Martin (Hache)

1997 "Don't work. Don't want to study. I'm not a bum. I want to be free."
7.6| 2h14m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 30 September 1997 Released
Producted By: TVE
Country: Spain
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
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An emotionally distant father attempts to reconnect with the son he abandoned. After his estranged son tries to commit suicide, Argentine expat Martín brings the troubled teen to live with him in Spain. But though Martín tries to reach out to his son, he's unable to bond with anyone in his life -- including his much-younger girlfriend

Genre

Drama

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Director

Adolfo Aristarain

Production Companies

TVE

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Martin (Hache) Audience Reviews

CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!
Jeanskynebu the audience applauded
Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
The_late_Buddy_Ryan Vintage coming-of-age drama from Argentina, though it's largely set in Spain. The setup is quite promising: Martin, an Argentine screenwriter who lives in Madrid and a distant, withholding dad if there ever was one, reluctantly takes charge of his 19-year-old son, Hache (pron. "Aché," the equivalent of "Junior"), after the latter unwisely mixes whiskey with a street drug called "dog" and ends up in the hospital. Martin, solitary and self-absorbed by nature, seems to be at a loss, but Martin's friend and collaborator Dante, a hedonistic gay actor, and Martin's clingy, coke-addled girlfriend Alicia (the fabulous Cecilia Roth of "All About My Mother") are delighted to have a handsome new playmate. Trouble comes (for the characters—and the viewer, IMHO) when the scene shifts to a luxurious villa in Almería, in the south (not unlike the modernist pueblo where Bardot and Michel Piccoli hole up in Godard's "Contempt"). An evening of drinking, doping and cynical philosophizing, presumably for the benefit of the directionless young Hache, has tragic consequences that seemed, to me at least, both predictable and contrived. Despite a charmingly redemptive final scene in which Hache finally comes into his own, the film never recaptured my attention after that. A couple of our Spanish Facebook friends really talked this one up; part of the problem may be that the subtitles can't keep pace with the dialogue, which, in these melodramatic final scenes, just comes off as pretentious and banal
joalogon Aristarain strikes back again.After the beautiful "Un lugar en el mundo", he gives us this film which is nearly a theater work.He repeats with two beasts of Argentinian's cinema. Cecilia Roth (whom half the Spanish talking world has been in love with), and one of the five best actors of all times, FEDERICO LUPPI.It's impossible not to think about my own father seeing his personage, with this overwhelming love for his son and yet unable to communicate with. Maybe I've seen it over five times, and still I cry each time when Federico Luppi stands on the balcony talking about the desperation of life after the idea of loosing his son misunderstood. It's the nearest you will get to understand fatherly love if you don't yet have a baby.The plot is banal, and the filming nothing complicated, just a camera fixed to let all the attention to actors........but then, the hit. What an acting!!!!!. You hardly are going to see something similar, Luppi is a monster, a giant, he fills the screen with a strength rarely seen away.A must see in Spanish, where you can really judge their beautiful work. The pity is that it would surprise me a lot if the titles are able to reproduce all that complicated and quick talking.
alejandrosl This film is overrated, yes. The actors do properly their work, it's true, but the script and the realization are poor. The most of the times the story becomes unbelievable, and I miss dramatism. An example is the suicide of Cecilia Roth, I can't believe a suicide like that, so cold and nor impulsive. And the dialogues are pedant, in situations like the related ones no one can't talk like that. I'm not agree with people that blame Juan Diego Botto, in my humble opinion is the best actor in the film, but his labour and the labour of the rest of the crew is not enough to get a good film. I can only rate 2 over 10.
Ian-67 Martin (Hache) is one of the best films because the plot is about feelings, about the relationship between humans. Real people listening, learning and talking with real people.Excellent characters with a lot to tell, to listen. A plot that we may live every day and we didn't notice, a plot that shakes to the point to think why you really are alive...If you miss this, you will lose two hours of reflection.