MANUEL VIGNAU AND MATEO CHIARINO IN HAWAII

Not telling

Poor gay guys. They don't know what they are. They don't know what the other guy is. So it goes anyway for Eugenio (Mateo Chiarino), a writer who's housesitting for the summer at his uncle's place some distance from Buenos Aires. Actually he very well knows he's gay; he just doesn't seem to want to let on in this pretty-looking, low-keyed film. He takes in Martín (Manuel Vignau, who starred in Berger's debut feature Plan B), an attractive young man, a few years younger, whom, it turns out, he used to play with (boyishly, innocently) when they were kids. Now Martín, who's working class, is hard up, having grown up in Uraguay (explaining the actor's accent), and made homeless by recent events, though he's as tight-lipped as Eugenio, and hides at first that he's sleeping out in the woods. Martín is soon doing yard and maintenance work, caring for the pool, and sleeping in the wood shed while the two close-mouthed hunks circle around each other, often shirtless, sharing meals and recollections of childhood. Eugenio is definitely eyeing Martín, but not sure which way Martín swings. A gay niche film? You bet. That's Marco Berger's specialty. But there is an arty minimalism going on here that could engage general festival and arthouse audiences with its layers of possible meaning and portent, if the basic subtext and agenda were not so rigidly fixed.

Is Martín gay too? All these silences. Who is to say? It's like watching paint dry. Or, as Boyd von Hoeij said in Hollywood Reporter, for the gay niche audience this director mainly pleases this film might just seem like one long "cock-tease," its "earnest tone" possibly "laughable or pretentious, or both." Or it's as if the beginning part of a gay porn flick were stretched out to feature length. But still, nicely stretched: Hawaii is a subtle film. Von Hoeij proclaims this, Berger's third feature, "a solid home run."

Besides the audience-titillation and repressed gay attraction, Berger has another important theme that resonates in the pair's laconic exchanges and awkward silences: the persistence of the rules of economics and social class. They don't matter and yet they do, starting with the basic relationship Martín and Eugenio negotiate at the outset. Furthermore not only do Eugenio and Martín uneasily circle each other with a master-servant vibe despite the efforts at camaraderie, but the novel Eugenio is writing, called The Germ, is about a wealthy landowner who feels the seed of communism sprouting in his young daughter, who questions his inherited property rights. This happens in Argentina, where a sense of class may be more obvious, or even ominous. "That's good," Martín says when Eugenio explains his theme. But does he understand? Against this cuts the similarity of the two men's bodies and of their youth.

But oh how slow all this is, how teasing. It's summer, too, the season when some people just lie around and wait for fall (or pretend to write). This can be hard to watch. Is the paint even drying? Three quarters of the way through the film, Eugenio's wised-up older brother (Manuel Martínez Sobrado) visits (he too chiseled and handsome), and finally frank talk comes. "You hired him because you like him," the brother says. "What happens if you fuck him and the summer ends? Will you take him to Palermo?" And so on. But this is the only explicit, crass moment. It clears things up for us. Berger's delicacy is rather elegant.

Martín doesn't know Eugenio's gay either, or so it would seem, until he does. This is the "surprise" we've all been waiting for, except that we saw it coming.

Maybe guys can be into prolonged foreplay too.

In Plan B, Berger's first feature, an ostensibly straight man discovered an attraction to his girlfriend's new boyfriend. In Absent, a young gay athlete seeks to attract his coach. In Hawaii he again plays with titillation and teasing and doubts about who's gay and who isn't.

Hawaii, 102 mins., Argentina, in Spanish with English subtitles, cinematography by Tomás Perez Silva. Berger has had good exposure for his films at mainstream international festivals, and his second feature won the LGBT Teddy Award at the Berlinale, where it premiered. Hawaii opens on VOD and DVD in the US, released by Artsploitation Films 18 February 2014.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.