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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
 CIAO
Imagine a two-man show on an empty stage. Add some minimalist furniture, dress the men in T-shirts and pressed jeans, and engage them in painfully awkward conversation. Finish with a whimper of a plot and you have Ciao, a cardboard gay drama stiffly directed by Yen Tan. The film opens to the heavy click clack of a computer keyboard. Jeff (Adam Neal Smith), a neat, young Texan discovers that his best friend Mark, before he died in a freak automobile accident, had scheduled, via e-mail, a face-to-face meeting with a Genovese cyber-beau named Andrea (Alessandro Calza). Since Mark longed to sip from this tall Italian drink of water, and since Andrea’s tickets to Texas are already booked, what’s a boy to do? And so, in an effort to forge one final connection with his late friend, Jeff invites Andrea to stay with him. The strangers pass three languorous days in stark apartments and soul-free Lone Star haunts. But the film is a character study without character. The two men are unable to move beyond their hyper-polite, gratingly awkward exchanges. This may be an accurate gauge of the natural discomfort between strangers who are connected only by death, but there is a fine line between good acting that channels unease and bad acting that makes one uneasy. Aiming for minimalism (evident in the simplicity of the setting and the script), the director’s low-key approach only succeeds in striping the men’s unusual situation of its inherent emotional impact. Avoiding an overarching message or cinematic trickery, Ciao relies entirely on our interest in the characters. But between the staleness of their interaction and the absence of any remarkable ideas, the film simply has no legs to stand on.
Ciao’s
only contribution to cinema is in
the way it dispenses with queer stereotypes as Jeff and Andrea are a
far cry from the jazzy Jack McFarlands or the promiscuous, vacuous
hotties of many gay indies. And their sole sexual encounter is the only
telltale sign of passion, both in their relationship and in the film’s direction.
While many movies (at least mainstream productions) obscure the intimacy
of gay sex scenes with humor, music, or distracting camera work (if
shown at
all), Tan’s camera lingers on the men as they tenderly kiss and grope
for each other—a cheerful reminder that even mediocre films sometime
swell with exceptional inspiration.
Yana Litovsky
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