First red flag: writer, producer, director en main actor are all one and the same person (Frederick Keeve). That isn't very promising, since there's no-one to look critical at the work of the other. Second red flag: hardly 20 seconds in the movie we have to watch a 50-something man having a crying-fit, while playing a sorrowful melody at the piano. A bit of a turn-off when you have just installed yourself on your couch, while the tone for the coming one and a half hour is immediately set: this is going to be a Very, Very Tragic Story.
It's clear that mister Keeve is an accomplished pianist, and his co-star Ricky Palomino is an equally accomplished classical ballet dancer, but they really shouldn't try to act: Palomino produces his lines at best adequately, but Keeve stumbles and mumbles and sleepwalks through his part. The writing is terrible, with cliché and often cringing dialogues, and no-where in the movie is the supposedly passionate love between Jason and Brandon made even remotely credible: there's zero chemistry between the two, the age-difference must at least have been some 25 years, and both men are unsympathetic and not even attractive.
The script kept amazing me, at many times it seemed that whole pieces of the story were missing. All of a sudden this divorced father falls for a guy? All of a sudden he is known to have supernatural healing powers?? All of a sudden his young lover jumps in bed with his former abusive boyfriend??? All of a sudden at the end of the movie there's some vague suggestion that maybe the whole family of Jason is in fact dead and the kids we saw are just figments of his imagination????
The whole project looks lackluster and low-budget, with cheap settings, bad photography, and a hollow, cold sound. The drone-views of the Californian shores and some National Geographic images of clouds, planets and the universe seem only intended to fill up the time. And sure: Rachmaninoff's pianoconcerto is ravishingly beautiful, but using it to start and end this awkward and superfluous movie felt almost disrespectful.
It's clear that mister Keeve is an accomplished pianist, and his co-star Ricky Palomino is an equally accomplished classical ballet dancer, but they really shouldn't try to act: Palomino produces his lines at best adequately, but Keeve stumbles and mumbles and sleepwalks through his part. The writing is terrible, with cliché and often cringing dialogues, and no-where in the movie is the supposedly passionate love between Jason and Brandon made even remotely credible: there's zero chemistry between the two, the age-difference must at least have been some 25 years, and both men are unsympathetic and not even attractive.
The script kept amazing me, at many times it seemed that whole pieces of the story were missing. All of a sudden this divorced father falls for a guy? All of a sudden he is known to have supernatural healing powers?? All of a sudden his young lover jumps in bed with his former abusive boyfriend??? All of a sudden at the end of the movie there's some vague suggestion that maybe the whole family of Jason is in fact dead and the kids we saw are just figments of his imagination????
The whole project looks lackluster and low-budget, with cheap settings, bad photography, and a hollow, cold sound. The drone-views of the Californian shores and some National Geographic images of clouds, planets and the universe seem only intended to fill up the time. And sure: Rachmaninoff's pianoconcerto is ravishingly beautiful, but using it to start and end this awkward and superfluous movie felt almost disrespectful.