The Apostate

Description

This droll, canny, erotically charged study of a man determined to free himself from convention marks the third feature from Uruguayan filmmaker Federico Veiroj, director of the wry cinephilic festival favorite A Useful Life (SFIFF 2011). Veiroj again trains his keen, sensuous lens on an unlikely hero whose present day dilemma recalls a bygone historical (and cinematic) era. Gonzalo Tamayo (a devilishly innocent Álvaro Ogalla, with whom Veiroj hatched the original story idea and co-wrote the screenplay) is an obstinate Madrid 30-something intent on forcing the equally obstinate Catholic Church to relinquish its hold on his misspent life by removing his name from the baptismal record. This surface turbulence draws its gradually manic Buñuel-esque energy from deeper currents in Gonzalo’s frustrated life—proto-political, quasi-existential, patently Freudian impulses emanating from his lifelong lust for his first cousin, his perennial inability to pass his final philosophy exam, a strained relationship with his overbearing mother and shady father and a tentative flirtation with the beautiful cookie-baking single mother whose son he tutors. More than a portrait of a man unwilling to fully grow up, The Apostate prompts subtle questions and subversive pleasures in its battle of wills between a would-be renegade and some of the more intimate institutions of social control. —Robert Avila

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