Berta y Luis
2011 · 16m · España
Directed by David Castro González
Berta and Luis are two very shy people in a humorous love story presented as a distance-course problem, where the viewer learns the formula of love.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A math-textbook love story sounds like the kind of twee concept that would make me roll my eyes, but the execution here is genuinely strange in a way that resists the rom-com formula—it's almost deadpan about its own gimmick, which is where it gets interesting.
The conceit of presenting romance through a pedagogical distance-learning framework shows formal ambition, though the whimsy risks tipping into novelty; what matters is whether the constraint becomes a genuine compositional tool or merely decoration.
The decision to literalize the 'formula of love' through the language and visual grammar of a math problem is what makes this work—it's the kind of constraint that forces every shot and edit to justify itself, transforming a premise that could be precious into something disciplined and genuinely funny.