Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

gradyharp Director/writer Andrés Waissbluth worked seven years to complete this two hour film about the crime underground in Santiago, Chile, and perhaps that is one of the reasons the resultant film seems episodic and in need of editing. OR, maybe this is the technique of a director who shows a fine sense of film noir storytelling.Two brothers - Silvio the elder (Néstor Cantillana) and Victor the younger (Juan Pablo Miranda) - have moved to Santiago from their home in Temuco after their parents' death and Silvio works to support Victor's education. On Victor's seventeenth birthday Silvio takes the virgin out to the clubs where he encourages Victor to lose his virginity with one of the club's stripper/prostitutes. In a tender scene Victor must face his nascent impotency while Silvio is out on the club floor impressing the 'owners' with his potential for hire.Silvio goes to work for the 'gang' as a bodyguard/henchman and makes good money to support Victor's schooling. But Victor has eyes for one of the dancers at the club named Gracia (Antonella Ríos) and begins to woo her, dropping out of school incurring Silvio's angry disappointment. Gracia just happens to be the squeeze of the club gang's leader Don Pascual (Alejandro Trejo) who is Silvio's boss! Gracia is the glue that holds this tale together as she is the paramour of Victor, Silvio, and Don Pascual and the consequences of this bizarre ménage a trois has deadly results. Through a means of re-telling the story through the eyes of Victor, Silvio, and Gracia we grow to understand the vulnerabilities and the cracks in each character that allow for the downfall that results.Sound like a Chilean Pulp Fiction? Well, it is and it is filmed in a brutally colorful, dark manner that includes a lot of frontal nudity (both female and male) and provocative sexual encounters. But in the end the sensual aspect of the director's vision is what drives this film, playing on the debutante virginal psyche against the hardcore professional sex worker with success. The cast is fairly strong, especially Antonella Ríos in the demanding role of Gracia. There are enough twists and turns and replays of incidents you think you understood the first viewing but that change dramatically in impact when told through the eyes of a different character. Bordering on two hours, some judicious editing would have helped the impact of the film. In Spanish with English subtitles. Recommended for those who like the edgy film noir style and the art of South American cinema. Grady Harp

myfavoriteartform 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.

lazarillo I saw this movie in Santiago last summer and unfortunately it will probably not be released outside of that country. It would be interesting to watch it again with English subtitles as Chilean Spanish is notoriously difficult (especially for someone like myself who left that country as a small child in 1973 and grew up speaking English). At times I could have sworn the characters were speaking Italian. The movie is a kind of a South American version of Pulp Fiction with three interweaving narrative strands focusing on a stripper, an inexperienced teen, and his more experienced older brother. It's no Pulp Fiction, but it's superior to most Pulp Fiction knock-offs. Juan Pablo Miranda is very convincing as the teen. Antonella Rios, who plays the stripper, would make even someone who wasn't born in Chile want to go there. Alejandro Trejo is convincing as a gangster/strip club owner, and Anita Alvarado, a local scandal queen known as the "the Geisha of Chile", puts in a cameo as the prostitute who first deflowers the Miranda character. Only Nestor Cantillana as the older brother disappoints, not because he's a bad actor, but because this rail-thin pretty-boy is woefully miscast as a tough-guy bodyguard. Still, check it out if you get a chance.

peteito 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.