Too much of everything

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Incredibly dull. I kept waiting for something, anything to happen. Should have turned it off. Slow, boring,depressing. I think we're supposed to feel something for the main character but we don't get anything to hold onto. She leads a painfully boring life and we get to watch every slow meaningless minute of nothingness. Seems the writer, director, expects the viewer to read her mind. Maybe if we knew what she was thinking we would care. Otherwise she comes off as an empty shell of a person and we get to spend every minute not caring. Her sadistic lover, is more of a pathetic wanna be and we have no indication of his motivation nor his character. A complete and total waste of time.

Leap year is the story of the encounter or rather the break up of Laura and Arturo. Apparently this is a simple story but it contains a lot of details worth taking a second look at. The Australian director and screenwriter who lives in Mexico submerges us in a visual world that is plain and charmless for Mexican standards and someone might be tempted to judge the film by its visual austerity. But this perspective allows Michael Rowe to explore the solitude of Laura, her detachment from others and to slowly introduce us into her adventures with man, what she searches in them or better said who she would like to encounter in them. After seeing the film a close friend told me it was anti Hollywood. Definitely it does not embody a mass market aesthetic. The dark skinned actors and the unappetizing looks of the apartment where the action takes place are ideal to center the attention of the spectator on what is happening to the main character. Scenes like Laura taking off her bra underneath her shirt, picking her nose while working on her computer submerge us into an uncomfortable bodily intimacy. And there are also the very explicit sex scenes with exquisite violence full of details I don't even feel free to mention here that are not exciting in the usual sense but awaken a deep curiosity for the character. This movie was not shown in the Mexican commercial circuit. What does it mean when society that not willing to see herself in the mirror. When Michelangelo Antonioni answered critics of his movie The adventure (1960) he used these words "Eros is sick, man is uncomfortable and this makes him react but he does so in the wrong way, he explores eroticism and he is unhappy".

The film almost lost me in the first 10min but I felt the need to stick it out, call it a psychic connection with the story but I am glad I did. The pain seeps out of the screen with this one, everywhere in frame and on the actress face is painful, so much I had to close my own eyes and walk even a few times. Suppressed emotions, extreme isolation, the strength to plan ones own death pulled me into the world of this one bedroom apartment, and every film technique works toward this. For 94min we never leave the apartment, except for the view from her window into the neighbors loving home. Borne from a desire to feel alive, to feel anything, the character exists in extremes, and so she begins a sexual relationship where she is completely our of control. Giving herself over to be used however he wants she comes to life in those moments, and that is the only clarity she has. It takes incredible strength to live like her and she needs every inch to move forward, let your apprehension go and watch this.

Laura's character is so complex. We see her living a superfluous life when she interacts with other characters, except for her brother Raul and a guy named Arturo. We descend to the darkest levels of the human psyche along with the main character and that exploration is highly successful by the director. The film is linear, with no jumps in time as does Inarritu or Guillermo Arriaga, and also includes sex scenes which are pretty explicit. Although it seems the movie is just porn, it goes beyond sex. The aesthetic is like simple and I think the merit of the movie is the story and how it show us the life of a lonely woman living on a big city. So, after painful and rough journey, perhaps it is possible to find hope and redemption. A great Mexican film.