Ferny & Luca (2021) - Andrew Infante

Quite intimate and incisive. I've seen people mention how this film encapsulates a time and place, yet Ferny & Luca transcends any type of coming-of-age motif. It's a film that seems to understand both the internal and external complexities that come with living, loving, and connection and the internal struggle between the mind and the heart. The low-fi aesthetic grounds it in realism and the New York setting projects a cultural, spatial specificity. but Ferny & Luca is also imbued with larger existential aspects that transcend the material. It seems to understand that growing up is a social fabrication, and feelings can be hard to decipher internally, let alone the difficulty often associated with expressing them. Emotion is illogical, yet logic in itself is often nothing but an abstraction constructed by the social. Devoid of any type of formal asceticism, Ferny & Luca has a vibrancy to its film language, it's playful and emotive, and at its best - particularly in the back half - it deploys more avant-garde arrangements which evince the underlying spirituality in its dissection of relationships and the give-and-take both internally and externally with oneself and others that define them. Also, when Ferny refers to The Matrix on tv as "Kung Fu Shit, I don't know", I cackled.