MAX SUEN IN A FEW FEET AWAY

Loneliness and illusion of Grindr sex in Buenos Aires

TRAILER

"Johnny Rio, a handsome narcissist but no longer a pretty boy, travels to Los Angeles, the site of past sexual conquest and remembered youthful radiance, in a frenzied attempt to recreate his younger self. Johnny has ten precious days to draw the "numbers," the men who will confirm his desirability, and with the hungry focus of a man on borrowed time, he stalks the dark balconies of all-night theaters, the hot sands of gay beaches, and shady glens of city parks, attempting to attract shadowy sex-hunters in an obsessive battle against the passing of his youth." -- A summary of John Rechy's 1967 novel Numbers.

The description of Rechy's novel of obsessive gay sex-scoring Numbers is there to introduce a new film from Argentina because I think it is the same thing, with several important variations. Attractive gay twenty-year-old Buenos Aires resident Santiago (Max Suen) isn't a struggling has-been like Johnny Rio but a much younger gay man still with fresh skin in the game, however he may depict himself as practiced and jaded, but he too is obsessive in his pursuit of gay sex. The smartphone apps he uses for sexual encounters both speeds up the acquisition of sexual experience and gets in the way of it. The cyber and the imaginary take place of what in the past, before internet and iPhones, was fresh and flesh alone. What Tadeo Pestaña Caro and his actors give us is exciting,intense, even hypnotic, but rather depressing because this 21st-century gay sexual experience for much of the time is so much more mediated than real.

Santiago is a cyber-world creaton formed by smartphone hookup apps, especially Grindr, the quintessential LGBT "social networking" device. Both Johnny and Santiago are obsessive. But it seems that now Santiago is as much obsessed with technology as with sex. In fact early on we see him taking a moment during sex (when his intended partner goes off searching in the apartment for condoms) to snatch time away for his phone again. The smartphone is always in his hand, even in bed.

Though this is a skillful and smoothly executed film with a lithe thespian convincing in his role, Rechy's Numbers is a literary classic and has a different kind of intensity, the obsessiveness of carefully paced literary description as well as the unique intensity of the real. There is a distracted air about Santiago's sexual explorations: his head is a little bit elsewhere, in the cyber world of the app. Johnny Rio is present, counting off his sex encounters.

The message of A Few Feet Away is what we were told would happen even before smartphones came into wide use: that they would become an indispensable part of everyone's lives and always be in our pockets. But we didn't know they would invade the bedroom and the sex club - or that someone attractive and available like Santiago would compulsively utilize his smartphone for the hookup app, scrolling and swiping and adding sexy photos of himself (on requests of "Show more") even when in a hot makeout spot. The film title underlines that what the protagonist is doing sometimes is "connect" with men on his obsessive app even when hs is right in the same room with them. To repeat: the app, and the phone, have created a "connection" that is more of a barrier.

Using apps enables, even requires, the donning of a persona. Santiago online is "Seth" (which he isn't even sure how to pronounce: its "th" isn't common in Spanish and he admits to an encounter he hasn't said it himself yet). For the guys he meets he is a university student majoring in architecture or law, while in fact he has a drone job at a call center and isn't studying anything. He seems to have only one friend, coworker Karen (Jazmin Carballo), and is less assured in his everyday than when on the prowl for sex. That night Karen lures him to an office party, a sequence that is cunningly orchestrated.

Santiago constantly confides in Karen, but his confidences are, we see, embroideries on the truth (depicted for us), while the more dramatic sexual encounters he describes often in fact had ended prematurely because he lost patience or wasn't attracted. The exciting world of Grindr possibilities and sexy images has made him too jaded for a single sexual encounter. He only gets heavily involved later in the film when he enters an orgy, pushed into an orgy room to which he had been denied access earlier (despite his changing to a bare midriff outfit to conform to "cutoff night") by an older man wno pulls him and another youngman (to use Recny's spelling) along with him up past the gate. "Seth" rises to full participation on this occasion and the film reaches a climax. At this point Pestaña Caro crafts a haunting, beautiful orgy sequence with bodies darkly yet luminously in space to the throbbing music and flashing lights with Santiago floating in the shadows.

But then "Seth" is suddenly running in outside in the dead of night to another spot that is closed and he leans his face against the gate wracked with sobs. Oh, the loneliness!

I find that the lead actor Max Suen appeared last year in a film called The Pleasure Is Mine/El placer es mio directed by Sacha Amaral in which he plays Antonio, a marijuana dealer who uses his in with people and dating apps to manipulate and seduce them. But young Suen is also a stage actor who recently performed the main role in Jean Cocteau's Les parents terribles. Interesting career. And interesting actor, slight, dark, with haunting and haunted eyes.

Ris Fatah's review on [url="https://queerguru.com/queergurus-riz-fatah-reviews-a-few-feet-away-that-takes-a-look-at-modern-dating-culture/"]Queerguru.com[/url] says what A Few Feet Away is about is "The ease of using online apps, their addictive nature, their potential to create an unreal world for the user, the risk of loneliness, the chance of meeting very odd people, the line between fantasy and reality, and the danger of ignoring real world opportunities at the expense of potential online rewards," which he says "are issues many hook-up app users will be familiar with," and he adds that though the film is set in Buenos Aires, its themes "apply to any city in the world." Fatah suggests this film might have been better if had featured someone older. At 20, Santiago can be excused as just going through a phase: if he were 35 or older, his obsessive behavior would have more serious implications and give the action more weight.

True; but this is a story of the corruption and distraction above all of the young, who were born into the app world with no knowledge of anything else. This is a smoothly executed, absorbing film for those interested in its twin topics of gayness and app-addiction, and it has a delicately modulated score provided by Balthazar Olivier and Alejandro Rosenblat, who blend artists as varied as Maluma, Kim Carnes, Midnight Oil and Gilbert O’Sullivan. Cinematography by Joaquín Castro and Andy González also is very fine, especially in the night party and orgy sequences. Director Pestaña Caro is equally deft with solitude and multiple bodies. In the end, the smartphone has the last word.

A Few Feet Away/A metros de distancia, 89 mins., premiered Mar. 20, 2025 at BFI Flare London. The North American Premiere was at Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. US release on the internet, VOD, digital and Unrated Director's Cut DVD from Cinephobia Releasing Dec. 9, 2025.


MAX SUEN IN A FEW FEET AWAY ```````````````````````````````````````````````

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