The film suffers from some ill-judged time jumps and some of the clichés of youth-alienation movies, but the two main actors win us over with their empathetic performances. It begins tentatively and gradually, but by the penultimate reel we have the inevitable montage of the pair enjoying themselves bowling, in the pool, and wandering Bilbao’s scenic spots. This is not to say that the friendship forms quickly on screen. Against the odds Rafa and Ibra not only become acquainted but quickly become fast friends-this in spite of the anti-North African attitude of Rafa’s mates. Completely alone in the world and lacking the benefit of documentation-indeed facing deportation-he is under pressure to sell drugs for money. Ibrahim (Adil Koukouh) is a young Moroccan who has a bed in what is effectively a homeless shelter for immigrants. Rafa (Germán Alcarazu) is a typical enough middle-class teen in Bilbao, focused on his phone and his video games, hanging out with his friends, and generally annoyed by his parents. Yet by the end we find ourselves completely caught up in the desperate friendship of two lads from very different backgrounds. Early on we find ourselves bracing for a sermon, which could have the affect of taking us out of the story. Mikel Rueda’s A escondidas (a better translation would have been In Hiding) gives every indication of being an “issues” movie, and it’s not even content to settle on just one issue. (The other is Niels Arden Oplev’s Kapgang.) Despite the ostensibly similar subject matter, the two movies could not be more different. In an unplanned coincidence, this is the second of two sequential reviews of contrasting 2014 European coming-of-age films about 14-year-olds. (Seen 3 August 1996) A escondidas (Hidden Away) Needless to say, that didn’t stop Hollywood from doing a slick remake starring Richard Gere 24 years later. Godard’s 1959 directing debut was all about style over substance, and the story (to the extent that there was one) is almost incidental. Of course, I am much more sophisticated than that now. And I saw Jean-Paul Belmondo as a second-rate Humphrey Bogart.
She spoke French like I did, and I finally found a character in the movie I could more or less understand! Such was my naïveté at the time that I thought that Film God Jean-Luc Godard’s deliberately erratic editing meant that we were seeing a print that had had the hell spliced out of it. I was pretty much lost until Jean Seberg appeared on screen, hawking The New York Herald Tribune on the Champs Elysées. It was a part of a six-week language and culture immersion in preparation for a year of study at a French university. I first saw Breathless 23 years ago in Pau, France, without the benefit of subtitles.
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