BOULEVARD (2014) Dito Montiel

I had read very positive reviews of this film, and I really liked Dito Montiel 's A Guide to Recognizing One's Saints . So I was surprised to find myself watching a predictable film whose plot can be sensed from the very first images.

Robin Williams , here in his last performance before his death, is Nolan: a sixty-year-old man leading a dull life, working a mundane bank job, well-read, and with a cultured wife. In short, a repressed gay man who manages to rediscover his will to live by falling for a prostitute. All this in a boring and familiar film that makes you hope it's just a gimmick, leading to an original ending. Which never comes.

Williams creates a character so low-key he borders on caricature, vaguely petty, afraid of everything. Montiel doesn't rely on a script that tells a story, but leads the viewer into numerous clichés, already abundantly present in cinema and literature. The effect is like watching a film we've already seen many times, where an over-the-top ( and under-the-top ) performance fails to save the story.

The two supporting characters are extremely banal: the cultured best friend who hangs out with girls younger than him, who obviously also supports Nolan's transformation of life as an openly gay man, and the terminally ill father locked in a hospice who never speaks ( the scene of the protagonist's confession of his homosexuality to his unconscious father is the worst of all ).

The commercial is lacking in substance, and I don't think it was a directorial choice.

The character of the wife is beautiful, measured and patient, who feeds on books and endurance.

As many people have written on numerous occasions, a film with a bad script and good direction is still a bad film.