Año bisiesto (Leap Year) is a 2010 Mexican chamber film by Australian-Mexican writer-director Michael Rowe about violent sex that never really leaves one room. Freelance journalist Laura, played by Mónica del Carmen, lives an isolated grind in a seedy apartment, bringing men home from nightclubs and never letting any of them stay a second night — until she meets the quiet, hard-to-read Arturo (Gustavo Sánchez Parra). What follows is an intense, violent sexual relationship tracked across a leap-year February. For BDSM and power-sex viewers this is art-house SM, not a commercial kink feature: two bodies, one calendar, and a camera that does not look away.
One apartment, one leap-year February
Almost the entire picture is shot in that single seedy room. Laura is twenty-five, a freelance journalist who barely goes out except to pick men up. The nights are interchangeable until Arturo. The film watches the pair’s relationship evolve rather than cutting away to a wider city. As days pass, Laura crosses dates off a calendar and slowly hands Arturo pieces of a secret past. The month on the wall is February in a leap year, so the title is not decoration: the extra day is part of the trap. The psychodrama is the sex and the waiting around the sex.
How much of the violence was real
Rowe originally wanted the on-screen violence and sexual acts to be real. During the shoot Gustavo Sánchez Parra argued for simulating some of it, on the grounds that filmmaking is about making people believe the acts are real. Rowe shifted. He later confirmed that only two scenes in the finished film are unsimulated. The rest of the brutality is performance. That still leaves an art-house picture whose central subject is consensual-looking violence inside a sexual relationship, played in a space too small to hide in.
Cannes, the festival circuit, and twelve Mexican prints
The film premiered in France at the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight on 17 May 2010, then went to a public release about a month later. Rowe’s home country, Australia, saw it next at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Other festivals followed: Toronto, Athens, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mar del Plata in Argentina, Hong Kong, and Japan’s Latin Beat Film Festival, among others. Producers said the film sold in more than thirty countries. In Mexico it played commercial theaters on only twelve copies and drew close to 50,000 spectators — a tiny print run next to large productions that go out with as many as two hundred copies. For a one-room movie about violent sex, that is a surprisingly wide afterlife.
