Writer and director Julián Hernández's latest film, Broken Sky, offers a minimalist, experimental treatment of an otherwise commonplace tale of young gay love. This is one queer film that takes itself very, very seriously — even at the risk of collapsing under the weight of its own artistic aspirations.

Broken Sky is set at a university campus in Mexico, where two Mexican college students, Gerardo, (Miguel Angel Hoppe) and Jonás (Fernando Arroyo) meet and fall in love. The two soon move in together. Theirs is a love affair of youthful innocence, passion and bliss, until one night at the local disco, Jonás falls for another guy.

Jonás loses interest in Gerardo despite Gerardo's repeated attempts to keep their relationship alive. Dejected, Gerardo moves out and finds a new boyfriend on campus: Sérgio (Alejandro Rojo). The once fickle and flirtatious Jonás now regrets losing Gerardo and tries to convince him to come back, but Gerardo decides to stick with Sérgio, and now it's Jonás' turn to cry.

Stylistically, Broken Sky is a kind of homage to the silent film genre. Its story is told with almost no dialogue. Intermittently, some sparse, poetic text appears onscreen to accompany the film's visuals. For example, during the film's early scenes in which Gerardo and Jonás court each other, the following lines appear, a few words at a time, at the bottom of the screen:

I promise to be — the blue sky
the lonely street — the fresh April air
I will protect you — from half-living
from feeling the dense — fog of the end …

Newcomers Miguel Angel Hoppe and Fernando Arroyo make the most of their roles as star-crossed lovers. Both are physically beautiful to behold, and as largely silent actors, they manage to convey a wide variety of emotions without uttering any words. As gay lovers, they turn in fluid, mournful, romantically charged performances. Their love scenes are believably passionate without being pornographic.

Facial expressions and body language are everything in this film — so much so that after a while, it takes on the look of an adagio. As with the symbolic movements found in tango, flamenco, apache and even bullfighting, Broken Sky exudes deep, dark, mythic expressions of sexual drama, even though it's only the story of a brief college love affair.

The film displays on-screen the ingredients of a gay love relationship with a kind of morbid detail. Moments of infatuation, sex, overbearing possessiveness, lovers' quarrels and rejection are obsessed over by Hernández's camera. This lavish cinematic tunnel vision results in a haunting, magnified introspection on love. Everyone in Broken Sky — the cast, the director and even the audience, is made to seem like a hypnotized voyeur.

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