I Want You (2012)

Here we have a Spanish romantic drama from 2012, the second installment in the Three Steps Above Heaven collection, and itself a remake of an Italian picture that was in turn drawn from a novel. Hugo, called Hache, returns to Barcelona after two years in London, resumes his illegal street racing, and divides his affections between a new singer named Gin and the old flame Babi. There are motorcycles, there is a beach, there is a scene of attempted sexual assault that the protagonist interrupts with his fists. The film was a commercial juggernaut at home, opening at number one in Spain, and it performed respectably abroad. None of this is in dispute.

The cultural inventory here is remarkably sparse. The cast is uniformly Spanish and white, assembled for reasons of continuity and star power. Women exist to be loved, mourned, or rescued. Race goes unmentioned. The environment, the economy, the body, the mind in its varied configurations: all are left untouched. There is no sermon, no lesson, no finger raised toward the audience. The film wants only to make teenagers feel something intense, and it succeeds on those narrow terms. A viewer arriving with a checklist of contemporary social concerns will find every box empty, and will find the emptiness refreshing or damning depending on temperament.

I confess a certain professional relief. So much of the current output arrives freighted with instruction, and here is a picture that simply wants to be sad and pretty at the same time. It is not a good film, exactly. The dialogue strains, the plot contorts, the ending drowns its hero in symbolism. But it is an honest one about its own appetites. We classify it accordingly, and we move on to the next.