'Broken Sky'

You can't accuse Mexican writer-director Julián Hernández of lacking a consistent vision. In this film, as in his previous A Thousand Clouds of Peace, he aims squarely at a lyrical portrayal of obsessive love. The problem? Hernández's real subject is narcissism, which he doesn't seem to understand. And he doesn't believe in dialogue. The result is nearly two and a half hours of plaintive looks, with the following vaguely apparent plot: Jonás (Fernando Arroyo) and Gerardo (Miguel Á Hoppe) are two university students who see each other on campus and immediately have sex. Things go well until Jonás sees a different boy and fixates on him. Gerardo retaliates by hooking up with someone else. That's the movie—desperate grasps, huffy affronts, gulping kisses, and one juicy (if silent) sex scene, early in the film, before our senses have been deadened by boredom. Without dialogue, we don't know who the characters are, so we can't care about what they do.