It's been 24 hours since I finished this, and I still haven't quite come out of what it made me feel, it was that close, that lived in. This is so beautifully observed and quietly intelligent in the way that lets desire, class, memory, and adolescence bleed into each other without ever explaining any of it. A film about the stories you build around yourself, the mythologies you inherit, and the moment those stories crack open to reveal something uglier and truer underneath. It felt both timeless and completely of this moment, especially in the way it treats platonic love and the things we romanticize to make sense of who we are. Toni's story about his grandparents is the sharpest thing here, a life built around a myth that turns out to be incomplete, and the devastation of learning that the stories keeping you together were always partial. This explains how the characters don't understand what's happening to them as it happens, and the film never pretends they should. At two and a half hours it earns every minute, and when it breaks your heart it does so without warning, which might be the most honest thing a film about youth can do.
