Abel (2010)

Touches You

Good start, but then it gets ruined

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Abel returns to the family home after two years in hospital for an undisclosed mental health problem which has rendered him silent. He is nine years old, and doesn't know what his role is in the family, until he finds an old family photograph and realises what the family in the photo had that the family he has encountered upon his homecoming does not have. It does not have a father. Christopher Ruiz-Esparza, as Abel, delivers a subtle but powerful portrayal of a boy locked in to himself who is desperately trying to find a role that will help him make sense of his life. Diego Luna gets as captivating and mature a performance out of him and his real life younger brother Gerardo as Michael Winterbottom did from his sibling child actors in the film 'Everyday'. A remarkable and disturbing film all round.

From a brief description, Abel sounds like a lighthearted comedy. A boy, possibly autistic, takes charge in his household when he realizes that his mother is struggling to raise her three children. After staying up all night watching Pedro Infante movies, he begins to act like a father, taking care of his younger brother and older sister. However, problems arise when he takes his role too far. The film gets slightly disturbing when Abel begins thinking he is actually an adult. There are predictably cute moments that occur when a child acts like an adult, but they are constantly undermined by slightly disturbing moments. Don't get me wrong, Abel is still somewhat of a comedy, but it has a much darker side.Luna is clearly well versed in Lacan (or, at the very least, he's read Mulvey). Abel's problem is with his identification. Something went wrong in the mirror stage and now his entire understanding of the symbolic order is incorrect. He rejects the name of the father and things get strangely Oedipal. In a climactic sequence, Abel's father makes use of a mirror in an attempt to correct Abel's identificatory issues.Usually, Lacan is evoked for commentaries on the medium itself. Luna gives the ideas a fresh take by tackling them within the plot. If you've read Lacan or are familiar with his ideas, you'll definitely get a kick out of this film. Even if you haven't (but if you're interested in film, you should definitely read Mulvey's short article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema) you can still enjoy the film as a bizarre story about a kid who challenges his absent father.

I must confess that during the first few minutes of "Abel," I became confused. In fact, I almost gave up watching it via Netflix Instant.But I'm so pleased I didn't.Truth be told, what prompted me to log on to "Abel" was that it was directed by Diego Luna, an actor whose work I deeply admired when I first met him in his brilliant and sensitive performance in "Y Tu, Mama, Tambien." But I'm happy that I hung on, because I discovered Luna's gentle sensitivity to the struggles of Mexico's lower-middle-class in this, his first film as a director.Which made me remember my own childhood when I also was a poor kid growing up in western Pennsylvania.Sr. Luna clearly has a great future as a director.Because the "truths" his work reveals are "universal."

Diego Luna's first film is a good movie about a kid with a mental disorder. The boy named Abel (Christhoper Ruiz Esparza) is the main character in this story about a middle-class Mexican family. This boy take the place of his father (nobody known about him by 2 years)trying to fill out the space at the father in the lives of his brothers. This movie has drama and comedy in an interesting mix. Jose Maria Yazpick (Anselmo's character)deserves a special mention, very good actor. The movie change from drama at beginning, comedy in the middle and return to drama. This is a god film but needs more punch at end to become a great, I noted that Luna needed more experienced to make it an extraordinary movie.