Burnt Money (2000)

An excellent movie where everything is beautiful - from the crumbling, claustrophobic backdrops of the antagonists' hiding places, the actors and the background music.

Besides showing an unusual homosexual relationship, the film also questions the relationship between sex, love and violence - even when the main characters turn "straight" violence and death hang in the air, with scenes sex often interspliced with those of death and agony.

More importantly, you can't help but feel sorry - and yet almost envious - for the doomed (and did I mention beautiful?) lovers as they slide towards their inevitable end, just for the incredible passion they have for each other.

Fmovies: Burnt Money, a provocative, severe crime thriller from Argentina, begins like a Spanish- language Guy Ritchie narrative, with an assembly of criminals arranging a heist. Yet the heist is over in a glance. The lion's share of the story is the impact of the job. So much of this film seems already acquainted, from its appealing crime thriller stylization to its narrative echoes of Reservoir Dogs, Heat and Bonnie and Clyde, that when it takes one of its unprecedented turns it overcomes you. There are a lot of unforeseen detours.

The opening introduces us to Angel and Nene, gay lovers who live in a murky Buenos Aires apartment. A narrator notifies us that they are known as "the twins." After showing how they met, in a grungy public restroom, the narrator distinguishes the one telling way they are similar: "the still eyes, the lost glare." The knifelike center on character relationships, and the novelistic way the story is divulged through sequential narrators, featuring internal monologue, prepares us to pull back to enmesh the "twins" in the heist. Neither they, nor the story, are as they appear.

Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Nene with scorched vigor. He has the loose-hipped walk of a younger Robert Downey, Jr., yet oozing even more with suggestiveness. His underhanded approach to life is not smug or justified, but rather self-assuredly devoid of any overeagerness or vanity. Eduardo Noriega brings a preyed-upon sentimentality to Angel. We feel at first as if he may be slow, and perhaps to some extent he is, but in a way that is lost in emotionally charged internalized delusions, a return to the primordial dilemma. He seems afloat in dissolution, a dream state readily seen. And their emotional holding out becomes a game that neither wins. Where they are intimate, there is peace restored, and there are religious obstacles.

The robbery of an armored car goes awry. The thieves, one of them injured, must stay completely out of sight. Law-sided demoralization and violence are initial drives of the story's turning point though not at the center. The film, which is based on a true story, offhandedly concedes that the lines separating cops from robbers are obscured, but its focus remains tight on the robbers.

One should not write this film off as categorized for a gay target audience. Though it revolves around the two implicitly loving leads, Burnt Money seems to compete with much more vivid heterosexual pairings. Nene swings both ways, and Cuervo, the getaway driver played by Pablo Escharri, has a girlfriend who figures integrally in the plot. After the men flee to Uruguay, police beatings push the left-behind girlfriend to give them up. Their status revealed, the robbers must stay out of sight, pressures mounting. Anti-gay implications add to the enmity. They don't trust each other, everyone keeps a gun at hand, but attachments gradually solidify nonetheless.

Burnt Money could have almost been made in the 1970s, when a film with the promise of spectacle in its subject matter was almost expected to take the more complex way to the end, no matter what the end may be. And yet the film reaches a climax we've seen so many times. Nevertheless, even in its brutal execution which extrinsically offers not much in the way of variation on a device dating back to the original 1932 Scarface, it maintains a theme of dissolution, a dream state made real to them, of feelings taking over, a theme which, in the end, makes the film its own beast.

I wasn't excepting anything special before I started to watch "Plata quemada". I just knew that it was an Argentinean movie and it has won the Goya price. Only good movies win this price. After the beginning of the movie (the underground scene) I thought that it would be another stupid gay romance. Later, step by step, the movie became more and more interesting. Great plot, excellent actors (and actress), wonderful music. As one of the IMDb users says, Eduardo Noriega's acting is similar to the River Phoenix's one. For example in "My private Idaho". Who knows if his voices were symptoms of mental defect or small epileptic fits etc.? When the movie was ending I was thinking that it was one of the best movies I had ever seen. But when appeared the information that it was based on a true story my breath was taken away. Next half an hour, I was not able to do anything, except to think about the movie. I reacted this way just when I had seen "Dancer in the dark". It is not one of the best movies I have ever seen, but the best one ever.

Burnt Money fmovies. The relationship between Angel and Nene is one of the most passionate, destructive, uncompromising depictions of love in all its blood-soaked sordidness that I've seen in a long time. These are not nice guys. They are wounded and fierce and protective of each other. So complex a relationship needs time to develop on film and director ,Marcelo Piñeyro, isn't afraid to give it to them. We share the sweltering boredom of their exile, the desperation of Nene's love for Angel and Angel's wordless, psychotic attempts to save Nene. These great actors can say it all in a single look. It is one of the most intensely erotic and romantic film I've seen in a very long time.This is a movie that will stay with me.

Marcelo Pineyro, one of the best directors from Argentina, surprises with every new effort. Working on this film with Marcelo Figueras, he also contributed to bring Ricardo Piglia's novel to the screen with unexpected results. The novel was based on a real criminal case that happened in Buenos Aires in the 1960's.

The two men at the center of the story are gay lovers who happened to be criminals. These two men share a passion that comes across on the screen like no other in recent memory. Angel, the Spaniard, wants to go to New York and Nene, his lover, wants to comply, but first they must attend to the assault of a vehicle that brings money to one bank. During the heist Angel is shot on his shoulder.

Things are so hot for all the people involved, they flee to Uruguay. This was perhaps a miscalculation, because they are being followed by the Argentine police, that is working with local authorities in apprehending all the criminals.

Nene is restless. He decides to leave the safe house, and finds Giselle, a beautiful woman who falls in love with him. At this point, we are of two minds, is Nene really cheating on Angel, or is he trying to use Giselle into providing another place where they can hide? The violent end comes in a finale that doesn't have anything to envy to any other movies of the genre.

The best thing in the film are the two leads. Leonardo Sbaraglia is one of the best actors that have come out of Argentina lately. He does an amazing job in portraying Nene. Eduardo Noriega, is also a Spanish actor that has done excellent work before and he shows his range in a magnificent performance as Angel. Leticia Bredice is Giselle, the young woman in Montevideo who befriends, then fall in love with Nene.

The film proves Marcelo Pineyro is a voice to be reckoned with and who has an enormous talent for giving his audience his best.

BURNT MONEY (Plata Quemada)

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Dolby Digital

Argentina, 1965: Following a violent robbery on an armored car, two gay lovers - rebellious rich kid Nene (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and borderline schizophrenic Ángel (Eduardo Noriega) - are forced to flee with their accomplices to Uruguay, where they take refuge in a decaying apartment building. Denied sexual favors by Ángel due to his worsening mental condition, Nene takes up with a sympathetic prostitute (Leticia Brédice), leading to jealousy, betrayal and tragedy...

Based on true events recounted in a non-fiction novel by Argentinian writer/critic Ricardo Piglia, and directed by former producer Marcelo Piñeyro (THE OFFICIAL STORY), BURNT MONEY is a masterpiece. Photographed with noirish intensity by Alfredo Mayo (HIGH HEELS) and underscored by an ironic soundtrack of lazy jazz and contemporary English/Spanish pop songs, the narrative is driven by powerful emotions which explode at regular intervals in outpourings of explicit sex and violence. The sacred and profane are interlinked in various ways (one extraordinary sequence cross-cuts between an act of worship in a Uruguayan church and an unpleasant encounter between Nene and a frightened youth in a public toilet), and the sweaty atmosphere is broken only by an explosive climax where the main protagonists are forced to take responsibility for their actions. Former TV actor Pablo Echarri ("Chiquititas", "El Signo", etc.) plays a younger, headstrong member of the outlaw gang, blinded by youthful arrogance to the danger in which they have all become enmeshed, while Brédice (NINE QUEENS) plays one of the few significant female characters in this otherwise all-male scenario, a brittle creature who falls in love with the wrong guy, with appalling consequences for everyone around her.

More than anything else, however, BURNT MONEY is a love story, played to perfection by two of the finest young actors of their generation. Spanish heartthrob Noriega forged his career in popular mainstream entries such as THESIS, OPEN YOUR EYES and THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, while Sbaraglia plied his trade alongside Piñeyro in the lower echelons of Argentinian cinema (TANGO FEROZ: LA LEYENDA DE TANGUITO, CABALLOS SALVAJES). Casting these two beautiful, experienced young men as lovers in a violent true-crime drama could not have been more fortuitous: Their devotions are rarely consummated on-screen (all of the aforementioned sex scenes are heterosexual), except for a chaste kiss at the end of the film, and an earlier, erotically-charged sequence in which Nene tends to a wound on Ángel's shoulder and initiates a sexual advance, only to be rebuffed because of Ángel's mental condition. And yet, Noriega and Sbaraglia are ultra-convincing as the macho thugs who would literally die for one another, and they invest every gesture, every inflection, with genuine romantic chemistry. These guys simply burn up the screen! Look out for the devastating sequence in which Nene 'confesses' to Brédice about his relationship with Ángel, where he describes their mutual affection with heartbreaking emotional candor.

To his credit, Piñeyro refuses to soft-pedal the dissolute nature of his central characters. But for all its dramatic fireworks and sexual tension, BURNT MONEY is a tale of steadfast devotion, as touching and beautiful as any this reviewer has ever seen. They may be thieves and murderers, but when Nene looks into Ángel's eyes, you know instinc