Pretty Good

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

Rafael, a precocious Jewish teen ager, in Montevideo, awakens to his sexuality early in the story. Rafa, as he is called has a problem controlling the acne that afflicts most young people. Rafael has been told by a dermatologist to stay away from all those fatty foods and chocolate that seem to be contributing to his problems. He lives with his middle class parents and two siblings in what appears to be a comfortable life.He frequents prostitutes with his buddies but he is yet to experience kissing a woman. The girls in the brothels he goes to, will do anything with him except giving him what he yearns for and no one seems to give him. At school, Rafael spends most of his time in class daydreaming, drawing, and getting in trouble.We watch Rafael eying one of the girls in his class, but he is too shy to do, or say, anything to her. One day, waiting outside his father's warehouse, he spots a girl at a small stand kissing a boy passionately. Rafa succeeds getting friendly with the girl after she confesses she is no longer seeing the boy she was involved with. Finally Rafael gets the opportunity he has long lusted for.A coming of age film from director Federico Veiroj, who wrote his own material. The premise posed in the picture gets a flat treatment by the same man whose idea gave birth to the project. Rafael leads a dull existence. Nothing really exciting happens to make the story more interesting. Rafael's life is highly predictable for a young man with a high libido.

This is a kid who gets all the money he wants (he can even wake his parents up in the middle of the night to ask for money, no problem), who goes regularly to brothels at age 13, who takes piano, tennis and karate lessons and doesn't seem to enjoy neither. And we are supposed to care for him because he has a fierce acne attack (for which, after seeing several specialists, he is taking the most expensive medicine in the market, without much improvement) and because he has never kissed a girl? Character identification really fails in this movie, and there's not much of an ironic distance, either.Neither we learn much about the Jewish community in Montevideo, which is the supposed cultural backdrop. Well, maybe we do learn a couple of things: that they do fairly well, and that your classmates will laugh at you if your father happens to be a bricklayer.This is not a badly made movie, only a pointless one.