Alirón 2: El descanso
2022 · 8m · España
Directed by Adrià Llauró
Genres: coming-of-age, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, tender
Marc and Fran, lifelong friends, have just acknowledged and discovered that they like each other. They set out to have the first intimate homosexual relationship of their lives, but inexperience and a third person make it harder to become intimate.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the tender queer romance now—what makes this one stick is how deliberately it refuses the cathartic payoff, letting awkwardness and interruption win instead of sentimentality.
Llauró positions this within the lineage of intimate European coming-of-age cinema, but the formal restraint—that third-person intrusion as both narrative obstacle and compositional choice—feels more considered than it has any right to at eight minutes.
The film lives or dies on the decision to keep the camera close and still during the physical moments, letting dead air and fumbled conversation do the emotional work that most shorts would fill with music or movement—and that choice transforms inexperience from plot point into the entire architecture.