El Beso
2015 · 12m · México
Directed by Carlos G. Dávila
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
What should have been a quiet night doing laundry turns into a thorough analysis of Ale and Daniel's relationship, in a Mexican adaptation of Mark Harvey Levine's short play The Kiss.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Dávila takes a stage play about relationship forensics and refuses to open it up—the laundry room stays claustrophobic, the argument stays verbal—which should be boring but instead becomes this weird pressure cooker that actually *works* against the adaptation instinct; I didn't expect to care this much about two people folding clothes and dismantling each other.
A rigorous formal exercise in translating theatrical constraint to cinema: Dávila honors Levine's text while letting the frame do the work that blocking and lighting do onstage, and the result is a studied meditation on how domestic space becomes a stage for relational archaeology—precisely calibrated, in conversation with a tradition of intimate drama.
The entire film hinges on Dávila's choice to keep the camera still and let the rhythm live in the editing and the silences between dialogue—that decision to trust the pauses rather than cut away or find movement turns what could've been static into something that breathes, and suddenly you're watching a relationship collapse in real time without looking away.