25 WATTS (Juan Pablo Rebella, Pablo Stoll, 2001)

“I’m fucked,” Alejandro—Leche—tells buddies Javi[er] and Seba early Saturday morning on a Montevideo street. (Wonderful Daniel Hendler, Jorge Temponi and Alfonso Tort: best actor, Buenos Aires.) Having stepped into a wad of dogshit, he feels cursed. Later that day he spends hours screwing up his courage to phone Beatriz, his Italian tutor (his upcoming test will determine whether he graduates from high school), only to learn from her mother that Beatriz is out with the boyfriend with whom, Leche thought, she had broken up. Seated at the kitchen table, Leche is crestfallen; his face sinks until it is visible only through the water in a transparent cup. Leche’s head appears trapped and drowning inside that cup.
     Beautifully written and directed by young Montevideans Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll (best screenplay, Lima), with gorgeous black-and-white photography by Bárbara Álvarez, 25 Watts—best film prizes at Gramado and from the Uruguayan film critics, and the international critics’ prize at Buenos Aires—transcends its slacker genre to become one of the best movies ever made about adolescent boys knocking on maturity’s door. Very funny, in particular about the guys’ sexual unease, the film is patient at building its explosive gags. Early on, for example, Leche (projecting!) tells Javi that his girlfriend María’s gift of a hamster means he is “a dead man,” that she is moving on. Later, in his bedroom, Rebella and Stoll punctuate Javi’s malaise with uproarious inserts of the hamster in its cage: dead-on reflections of Javi’s own state of mind.
     These boys cannot see much ahead. After all, only one Uruguayan has made the Guinness Book of World Records—for clapping for five days straight.
     After making with Stoll the marvelous Whisky (2005), Rebella took his own life.