Wolfe announced this past
week that the domestic DVD debut of Swiss filmmaker Marcel Gisler’s
award-winning Mario will take place on Oct. 30.
The film played European
markets — with a mix of festival showings — earlier this year and then began
working the domestic film festival circuit to both critical praise and award
accolades (winner Best International Feature at FilmOut San Diego in June of
this year).
Gisler, who has scored
both critical and commercial success with Rosie (aka: A Man, His Lover and His Mother)
and the documentary Electroboy, turns his filmmaking talents to the high-pressure
world of professional sports, which becomes all the more so when sexual
orientation enters the equation.
Mario (Max Hubacher — The
Captain, The Foster Boy), a handsome lad from the rural German-speaking
(Swiss-German) area of Switzerland, is something of a star on his Under-21
soccer (football) club (think: minor league for professional soccer). He has dreams of turning that talent into a
pro career, made all the more urgent by his father (played by Jürg Plüss), who
missed his chance.
After an initial set-up
to showcase Mario’s talent, the team’s coach announces that a new recruit from
Germany will be joining the team, Leon Saldo (Aaron Altaras — Not
All Were Murderers, The Invisibles), who will be sharing quarters with
Mario (traveling to and from the countryside requires that he stay nearby).
After some awkward
moments a relationship develops between Mario and the sultry Leon, which for
the sake of their football careers must be kept secret (issues with the team’s
sponsors, drugs and fan disapproval bubble just beneath the surface as
career-killers). Indeed, when rumors do
begin to surface, Mario takes extraordinary measures to tamp them down by
recruiting his childhood friend, Jenny (played by Jessy Moravec, who previously
co-starred with Hubacher in writer/director Juri Steinhart’s Let
the Old Folks Die) to be his girlfriend. She has no problem with that as she as
always had a crush on Mario.
Without giving too much
away, filmmaker Marcel Gisler maneuvers the story well-away from the cliché
elements that oft-times clutter such relationships and flushes out the
characters. Mario, gets his chance,
despite the rumors and is off to Germany with Jenny in tow (he has made his
“bed,” so to speak, but can he live with it?), while Leon seemingly tosses it
all away by not bending to the hypocrisy of it all.
Mario is presented in German/Swiss-German with English
subtitles.
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