Genre Drama
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Julio is a struggling writer who turns to a past romance for inspiration. But the further he gets in his novel, the more regretful and reflective he feels about what he lost: Emilia. A delicate and deadpan Chilean drama based on the novella by Alejandro Zambra.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Cristián Jiménez's dust-dry dramedy attests to the writer-director's own bibliophilia (the film is literally divided by chapter pages), as well as his lead actor's ability to milk a deadpan look that would make Buster Keaton proud.
Slant Magazine by Diego Semerene
Cristián Jiménez's film knows how entangled the will to know is with the will to make love.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
There's nothing obscure about young love and loss, and a story, as Mr. Jiménez put it, about "youngsters who have to deal with this sudden lack of certainties which makes them more lonely than they could have ever imagined."
Boxoffice Magazine by Richard Mowe
It has its moments, although the charmless main character Julio (played by Diego Noguera) begins to get on your nerves, as he seems incapable of extricating himself from difficult situations.
By turns gentle, deadpan, droll and sarcastic, Jimenez's film reflects on Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" to track a sweet but doomed love affair between literary -- and pleasurably randy -- college students.
This isn't a story of Shakespearean proportions, but it's a sweet peg for this complex, carefully constructed gem.
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