Sexual Dependency

As an artistic experiment, director Rodrigo Bellott mounted a huge billboard advertising RIGO BoSD underwear, featuring a gorgeous young man, strategically placing it on one of the main avenues in downtown Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Within a month, the related website was receiving inquiries from clothing companies about the manufacturing rights to the line. Passed at one time or another by all the main characters in the film, the billboard comes to stand for the pressures of lifestyle, physical beauty, sex, class, race and power relations that the young characters experience in a media-dominated culture. Five characters dominate the story. A poor Bolivian teenaged girl is date-raped at her friend’s lavish debut party. A young Colombian man is treated to a free throw at a whorehouse. A rich young stud is privately terrified as he spends his last evening before leaving to attend university in the United States. A tough, black woman college student and a football player who moonlights as an underwear model and is secretly gay complete the cast. With one exception, each scene is shot with two cameras so that a constant split-screen narrative shows different angles of the same event. Not in the least a gimmick, this device visually links the disparate stories and allows each to unfold from different perspectives. (Kay Armatage, Toronto Catalogue)