Vintage coming-of-age drama from Argentina, though it's largely set in Spain. The setup is quite promising: Martin, an Argentine screenwriter who lives in Madrid and a distant, withholding dad if there ever was one, reluctantly takes charge of his 19-year-old son, Hache (pron. "Aché," the equivalent of "Junior"), after the latter unwisely mixes whiskey with a street drug called "dog" and ends up in the hospital. Martin, solitary and self-absorbed by nature, seems to be at a loss, but Martin's friend and collaborator Dante, a hedonistic gay actor, and Martin's clingy, coke-addled girlfriend Alicia (the fabulous Cecilia Roth of "All About My Mother") are delighted to have a handsome new playmate. Trouble comes (for the characters—and the viewer, IMHO) when the scene shifts to a luxurious villa in Almería, in the south (not unlike the modernist pueblo where Bardot and Michel Piccoli hole up in Godard's "Contempt"). An evening of drinking, doping and cynical philosophizing, presumably for the benefit of the directionless young Hache, has tragic consequences that seemed, to me at least, both predictable and contrived. Despite a charmingly redemptive final scene in which Hache finally comes into his own, the film never recaptured my attention after that. A couple of our Spanish Facebook friends really talked this one up; part of the problem may be that the subtitles can't keep pace with the dialogue, which, in these melodramatic final scenes, just comes off as pretentious and banal

Very wordy, almost feels like a theater piece at times. A young man, somewhat lost, comes from Argentina to Madrid to be with his distanced, emotionally detached filmmaker father. But he ends up spending almost as much time with his dad's sexy, druggie younger mistress, (an incandescent performance by Cecilia Roth) and his dad's hedonistic, bi-sexual actor best friend.Entertaining and moving at times, the central character (the filmmaker-father) is so removed, and so hurtful it becomes hard to understand why the others continue to put up with him. It also gets a bit repetitive, as it becomes obvious that each time the father starts to open up, he'll just close down again. And it can feel very wordy.It reminded me of a pretty good Woody Allen drama. If it had more humor it might have made it even better. Still, I'm glad I saw it, and I find moments and performances stick with me. And on second viewing I liked it a bit more, forgiving the theatricality, and enjoying getting to know these people.

That film ha a really horrible camera work! I saw other films with lots of dialog but none of these films had a camera work which was that bad. Like in a bad south American soap opera there wasn't much going on with the camera. The only nice picture in the film is when they move to the house on the beach. But since the house was looking very nice, even a tourist would have been able to get a nice movie of this house with his cheap camera. So that rather should be a radio play. But not even that - the characters are so stereotype that this film is not half so wise like it pretends to be. Also acting and cut are bad - especially the scene where the gay finds the women drowned in the pool. I thought "what the hell was that"? The actor doing just something and/or the cut was so bad in this scene that you have the feeling that something went completely wrong there if you see that.

I love this movie, what more can i say?!.Some people say that this is a theatrical film because of its dialogues and locations, and i think it´s true, but what´s the matter?. In fact i think it´s like a Greek tragedy with all the kind of characters you can imagine: Dante (good chosen name) is the pleasure, Martín is the fear , Alicia is the emotion, and Hache is the doubt. And here they are mixed in Spain at the end of twentieth century.The performance is simply wonderful. Cecilia Roth (All about my mother) is splendid and what can i say about Federico Luppi who is one of the best actors in Spanish language that exists. I can imagine nobody except Eusebio Poncela as Dante. Juan Diego Botto is quite good.But the best thing in this movie are dialogues. They are really deep and make you think about many things in your life, especially when you are in the age of Hache, and you don´t find ways to mature. And film helps you to take account that many people is not as mature as they are supposed to be - for example Martin father -, and other many people is not as crazy as they are supposed to be - for example Dante-. There are phrases in this film that i know by memory and i use with my friends when we are joking. There are many interesting thoughts about love, loneliness, family, money, sex, drugs, and, of course, life.See it when you are sad.