El Desenlace, directed by Juan Pinzás, screened today for journalists at the Unibanco Arteplex and will play at the Mostra Internacional. It's Dogme-certified (#31), and while the film has the dense dialogue and no-frills approach you might expect, the skeletons inevitably dragged out of the characters' closets are so fabulous that I often forgot I was watching a Dogme film. Its sense of humor softened such a typically confrontational aesthetic with great success (not to mention the colors looked great -- congrats to cinematographers Gerardo Moschioni and Tote Trenas).

The premise of El Desenlace is ostensibly about a group meeting at a hotel to discuss the production of a new movie, to be adapted by a vain producer, a machista director, and his troubled girlfriend from a novel by a closeted writer. Along for the ride are an ageing reporter with big breast implants and a bitter gay magazine editor, but the film adaptation in question is really just a thin excuse for the characters to attack each other in a variety of absurd fashions. A mysterious parapalegic haunts the hallways while we learn that one of the protagonists is really a female Oedipus, amidst plenty of back-stabbing and bed-hopping.

Such melodrama saves El Desenlace from feeling like a sadistic actors' workshop, and while the characters are at times too brutal (and the justifications for their behavior bit too tedious), the film thankfully knows not to take itself too seriously. It's a perfect marriage -- the raw, handheld Dogme approach combined with the camp of a soap opera, giving the story a freshness that kept me curious and entertained.