BROKEN SKY If you’ve ever observed a couple in public staring impassively at one another and wondered what the story was behind their gaze, you might be the ideal audience for writer-director Julián Hernández’s meditative, almost silent romantic drama. The thin plot concerns two university students, Gerardo (Miguel Ángel Hoppe) and Jonás (Fernando Arroyo), who share an instant sexual attraction and quickly become madly infatuated with one another as only the young can. Although we can safely guess that their love will disintegrate as quickly as it blossomed, Hernández doesn’t display any wised-up cynicism toward his characters. In fact, he audaciously honors their doomed affair as the stuff of grand tragedy. Decorating the movie’s corners with Arturo Villela’s mournful score, Hernández shoots most of Broken Sky without dialogue, and the result is a film dripping with melodrama and pretension. For a while, the stylistic choices work: Without judgment, Hernández and his actors superbly capture what your first adult romantic relationship feels like — how its thick dreamstate blocks out the world around it, cultivating emotional instability, irrationality and the inherent mystery of trying to understand the person you’re sleeping with. But at 140 minutes, Broken Sky’s experimental novelty can only hold you for so long. Hernández purposely leaves his characters nondescript so as to universalize their situation, but it’s hard to swoon over these lovebirds when we have no hint of their inner lives. All in all, a striking, memorable disappointment — not unlike so many first loves. (Sunset... More >>>