One of my all time favorites.

Fresh and Exciting

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I've seen so few good 'gay-themed' films. "La partida" aka "The Last Match" is one of the great ones. From the director of another excellent film, "Clandestinos," we have a rare instance where gay characters aren't portrayed as ridiculous, clown-like stereotypes. The leads don't wear eyeliner, and they aren't go-go boys who hang out in bars, and they don't have drug problems. Instead we have two leads who are just regular people, who discover that they have a mutual attraction for each other. Living in Cuba, with a wife that supports him financially, Reinier is an avid futbol player, who is hoping to go pro, as a way of escaping a country where freedom does not exist. He also wants to escape the poverty that envelops him and his family and mates. So desperate for a way out, his own mother pushes him towards male prostitution, hoping that her young son will marry a foreigner, and thus give them all a way out of Cuba. Likewise Yosvani is in an unhappy relationship with a female, also supporting him. The two guys figure out that they like each other more than they should, and soon it turns into love. From that point everything and everyone seems set on destroying what the two have found with each other.This is a sad story. It is romantic in a way that so few movies of this genre are. The two lead actors are great, especially Milton Garcia as Yosvani. He loves his friend in this intense way that we all wish we could be loved. His eyes are so sad, as though he knows from the start, that the love story will never have a happy ending. But he doesn't give up. This guy was brilliant.Director Antonio Hens has a way of showing his audience a different kind of gay world, one that is free of dumb stereotypes. In "Clandestinos" we have a gay terrorist. And here we have a guy who plays football, and a street thug, who just happen to be attracted to the same sex. Films like this are so important, in that they teach the uninformed that gays are not "freaks," but in many cases completely typical men and women that just happen to be drawn to the same sex. As long as they are portrayed as silly stereotypes, the hatred and prejudice will be perpetuated. We need more cinema like this. It's a great love story, well-made and beautifully written. I recommend this movie as well as "Clandestinos," for people looking for something different.

Being a teenager or young is difficult in all modern societies. And being gay adds some extra speculations and fears. I am gay and I am from Argentina, and in the mid nineties (when I was 25) I was fortunate to travel alone to Cuba on vacations. There, I met a Cuban young man of the same age as me, "by chance" in the streets of La Havana, and I had a little romance with him during my staying in this beautiful and romantic country. Due to this, I could live some of the situations portrayed in the film and I can say in that sense it is rather accurate. In Cuba there is not classical "poverty". They lack of desirable capitalist goods (like electronics or branded shoes, etc) but they are not hungry or without health care, education, etc. And the means to obtain these goods is through the tourists from Europe and Latin America. Well, the weather is hot all the year long, the same as the people doing things outside their houses until very late in the night. And Cubans are very romantic people in general. Well, my "Cuban boyfriend" lived with his family there. And he was openly gay. He (as the one in the film) presented me to his parents and brothers, the second day after we met. Well, the economic situation of the country (little communist island commercially blocked by its neighbor the superpower with the supportive superpower recently disappeared) took us to an uneven relationship (I had the dollars to spend), though not so much because my origin, age, job, etc.. But thanks to him, many things we did were done using "services and fares for Cubans" (not the ones for tourists). My country and specially my city is rather open to gay people, since those years. and I perceived a similar "air" in La Havanna. OK, There was not "gay dance clubs", but we went to dance to ordinary places and we danced together only taking care of not to kiss each other in public but we did it in familiar places. Well, this is my context to evaluate the film from there I feel it was well exposed by the script and director. In this case, both characters are young men, supposedly heterosexual, living and being maintained by their respective girlfriends' family, who fell in love of each other. The end of the film could be in the way it is or being more or less tragic. For me, the value of this movie is to have transporting me back to the Cuba I have known.

There is no question this film is a brilliant achievement, yet it posed some large issues for me. First, it was filmed in Cuba and that really was a shock because of the U.S. boycott on all things Cuban which has existed for decades and which I have never really understood. Let's not forget that President Kennedy was killed specifically because of U.S Cuban policy which at the time was to assassinate Castro and destroy communism in Cuba. How we can justify the complex relationship we have with Communist China and still boycott Communist Cuba is a conundrum to say the least. The other issue for me with this film was the fact that I was under the distinct impression that tragic gay love stories were passé and something that was better left to a previous era. This tragic gay love story for all its modern aspects still smacks of something from a lost age and that did dilute the impact of the story for me. However, there is no denying that on many levels this film is brilliant and should be part of any serious film collection on this genre.

I did tick the 'spoilers' box, but it doesn't seem to be showing, so: Spoilers apply!I don't know what the legal status of homosexuality is in Cuba, but 'La Partida' is set in Havana and tells the tale of Reinier, a young father who pays for his taste in new clothes by turning tricks on the seafront at night. By day he plays football on some waste ground with a bunch of mates. One of those mates is Yosvani, who makes his living by working in the import business run by his fiancée's thuggish father. A drunken kiss from Reinier one night confuses Yosvani - he's repelled by the excesses of the seafront rent boys, but is unable to resist starting an affair with Reinier.The friend who watched this film with me pointed out that gay dramas often end with one of the protagonists dying - and so it is here, with one of our boys not alive as the end credits roll. For many film-makers, it seems, the only way for a gay romance to end is fatally! But apart from that this is an engrossing film: not so much for the romance, which follows predictable film lines, but because of the fact it is set in Cuba: how accurate is its portrayal of poverty there I am not qualified to judge, but given the self-imposed Castro regime isn't brave enough to allow free and fair elections I suspect it's fairly accurate. As for the acting, the two young leads do not disgrace themselves: Milton García as Yosvani is especially good in portraying the journey from macho tough guy to bewildered dumped lover. So this is definitely worth watching, at least once.