DON’T let the title throw you. This is not the cloyingly saccharine rom-com with Isla Fisher which flopped into cinemas in February.
Winner of the Camera D’Or Prize at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival for Best First Feature, Australian director/playwright Michael Rowe’s debut Leap Year (Ano Bisiesto) is the antithesis of Hollywood’s soppy chick flick.
Dark, disturbing and powerful, it is a captivating essay on loneliness and alienation in modern urban society.
Set entirely within the small, claustrophobic confines of an apartment in Mexico City, 25-year-old freelance journalist Laura (Monica Del Carmen) spends her days writing, making small talk with her family over the phone and watching trashy TV, before going out and bringing men back for no strings sex.
Laura yearns for meaning in her life, gazing out of her window at the seemingly idyllic lives of her neighbours.
Haunted by a sinister event which happened on leap year day, Laura is imprisoned by her loneliness and desperately longs for affection.
As the dreaded anniversary approaches, she methodically crosses off the days on the calendar as if counting down the hours before her execution.
But her daily routine of self-loathing is violently interrupted when she meets Arturo (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), whose small courtesy of sticking around long enough for a post-coital conversation and an unexpected arousal at being physically abused during sex, leaves her with a taste for more of this rare excitement in her otherwise banal life.
It’s not long before Laura is consenting to ever more demeaning and violent sexual acts, thrilled by the break to the monotonous pattern of isolation.
She is beaten, peed on and subjected to all manner of toe-curling humiliations, but as her desire for ever more extreme S&M escalates, her deep inner turmoil falls sharply into focus.
Del Carmen delivers a stand out performance as the emotionally adrift lead, while Veteran actor Sanchez Parra convincingly conveys both cruelty and tenderness as her lover.
The first 30 minutes or so may be agonisingly slow, but the long lingering camera shots serve to eccentuate the tedium of her existence and highlight her suffocating loneliness.
Rowe’s film is certainly no cheery Sunday afternoon picture, but it is a captivating and gut wrenchingly powerful exploration of modern urbanity nonetheless.
Original and thought-provoking, it will leave you moved and disturbed long after the closing credits.
Leap Year (Ano Bisiesto) is showing at the BFI London Film Festival on October 16 and October 17. To book tickets and for more information, visit bfi.org.uk/lff
Leap Year is released nationwide on November 26.
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