In the absorbing, offbeat homo-buddy adventure Hidden Away (TLA) two attractive teen boys, Rafa and Ibra, at first find a flirtatious bond through food fights, water polo and playful wrestling. Then (bam!) they're in love, an attachment that shocks both friends and family. Spanish director Mikel Rueda makes the most of the sturdy talents of his adolescent leads. German Alcarazu was 15 when he played the increasingly lovesick Rafa, and Adil Koukouh gives a subtler turn as the enigmatic Moroccan lad who fears expulsion from Spain because of his illegal migrant status.
Filmmaker Rueda pushes the envelope artistically. The story arc is fractured, with key scenes from the first act repeated for emotional effect towards the story's finale. What could be irritating or confusing in a longer narrative, here is tolerable, even endearing. Illustrative of what the filmmakers and their humpy cast pull off are a couple of scenes. First, Rafa tries to avoid his close hetero friend Guille's urging that he date a teen girl named Marta.
Guille: "The other day Marta asked me if you wanted to hang out again."
Rafa: "Look, Guille, I don't like Marta. I just don't. Forget it, man."
"Take it easy. No need to explain."
"Thanks."
In the very next scene the filmmakers flip the story and show Rafa's ongoing involvement in getting his boy crush Ibra to normalize his status and thus obtain Spanish citizenship. There's a montage of scenes of the boys eating, bowling, playing water polo and other European adolescent male pursuits. Hidden Away shows the subtle differences in how one's place on the Kinsey Scale is measured in the new Europe, as opposed to in the more repressed American teen scene.
While the boys don't truly "get it on," their various forms of foreplay get the job done, so that we greedily anticipate more than we get, yet are not disappointed. Rafa and Ibra's lips hover near the point of frisson a couple of times, allowing our imaginations to fill in the blanks. The filmmakers also make the most of what will be, for many viewers, unfamiliar locales of Northern Spain in and around the ancient Basque city of Bilbao.
Kudos particularly to Kenneth Oribe's camerawork, the nuanced editing of Chema Alba, and a young cast that just went with the flow against imaginative backgrounds like underwater polo scenes and amazing vistas from onboard a mountain cable car.