Boystown
In Boystown, Victor (Pablo Puyol,) an enterprising Madrid real estate agent, has found a fail-safe way of securing apartments to turn into condos: murder the occupants. In this case it’s a number of older women who live in the city’s up-and-coming Chueca neighborhood. When they won’t sell, he closes the deal for them. It’s all part of his master plan to turn the neighborhood into a mecca for upwardly mobile gays, similar to Chelsea or the Castro; in short, creating his own Boystown.
What proves to be a snag to his plans occurs when he murders one old lady who wills her property to her neighbors - a working class gay couple Ray (Carlos Fuentes) and Leo (Pepón Nieto,) who when they’re not bickering, are expressing mad passion for each other. Instead of selling the unit to Victor, Ray gives it to his mother - the over-the-top Antonia (Concha Velasco,) who can’t stand Leo and lets him know at every opportunity. Leo, it turns out, is the brunt of numerous jokes.
Also integral to the story is the investigation by a phobia-ridden police inspector Mila (Rosa Maria Sardà) and her seemingly straight-laced son Luis, who can’t make heads or tails of the homicides. Luis’s interest in the case has its own agenda, which leads him into making some investigations into gay culture on his own. (Okay, he turns out to be a total bottom.)
Such are the elements to Juan Flahn’s engaging black comedy that pivots between silly a silly sit-com and a dark thriller - it’s like an episode of "Law and Order" on helium. What makes the film work isn’t so much the thriller elements (we learn the killer’s identity at the onset and the climax is pretty much by the book,) rather it is this quirky group of characters, especially the mother-in-law-from-hell Antonia, played to the hilt by Conca Velasco, and the sad sack Leo, sweetly rendered by Pepón Nieto. Pablo Puyol makes a coolly menacing villain, whose brand of social Darwinism gives this film what little weight it has. "Boystown" is Almodóvar-lite, and is that so bad?
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