This assured first feature from Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas is a masterclass in storytelling through image rather than words. The photography, particularly the eloquent use of shallow focus and the eye for subtle body language, delivers stabs of clarity to a portrait of an ambiguous relationship between a man in his 50s and the teenage gang leader he meets on the streets.
Armando (played by the great Chilean actor Alfredo Castro, a regular collaborator of Pablo Larraín) is coolly inscrutable, the bitterness resulting from some hinted-at childhood trauma etched deep into his watchful face. He is gay but prefers his sexual encounters, like everything else in his life, at a safe distance. He scopes the streets of Caracas for young men, takes them back to the shadowy secrets of his apartment, but never touches them. One day he spots Elder (Luis Silva). The teenager lashes out, both with homophobic invective and with his fists, but there’s an uneasy fascination between the mismatched couple which draws them together.
When I first saw this picture at the Venice film festival, where it won the top prize, I felt that it suffered in comparison to the similarly themed Eastern Boys (2013) by Robin Campillo. On a second viewing, however, while it lacks the propulsive narrative drive and tonal shifts of Eastern Boys, From Afar reveals itself to be every bit as compelling a piece of film-making.
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