Leap Year (Año Bisiesto)

MOVIE #1,408 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 02.29.24 This is fitting for our second “Leap Year” choice, especially as a juxtaposition to the Amy Adams romcom that came out the same year. Whereas that movie is designed, if not preordained to emanate good vibes, Australian-Mexican filmmaker Michael Rowe’s Año Bisiesto specifically sets out to do the opposite. Shot almost entirely in a seedy one-room apartment, this psychodrama details the grinding routine of Laura, a depressed young person who enters into an intense and increasingly violent sexual relationship. Laura fills in the square for the 29th of February with red ink and then proceeds to mark off each day leading up to it with an "x." She fills these days fornicating with strangers and masturbating while peeping on her neighbors. There's not a whole lot we get to see of her life beyond the sex: she has a ‘normal’ lovesick brother, a vague/unfulfilling job as a freelance journalist, and her father died on Leap Day four years earlier.

Much of the 87-minute run-time is filled with increasingly difficult to watch, borderline porn scenes wherein Laura subjects herself to more and more extreme and degrading sex acts at the hands of a willing participant, whom she eventually asks to kill her while they fuck on Leap Day. SPOILER: He doesn't show up.

This movie is stark and simple and obviously depressing. It's not necessarily a slog but it isn't a fun hour and a half either. I'm not sure it has a point beyond existing as a bleak portrait. It paints her proclivity for masochism as a deep, potentially fatal flaw as well. Mónica del Carmen is solid and delivers a fearless performance in the lead role of Laura, but given the violent subject matter inherent and the very real way it's filmed, perhaps that's the only way it could have gone.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,407 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,409 ⫸

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Año Bisiesto (Leap Year) is a 2010 Mexican film from the Australian-Mexican screenwriter and film director Michael Rowe. It was released on May 17, 2010.