In Voley — the new film written, directed and starred in by Martín Piro-yansky — Nicolás (Piroyansky), Pilar (Inés Efrón), Cata (Vera Spinetta), Manuela (Violeta Urtizberea), and Nacho (Ricardo “Chino” Darín) have been close friends since their teenage years. Now, they are in their mid-twenties and are still friends, although they see life with different eyes. As New Year’s Eve approaches, Nicolás invites them all to celebrate it at his family’s summer house in Tigre. So off they go, with one unexpected guest: Belén (Justina Bustos), a friend of Manuela’s ever since childhood.
One more point to consider: there’s a love affair as well, for Nacho is actually Cata’s boyfriend. Soon enough, there will be more sexual allure in the air, as each one in the party goes for their object of desire. And to think that once they were just innocent friends... But it’s time for unforeseen urges.
As far as light-weighted youngster’s comedies, Voley does meet most of the genre’s expectations. It has about a dozen of amusing scenes that unfold effortlessly, it’s rather well acted by the entire cast (special praise goes to Piroyansky and Urtizberea), it keeps a swift pace from beginning to end, the dialogue is well written and many times witty, and most of the jokes and punchlines are delivered with good timing. If you are to take it a string of anecdotes and episodes that nonchalantly draw a portrayal of these youngsters (including drinking alcohol, smoking marihuana and snorting cocaine, all of it in small doses) Voley does the trick — even when three or four jokes are plain dumb, and not in a good way.
And yet halfway through it, let alone once you’ve reached its ending, you can feel Voley needs a stronger screenplay: one that can hold all these anecdotes together and join them into a picture of a larger scope. A screenplay with a central plot in which the subplots may converge and say something else other than what they say separately. But since that’s not the case, no wonder why, you may feel you’ve been shortchanged. And while the characters are not heavily stereotyped, they do not have many personal traits either. A couple of them, Belén and Cata are in fact underwritten.
So in a sense, Voley misses on a good opportunity to shine in a genre tackled not that often in local cinema. Yet, it does have its undeniable assets as well.
