Various love stories can be recounted around the world. However, being straight offers so many options of love stories that one can choose from. But for people born in the 20th century whose first love was a woman, that is different. Many of those stories are tied to some kind of tragedy or loss that it’s easy to begin making one’s own story look like all the others. For gay and bisexual people, there’s always the greater probability of ending up in unrequited love, and to speak one’s mind also carried a certain risk or certainly used to but how many of us do end up using it as a justification Situations are romanticized by conveniently deciding to view them as being hopeless and perhaps in the process of deciding that, one may have a chance on something beautiful.
Matias, a forty-something Argentinean film maker comes across a constant stream of failure in his life whose role he conceives to be that of a director in a film. He is trying to capture such themes in his work but is endlessly bewildered and stuck trying to dramatize his reality. An unexpected invitation forces him to realize it’s time to relive the desired moments he abandoned and return to offer authentic engagement with the past.
The Duino in the title is a small village located on the coast of Italy, and also the location of the United World College of the Adriatic where young Matias (Santiago Madrussan) had a scholarship. A painfully shy, awkward youth, he is still dragged on stage by some girl looking for a partner, and his dancing skills fetch him a horde of new fans chief among them Alexander, a rich Swiss student (Oscar Morgan), who likens him to Fred Astaire. A passion develops between the two as they explore the region’s ruined castle with its own concerns of passionate love and invoke quotes from Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life. A dreamy summer comes to a rather abrupt end though with the expulsion of Alexander but Matias has not said a word until now.
He will have another chance, this time spending Christmas with Isaac in Switzerland where the two appear to become so close that there is every cause to believe that his feelings are likely to be returned, only for this attempt to be affected by Alexander’s flirty sister and conflicts arise. At the same time, Matias revisits a different layer of history and his historical dynamics with parents, which illustrates the importance of other types of emotional attachment for youth looking for their paths in life. It is hinted that his feelings for Alexander swept him off his feet because there was lack of love at the beginning but is it really possible that fixing one relationship will fix the other one as well?
Matias’ recollections of his own history are combined with the current action, which is rather interesting in that the director is rather aggressive about reshooting some scenes of the film and this causes tension between him and producer Paolo (Juan Cruz Márquez de la Serna). There is a pressing time scale in that there is a festival event to meet and Paolo appears to be anxious that even if he falls to that pressure, Matias will not be happy about it and will start doing changes, again. When making a film, there is a time and place for everything, and so one needs to be able to take a step back and realize that very few people can deliver a perfect end product.
Will Matias ever be able to come to terms with the flaws that his past possesses? In the course of di Pace’s story, which is based on his life, the link between fiction and memory, artifice and life is troubled by current and past concerns, encouraging us to rethink the convenient stories we readily adopt and replace.
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