A movie that you might want to watch someday. It is unbearable to be a single gay man with a disgusting mark on his face when there are so many beautiful, young, happy and successful couples around.
Harry, painfully shy, securely packed into the shell of his own fears and doubts, is no longer young, not yet old, at an age when a loved one is not a dream, but a vital necessity.
Harry’s attempt to find a mate at a local gay club ends in a shameful escape and the ultimate conviction that if you can’t clean the stain off your face, the best way out is to settle scores with a life that has nothing but emptiness.
Harry drives away in a small passenger car, not disassembling the roads, and at the end of the way gets to a deserted beach. Here his new world narrows to the size of a car, which, like a shell, gradually overgrown with algae and becomes part of the shore.
Everything changes when Harry rescues a stranger buried ' kind ' uncles in the sand up to his neck and doomed to drown in the waves of the tide. Flint - eccentric, rough, to hell in the eyes alive and open, ready, it seems, absolutely for any turn of fate. He playfully picks up Harry and leads, leaving him no chance to escape and lock himself in his shell. That's Flint. I saw it, I lifted it, I carried it. That's his style, he's so used to it.
Further, the plot seems quite predictable. Harry has no other way than to gradually become more and more carried away by the charismatic Flint, who then lets him come very close, snubbing in Harry’s hands during the dressing of the wounded head and declaring that the spot on his face is even nothing so-so, then hanging out a painful crack when he dreams aloud about women in bikinis or laughs wildly after Harry’s timid confession of love.
For all the obviousness of the plot, the film does not tell a love story. This is a story about healing and gaining integrity, this is a story about the everyday difficulties of life without a penny in your pocket, this is a story about trust and friendship, about falling into the abyss of alienation and ascension to the top of the bliss of finding a couple.
The film intertwines quite everyday scenes and phantasmagoric images, because of which the narrative should not be perceived linearly in order not to lose the essence. Visions and fantasies complement reality, not so much explaining as forcing the viewer to think up, supplement and complete events.
This film is a theater of two actors, their talent, ability to deeply reveal the image turns the picture into a precious sparkling stone of witty art house. Bernard Hill - bright, full of life, open-minded Flint and John Hanna - a shy gay man hiding in his shell, made up a coherent, harmonious and sensual duo. Every action, every look, intonation - everything works on the image, makes the character voluminous, and emotions genuine.
The ending of the film will likely leave the attentive viewer with a slight sense of hunger. How something was missing, something was understated, something was underexplained. This can reduce the impression of the whole film, and maybe, sometimes after a while, encourage you to return to the two characters once again and go all the way with them from distrust to sincere friendship, from loneliness to the emotional union of two seemingly different people under the same skin.