Really enjoyable film. Totally unpredictable. I had read other people's views on how the camera work is rough / shaky etc - I didn't find this to be the case. Sure there are some scenes, mostly set outside that are a little shaky, but this added to the atmosphere. During the making of we learn that this is Director Andrés Waissbluth first film, which makes it even more amazing. Antonella Ríos who plays Gracia, the girl on the DVD cover with the shaving foam covering her bits, is just so damn sexy. IMDb reveals she did a lot of TV work after, but no films. That makes no sense. All the cast, which isn't that big, do a great job, and really take the viewer to that place, the bar, the house etc. I had my reservations before buying Los Debutantes, buy now I know I should have watched it much sooner. Now it's time to check out the other work from Andrés Waissbluth .

I was pretty surprised with this flick. Even though their budjet was obviously lacking still you have to be impressed that this movie took 7 years to make and still turned out good. The acting was pretty impressive and the story really captivated me. My only complaint would be that the ending really was a little too abrupt for my taste. But hey if your audience is left wanting more then this movie has succeeded.I would really recommend anyone in Hollywood to look up Antonella Ríos who is an excellent Spanish talent (something hard to find now days with all the bad novela over acting). Antonella Ríos truly is a star on the rise.

Los Debutantes is the story of two orphaned brothers who have moved to Santiago from the South after their mother dies. The confident and streetwise Silvio, the elder brother, gets a job working for a sleazy strip club's owner after taking the naive Victor there for his 17th birthday.As Silvio blossoms under his boss's tutelage, both brothers get involved with the owner's sexy and manipulative mistress, Gracia. As the film unfolds, characters are redefined as we begin to see the subtle and overt ways that each one manipulates the next.The film is well made, with good cinematography and fast pacing. It's also pretty sexy, with a lot of nudity and some fairly explicit sex scenes. It uses the now-popular technique of layering different scenes from different points of view, out of chronological sequence. Many people hate movies like this because they don't understand what's going on - Memento, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and many other good films use this device. The plot itself is really nothing new, there are elements of Body Heat, Pulp Fiction, and many other good film noir.As the different layers are revealed, our understandings of the characters and their motivations evolve. While the plot may be somewhat cliché, it is also clever and entertaining.I would call it an enjoyable movie, worth watching, but nothing memorable. I haven't seen many films from Chile, and it's always interesting to see film noir from other countries. Other than that, rent it if it's available but don't lose any sleep if it isn't.

An intriguingly bold film weaves the seemingly effortless camerawork with some superb casting and an explosive soundtrack to plot the damaging effects of the crime and corruption of the Santiago underworld on 2 naive young brothers from the southern city of Temuco.Film debutant Daniella Rios is the seductive erotic dancer Gracia, working in the nightclub owned by the face of the new mini-wave in Chilean film production, Alejandro Trejo. The elder brother, played maturely by Nestor Cantillana, is easily convinced to become Trejo's lead henchman, after a night at the stripclub to celebrate younger brother Victor's (Juan Pablo Miranda) seventeenth birthday. From the establishing shot of this opening scene, the film explodes into neo-noir exploration of everything the outside world doesn't usually expect to see in this country so stereotypically conservative and catholic.Gracia's charms of seduction attract the three men like bees to honey, although the circular narrative of the three-way fantasy romance revolves around the linear portrayal of major international drug deals between Trejo's men and the 'Gringo', Eduardo Barril. Power relations become a vital theme, as society's outsiders merge in a mini-family. The prostitute holds an exotic spell over all the chilean men in the film, emerging from her ambiguous position in the periphery of society, and is seen as holding the key to all three men's futures. The relationships between Trejo and Cantillana become important, as the boys' parents are conspicious by their absence (one assumes they still live in Temuco). Therefore it is Trejo, el padrino, who 'adopts' Cantillana, and effectively 'makes him' as a man in the city. Miranda rapidly becomes the desperate outsider, as his dependency on his 'father figure', Cantillana, becomes increasingly strained by jealousy over the beautiful Gracia. However, Miranda remains trapped by the constraint of still being in school - he is dependent on Cantillana, who is dependent on Trejo, for the money to survive. Trejo, in turn, is under the thumb of the 'Gringo', and his wealth has been accumulated through drug deals and well as his strip clubs. The figure of Gracia acts as a time bomb viewed as a beautiful firework, she wraps a web of beauty inside the patriarchy but the strain can only lead to one climax.As the tensions of these power relations come to head, Gracia remains ambiguously elusive. The viewer is never sure which male figure she will commit to. The film concludes tragically and explosively in a shoot out which realigns power relations and erases half the major male protanganists. The final shot of Miranda's beaten face speeding down the PanAmericano highway is despairingly powerful. The boy has been sucked in by the lure of the city's underworld, yet has lost his only visible family, and his woman, who is his only friend in the film. He has nothing. The overriding metaphors are bold and brave. This is a gangster film in Chile. The notions of family, no sex before marriage etc, are abolished, and instead the harsh realities of the other side of Santiago's coin are displayed in all their savage glory. Trejo beats Rios brutally, Rios and Miranda make love in a cinema reel room - a whore having sex with a minor she barely knows. The 'gringos' are seen to have a financial hold over this small Latin American nation, but not through the copper mines, through the illegal path of drugs. Waissbluth's triumph is in his presentation of this dark underworld, which raises so many social questions, more perhaps than the record-breakingly successful Sexo Con Amor, within a slick, smooth firecracker of a film, which place this film firmly alongside Sexo Con Amor, Taxi Para Tres, and El chacotero Sentimental, as cinematic evidence that Chile is well and truly artistically alive and kicking in the post-transition period 15 years after the censorship of the Military Regime.