A sentimental education at a Mexican motel

Competition “The Empty Hours”
Aarón Fernández (Director)
Kristyan Ferrer (Actor)
 
Aarón Fernández’s second film details an old story: young man experiences first sexual love affair with an older, more experienced woman. The film takes place in Mexico at a motel which 18-year-old Sebastián (Kristyan Ferrer) is managing in the absence of his uncle, who has taken off for a well-earned sabbatical. Though Sebastian is smart and able, the job requires a certain amount of tact. It’s one of those motels—a place for romantic assignations—and while the young man is wise to the world, he isn’t always hip to certain situations. The older woman, Miranda (Adriana Paz), shows up to meet one of her boyfriends and ends up tutoring Sebastián in the ways of love, starting out by indicating that one of his guests, a rancher, is homosexual. Sebastián isn’t shocked, but he is impressed with Miranda’s powers of observation, which, of course, mimic those of the audience.
 
“It’s not a particularly original story,” Fernández said at the press conference, “but are there any original stories left any more? The whole point was to find a new way to tell it, to construct a cinematic model of time and space that would present the characters and the situation in a new way.”

 
In that regard, “The Empty Hours” almost defies the conventions of the usual coming-of-age love story. “The appeal is very normal,” Ferrer said, when asked what he thought audiences would take away from it. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting” Though Sebastián and Miranda do end up in bed together, thus consummating the implications of the sexual tension that exists between them for most of the film, the resulting scene isn’t anything more than erotic. Fernandez doesn’t make promises he can’t keep. There’s no feeling that this is anything more than an initiation into adulthood.

 
“I wanted to show how Sebastián changed from the beginning to the end,” Fernández said. “He undergoes an emotional education, and if that’s what is conveyed to the viewers, then I’m happy.”
 
The fact that Ferrer was only a teen at the time the film was shot was important to the director. Paz, however, is an experienced actress who already has an established career in Mexico, though Fernández cast her because of the “naturalness” of her beauty. “To me she’s a star,” Ferrer said. “I learned a lot during the love scenes,” and we can assume he wasn’t just talking about acting.
 
One journalist remarked that the movie almost seemed like a documentary, to which Fernández replied, “A lot of the camera work was handheld, to add more energy to the story. The visual concept was that of an impressionist painting, in which you accumulate details in order to form an overall story that affects you emotionally.”
 
“I think it’s a very sensitive film,” Ferrer added.
 
Fernández commented that he wrote the script in Paris while he was pursuing a degree in filmmaking, but that he shot the movie at the same time his son was born. “Second films are always more difficult,” he said, “and I think that makes them potentially better. Because my son was being born at the time, I had to be very patient, and that’s a good thing.”
 

Competititon
“The Empty Hours”
Director / Producer / Screenwriter : Aarón Fernández
Cast : Kristyan Ferrer, Adriana Paz