A Year Without Love

A Year Without Love is only Berneri's third feature yet is an elegant, economical work.

First-time director Anahí Berneri, who wrote this involving, if slow-moving, film with Pablo Pérez (based on Pérez’s own diaries), doesn't shy away from the whippings, rope work and carefully calibrated humiliation that make up a good night of dungeon play. Yet A Year Without Love isn't a sex movie (so don’t expect one), but a studied examination of how one man folds jarring events into the everyday fabric of his life.

Anahí Berneri's promising feature debut (based on Pablo Pérez's autobiographical novel) is at once unsentimental and sympathetic; she evinces rare insight into a gay man's life and sexuality without cringing, passing judgment, or wallowing in pity.

An Argentine writer dying of AIDS searches for a medical cure and some human warmth in the hospitals and S&M clubs of Buenos Aires in dignified, thoughtful drama A Year Without Love.

Abrasive but affecting.

It's a weighty and visually interesting movie that unfortunately doesn't have a strong message beyond its overwhelming bleakness.

The unusually explicit dungeon scenes with Pablo, a leather daddy and a fellow slave may whip a rather specialized audience into a frenzy. But for others, A Year Without Love will be a less pleasurably painful experience.