Avis des critiques

Charting the ebb and flow of a gay relationship as it shifts from the idyllic South American coastline to the urban chill of Berlin, Aïnouz's storytelling is luxuriantly spare, counting on iridescent imagery and head-filling sonics to project the feelings of largely inexpressive characters.

What kind of movie is this? Where could it possibly be heading?" Normally, if you find yourself asking such questions, say, a half-hour into a movie, it's a sign that either the film is a hopeless, unfocused muddle that doesn't know what it's up to or it's purposefully oblique, taking us on a journey to new and unexpected cinematic destinations. Happily, "Futuro Beach" is a prime example of the latter. [Its] unusual artistic itinerary is mirrored by a significant geographic-cultural one.

Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), "Futuro Beach" explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign. Donato's abandonment of an ailing mother and adoring younger brother (beautifully played as an adult by Jesuita Barbosa) is scrutinized not in dialogue but in long, musically enhanced scenes of drinking, dancing and picturesque soul-searching.

I'm not being glib or pretentious claiming that [Aïnouz's] films are incredibly architectonic. He doesn't merely stylize: He assembles. The end product is precise, engineered, its structure as apparent as that of a Bauhaus building.

[...Aïnouz] seems far more interested in capturing fleeting moments of abstract visual beauty, to the point where most of his characters' actions appear to have been reverse-engineered in order to create such moments. That approach was woozily effective in Aïnouz's 2011 feature The Silver Cliff... But it doesn't work nearly as well in Futuro Beach, a more sprawling effort that follows a love affair over roughly eight years and across two continents, to increasingly diminishing returns.

While keeping things softcore, Karim Ainouz's Brazilian/German co-production misses no opportunity to have his actors take their clothes off and creates something genuinely erotic... Futuro Beach is as strong on texture as narrative. It's full of sensual images like a man in a diving suit cleaning an aquarium tank from the inside, as fish swim around him. Cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya captures the essences of both Brazil's sunny beaches and Berlin's winters.

Futuro Beach masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious before reaching a thoroughly underwhelming conclusion.

In the unreal real the dramaturgy, like the camerawork, is reduced to a common-sense logic which leads to an image that is stale when not superfluous, loose when not empty, inefficient when not pointless. Like inPraia do Futuro, whose real (the loss of a lover) peters out to nothingness (aimless meanderings through Berlin) because it has nothing to say and not even the very basic obligation to entertain.

What Aïnouz provides is a fulsome celebration of male bonding and physicality; with the punchy pop-art palette of the Brazilian sequences and gliding pursuit of bikers in the German mist, it's a work of great beauty. And when the three men, estranged brothers and estranged lovers, reunite on a European beach where the sea has receded to the horizon, the emotional payoff is incredibly moving.

Each succeeding chapter—there are three in all—seethes with what we've picked up on in the previous one. The pace of the third is no quicker than the first, but by this point, every movement is loaded. Aïnouz, Moura and Schick get something very right about the way relationships evolve and, working with cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözcaya, effectively evokes the contrast between sunny Brazil and cold, cold Berlin.

Two breakneck motorcycle rides — one across the sand dunes of a Brazilian wind farm, the other into the foggy abyss of a German autobahn — bookend Karim Ainouz's stunning fifth feature, "Praia do Futuro," and while the riders disembark for the intervening film, the exhilarating forward momentum between these scenes is near-constant.