Amor plano (Flat love)
2009 · 15m · España , Estados Unidos
Directed by Andrés Sanz
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, romance
Tones: melancholic, surreal, whimsical
A man falls hopelessly in love with a two-dimensional woman painted in a picture at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man fellating his own delusion in front of a Rothko—it's the kind of premise that makes you wince and lean forward at once, a genuinely weird romantic comedy that actually understands the difference between whimsy and pathology. Most scouts would call this precious; it's actually subversive.
Sanz positions this squarely within the lineage of surrealist cinema and the museum-as-muse tradition, though the tonal control—balancing melancholy against dark comedy—requires a restraint that not all emerging directors possess. It's a film aware of its own artificiality in the best curatorial sense.
The entire film hinges on a single decision: treating the 2D woman with absolute visual and emotional equivalence to the protagonist, which means every frame has to commit to that flatness as genuine rather than gimmick—and Sanz holds that constraint so strictly it becomes the emotional core.