Admittedly at times to the point of bad taste, Spanish, and European, print media, television and cinema are much more open about sexual reality, nudity and profanity than are their American and UK counterparts. This applies to political life, as well, where the former's John Profumos and Gary Harts are not ruined by escándalos de faldas, literally "skirt scandals," and porn star Ilona Staller, nicknamed Ciccolina, became a naturalized Italian and was elected to Parliament, whose sessions she occasionally attended naked.

The Catalonian Cesc Gay's Nico and Dani is a franker, more graphic Verano Azul, the latter an excellent, immensely successful award series produced and aired by Spain's national television, RTVE, in the mid 1980s. Set in a Mediterranean resort town, Verano Azul centered around a group of very young teens, a twenty-somethingish teacher and a retired fisherman who lived in a grounded boat. Their adventures were only occasionally (and innocently) amorous, and there was national mourning at elderly fisherman Chanquete's death and the August breakup as families returned home and the kids went back to school.

At seventeen, Gay's two protagonists are just enough older to be on the threshold of leaving childhood behind, troubled by sex, eager (in Nico's case) to lose virginity at once and yet inexperienced and confused by their own longings and by the complex, often hypocritical, codes of an adult world.
Mirror-framed by Nico's opening arrival at and final departure from the local train station, with Dani starting and ending alone on the platform, the film covers a week-plus during which, parents and older brother away, the two friends have the house to themselves, with only part-time company from Myriam, the sexy lonely Moroccan cook, and Sofia, Dani's pretty and ironic tutor for English classes.

Nico repairs a motorcycle, and the boys watch videos, drink, smoke cigarettes and joints, bicycle and go to the beach, the town, the bars and parties. Most significantly for them, they must confront their own maturity, their changing psyches, bodies and sexuality. They must come to terms with the past and present and with the nature of their relationship to one another. Dani voices his premonition that things would not be the same as the previous summer, and boyish bonding in hunting and fishing (which often returns as male bonding in middle age) is put on hold as Nico actively seeks sexual experience for them with Elena and Berta, two girls also primed to lose innocence and gain experience.

It would spoil the finely told story to reveal more, though the situation is further complicated by the homosexual group centered around Sonia and young novelist Julian, a former pupil and "friend" of Dani's father. Dani and Nico engage in sexual bantering and in the tentative homosexual play that Kinsey reported to be common among adolescents. Homoeroticism is present on one side, but each of the boys must decide his own path to take.

Adapting his film from a stage play, director Cesc has achieved a rewarding balance of sympathy, pathos, humor and realism by coaxing excellent performances from a group of both experienced and debuting actors. Setting and story make plausible an almost claustrophobic emphasis on the two boys, small blonde Dani (Fernando Ramallo) and intense-eyed scrawny Nico (Jordi Vilches). The film's dialogue makes effective use of Spaniards' vibrant mix of profanity and slang (English is duller in this respect, and in any case the subtitles simply cannot do justice).

Despite loose ends such as the unresolved Myriam and a few purposeless mid-film titles, Dani and Nico sensitively pictures what, older now, one knows must be the universal angst of being grown-up yet not grown. Backed by its well selected but unobtrusive mixture of music, the film conveys not only the insecurity and yearning of very young manhood, but also captures the texture of a type of summer town and way of life common to southern Europe.

That the boys' drama is delicately played out in Spain is fitting, for, almost unknown here beyond the brief flurry of Garci's To Begin Again and Trueba's Belle Epoch and the spectacular but isolated successes of Almodóvar -- whose colorfully kinky Spain is as unrepresentative as is the apocalyptically violent America of Willis and Stallone -- the new generation of Spanish filmmakers is in general building up an excellent and serious cinema.

Based on some of the viewers' laughter and other reactions at points during the New York screening and on the fact that there were protests and walkouts at the critics showing at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival -- where this movie won a Special Award -- it seems that some of the audience missed what it's all about. "In America," mused Marlene Dietrich, "sex is an obsession, in Europe it is a fact of life." Topless beaches or teenagers in bars or profanity is not Cesc's point and ought not to obscure his gentle humor and rare handling of an emotional and important theme. 

(Released by Avatar Films; not rated by MPAA.)