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Amos Lassen wrote on 12/27/2011:

“Smoker’s Only”

Argentinean Ennui

Amos Lassen

Boredom in Argentina is the focus of “Smoker’s Only” and it is characterized by Cecilia Bangolea as Reni. Reni is a rootless, thin and other worldly Bohemian who is in her early 20’s. She sings with a rock band that has had some success but she has reached the point in her life that she cannot decide what her next movie should be. When the band kicks her out and she is at her most vulnerable, she meets Andres (Leonardo Brezciki), a male prostitute as he is turning a trick in an ATM station. She is hypnotized by what she sees and she approaches Andres and the two become fast friends. She also learns from Andres, who claims to be bisexual, that being paid for sex is a power trip for him and feeling love for him, decides to join him and the two begin hustling as a pair.
The two are outsiders who enter the underworld where shady dealings are the rule and divorce from the mainstream is the way of life, What we get here is a film that needs more character development; we just do not get to now Reni and Andres and if we would learn more about them, we would probably be drawn into the film. Just as they were set apart from society was I set apart from the film. Made in the stream of consciousness style, we see some very strange dream sequences which really added nothing to the plot. The film looks at Reni’s poor choice of falling for a hustler with a kind of sad seriousness and the dark side of Argentina is hardly shown to us. The film is a look at the struggle between love and sex and it reaches the same tired and old conclusion that sex minus love has no meaning even if it is profitable. Even though Andres feels liberated, we see that this is really not much more than a cover for his gear of genuine and emotional commitment.

Baccho wrote on 07/23/2008:

I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. North-americans call Rio a gay Mecca. Brazilians love to quote statistics, saying: 10% of males claim to be homosexual, 10% hetero, 75% bisexual, and the other five are just liers. I will watch ALL Brazilian and South American films from countries with similar cultures. This one let me down with such a poor story, poor cinematography, and no worthwhile treatment of any cultural-sexual issue that I did not watch it to the end and gave it away to a "gay, north-american" friend to practice his spanish. Killed a few bugs with it too. njoy! tchau! beijões e abraços! seu baccho! entendeu?