HORSEPLAY, written and directed by Marco Berger, opens in theaters on June 2nd and hits digital platoforms on June 13th. This is a beautifully photographed, well-acted film that takes place during a modern-day summer in Argentina and has a strong undercurrent of homophobic machismo and some homosexual interest. It's subtitled. It will have appeal to the LGBTQ audience -- especially males who may crave a drama with a generous amount of full frontal and total backside male nudity.
Berger focuses on a group of ten buddies who, at first, seem like members of a sports team -- like the team in the TED LASSO episodes. But this is basically a group of attractive, slim, well-built slackers who, collectively, display about 1/4th a cup of emotional depth and substance. They are quite languid in a large, roomy, rather elegant house which none of them ever attempts to keep clean. A female housekeeper does that. Due to the space, some of the buddies will sleep together on the same bed. Some are dressed. Some are totally naked. Their main daily activity is engaging in horseplay. They like to prank each other making secret homo-suggestive videos and then sending them to friends or posting them on Instagram. The material consists of one guy smooching another's butt, two pals pretending to fondle each other, wiggling one's johnson over the head of a snoozing roommate -- that sort of juvenile stuff. These guys have been engaging in that sort of behavior ever since they were 16. They're now 25 and the horseplay carries on for such an extended amount of time that -- to the viewer -- it gets annoying. The young men talk about hot babes and make fun of homosexuals. We wait to discover which one is closeted. Well..one is. And he's attracted to a bisexual housemate.
Some young women, ready to party, visit the guys. One interesting thing to note is that these females are also hormonally charged but their conversation is different. The guys talk about what pranks they've done and what pranks their planning. They smoke cigarettes, weed, and they drink. The females talk about sexism, science and environmental issues. One calls the guys out on the sexually-driven prank videos and how they view two shapely, gorgeous women making out as normal but view two shapely, gorgeous men making out as unnatural.
The girlfriend of one of the housemates has had it with his instigating some of the videos. As I wrote, this is a beautifully photographed film with a deluxe set location of a house with a pool. At times, HORSEPLAY looks like a David Hockney painting come to life. But, after a while, we long for a solid point to all this. Will there be a major revelation? Will these young men finally grow up? Will the closeted gay one come out? Here's a trailer for HORSEPLAY.
Initially, there seems to be a sexual fluidity amongst this group of friends. As I wrote earlier, several share a bed with one sleeping in the raw. They greet each other with a kiss. But you do sense restrictions and great immaturity in their conversations that accompany the pranks. At the beginning, one housemate declares "You know this is just horseplay." Later, during one nudity-infused prank cellphone camera shoot, they all chant "Home photo!" Eventually, this takes us to an ending that I felt...well, let's say we've seen that kind of ending before in dramatic films with a gay male storyline.
But the Argentinian eye candy was tasty.
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