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Argentine Memories
Rating: 3 Stars
All Worlds Video. Produced by Mike Donner and Jean Rivera. Written and directed by Marco Antonio. Videography by Mike Donner and Marco Antonio. Starring Marco Antonio, Jean Rivera, Javier Duran, Caetano, Fabio, Maxi, Gustavo, and Gian Dolce.
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Argentine art objects Marco Antonio and Jean Rivera, filled with nostalgia for those golden summers in the countryside near Buenos Aires, lie sprawled on a bed in L.A. They watch a videotape created by compatriot Javier Duran to assuage their homesickness. The tape shows young Argentineans burbling with masculine comradely spirit in some unidentified down-home rec room. There are four sex sequences that seem to be fantasies conjured up by the video. Finally, aroused, the expatriate pair make love.

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Antonio and Rivera, who stumbled into the L.A. porn world a couple of years ago, have begun collaborating behind the scenes, with mixed results. Argentine Memories is slightly more accomplished than director Antonio's debut production, Argentine Tangle, but its sense of place is less vivid. (In Argentine Tangle, the reasons to regret leaving Argentina were right up front.) Some segments are accompanied by Latin pop, others by music of the sort Yanqui public television plays during fundraising breaks. If, as seems likely, Antonio and Rivera are trying to emulate William Higgins's recent music-drenched European videos, they need to be told that submerging scenes in classical music doesn't necessarily work for Higgins, either.

Most of the physical business is well choreographed, though Duran's picnic-on-the-Pampas three-way with Gustavo and Maxi is disappointingly dutiful and slow. The first sex scene, between Caetano and Gian Dolce, feels like a clip from another, tackier production. The best sexual moments occur between real-life partners Antonio and Rivera, whose off-screen rapport reads beautifully on camera. The casting commendably avoids Latin-stud stereotypes: Antonio and Rivera themselves could pass for French aesthetes.