Elena is a very vital girl. She also very sexual. She has had many relationships, but they have never lasted long. The young woman is a dance teacher at an academy and she has to prepare a group of deaf and mute children. This is how she meets Dovydas, who is a sign language interpreter. The attraction between Elena and Dovydas is immediate. “I feel like I’ve known him forever,” she confesses to a friend of hers.
The couple begins to see each other. They go to eat and walk. Elena has the typical doubts of any beginning of a relationship: will she have a partner? Will she like me? The answers are no and yes. Dovydas doesn’t have a girlfriend and Elena loves him. But there is one thing that the boy does not take long to reveal: “I am asexual.” Dovydas is sincere from the first moment.
“I don’t suffer from any physical problem. I’ve explored my sexuality. I’ve gone online, I’ve seen a lot of sexual options, but none of them suit me. I’m simply asexual.” Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradze explores in Slow, a film that hits Spanish screens this Friday, how a sexless relationship can develop.
“I could have created characters who lived an impossible love for other reasons, for example, that he was homosexual or that he was married,” explains the director in an interview with La Vanguardia. “But I was attracted to the idea of ??introducing an asexual character, since his is a natural orientation like any other, but much more unknown.”
Kavtaradze, who studied the subject in depth before writing the script and interviewed asexual people, explains that this situation “affects 1% or 2% of the population and occurs in both men and women.” The director decided that “the asexual would be the male character, because we are more accustomed to seeing very sexualized men in the movies.”
Despite Dovydas’ confession, Elena decides to move forward with the relationship and goes to live with him. It’s the first time she falls in love with her. The couple is in complicity, they have a good time together and try to have sex, although without much success. Are mutual feelings enough for a relationship to work?
Kavtaradze is convinced that “a relationship without sex can work.” “There are couples with physical problems who continue on,” he points out, but Slow is a film and the director and screenwriter wanted to raise a problem “that’s why Elena is a woman very interested in sex,” who believes she can live without practicing it, although She immediately realizes that she misses things, not so much the act itself as “that look men have when they want you.”
For Elena and Dovydas there is no single way out. The couple can choose to move forward as they are. It may open the door for her to have relationships with other men. It can break… To find out how events develop you will have to go see Slow, which screened at the Sundance Festival and is the film chosen by Lithuania as a candidate for the Oscars.
