This little flick has it's own reality! It's a mix of cheerful hopefulness and sad truth.

Three young teenagers, two boys and one girl, who don't exactly fit in with the other students their age, befriend one another and develop a close bond. Lorenzo is naturally positive, happy, and pays no mind to the other classmates who reject him. Antonio is an ace basketball player but emotionally damaged by his brothers death. Blu is her own person and secure in her decisions and behavior. These three find one another and their friendship brings light into their lives.

All is well until their sexual desires enter the picture and their relationships begin to fracture. Antonio is still very insecure and cannot break his need to be accepted by his peers. His damaged emotional self-image turns the happy threesome upside-down. The story has two endings the real one and the idealized one that Lorenzo and Blu would have preferred.

Seen at the Movies That Matter film festival 2017 in The Hague. Disappointing, storytelling-wise as well as how the fantasies of main protagonists were visualized. The clearest example of the latter is Lorenzo's arrival at his new school. We see him drop his backpack and dance his way into the building with the other pupils applauding. Another example, not much better than the former, can be found in Lorenzo's dialogues with his dead brother.

Plot and developments overall are not involving, and as such not as moving as the film makers apparently had hoped for. The composition of the threesome is a bit artificial, seemingly only setup to expose and thus emphasize their differences, their sole binding factor being that all three were treated as outsiders by their peers.

The story around Blu does not receive the attention it deserves. It leaves unclear why she still hangs out with one of the guys who filmed her while she was sedated and seduced by him and his three friends, something that appears later to be a full-fledged gang-rape, less consented than Blu herself tells everyone repeatedly. The rest of the school has earmarked her as "easy to get", words like sl*t are graffiti-d on walls all over the area. The footage itself was not made public, yet the seduction was known all along by other means (gossip?? hearsay??). Near the end of the movie when Blu happens to see the whole footage and learns what really happened with her and the foursome "friends", it triggers her to take formal steps against them, together with her parents and eventually involving the police. How and why that developed is covered in only a few minutes, hence left us wondering.

When our three main protagonists are taking a swim at a deserted place outside, Lorenzo makes his move to Antonio and touches him, something that Antonio apparently does not take well and he leaves without saying anything, despite Blu calling after him to learn why he left. I cannot reveal further developments, in fear of spoilers. But in the end, also somewhat artificial, we see the very same scene where Lorenzo touches Antonio, with a totally different outcome, leaving us outguessing how it will develop. This is where the movie ends with showing the final credits, leaving us wondering again.

All in all, I feel a bit lost because of the generally positive reviews, by non-critics as well as critics. None of them even touches the objections I outlined above. In other words, this is a minority viewpoint. Most probably, my age (67) will be deemed the culprit.

First, let me say that I will have to disagree with the people who have raved about this movie. It was not horrible but I don't think it was as good as some have made it out to be. Having said that, allow me to clarify that there is only one ending. Antonio shoots Lorenzo. The "other" ending is simply the way Blu tells her story. Remember she's writing to her older self and she tells her that if only things had been different (hence the scene where Antonio reacts differently to Lorenzo's advances),all the tragedy could have been avoided and things would have turned out much better. It's how she tells her older self to try and spread tolerance and education to avoid what actually happened when she was young.

Now, for the things I didn't like. For a movie with such a macabre ending, I thought the musical numbers were not the best way to develop the film. I also didn't really like how some themes were overdeveloped while others were given very little attention or resolved in 2 minutes. Antonio was obviously a troubled teen with psychological problems so won't excuse in any way his actions but I think the movie could also have made a point of explaining to gay teens (I'm gay myself, so this is not a homophobic remark) that coming on to another guy by making physical advances is simply not something to be done lightly and most times there are consequences. Lorenzo paid a very high price for his actions and although they didn't warrant his death, it would be good to point out that if he had simply talked to Antonio instead of trying to put his hand down his pants things might have been totally different.

The acting is quite amateurish at times, with bad transitions between scenes, dialogue that at times seems out of a book, and characters that are sometimes stereotyped in ways we've seen in movies several thousand times before