I have a soft spot for films centered around poker, so I was intrigued by Luna's Game, a Spanish drama centering around Luna, a woman (Ana Torrent) who has dedicated her life to becoming a top professional poker player, despite (or perhaps because of?) a tragedy in her childhood that stemmed directly from her father's involvement in gambling. But the question that's ultimately left unanswered is what this movie is trying to accomplish.

Luna's Game (original title: Juego de Luna) shoots for a sophisticated structure, with various flashbacks to Luna's childhood and girlhood woven into the main present-day story, which features Luna playing at the highest stakes she has ever dealt with. Yet this structure really only creates the superficial appearance of complexity to a film that really doesn't have a lot to say. It really doesn't take long for Luna's Game to establish the basic background information about its main character, Luna, and the handful of supporting characters, at which point I was waiting for the next development, or at least some indication of where the film was taking me.

That indication never came. Luna's Game meanders through the rest of its story (making its 96-minute running time feel closer to three hours in subjective time), showing us how Luna finds out a bit more about her past, and how she contemplates changing her way of life, thanks to a new romance. But these story threads remain oddly uninvolving; there's no sense that they are part of an overall narrative, or even that they're particularly important to the character. There's not even the justification that Luna's character is too cold and controlled to display her emotions, because in several scenes she clearly has a strong emotional reaction to particular events. It's simply that the film never puts the pieces together to tell a consistent story.

Eventually a climax of sorts occurs, but it's disastrous in two ways. The first is that we still don't particularly care about what's happening, so the struggles of Luna as she gets into trouble and tries to claw her way out of it just don't resonate. The second flaw, though, is the one that really boggled my mind. In the final poker showdown, the dramatic high point (at least in theory) of the entire film, there's a fundamental mistake. I even had to rewind and check it again just to make sure I wasn't misreading something, but it's true: the film claims that a full house is beaten by a flush (not a straight flush, just a regular flush). That's a mistake that even a casual poker player wouldn't make... how could it end up in a film that centers around poker, and even worse, how could it end up in the most important hand of the film? (And the camera shows the cards clearly, so there's no chance of a mistake there.) It may sound trivial, but honestly, in a film about a professional poker player, it's rather disconcerting to see an error like that, and it does rather spoil the effect of the end of the film.

The DVD

Luna's Game is packaged in a transparent keepcase, with the nice touch that the cover insert is double-sided. The default (at least in the copy I got) is the English cover, but you can flip it over to get the cover in Spanish. The first menu screen also gives viewers the option to select menus in English or Spanish.

Video

Luna's Game appears in an anamorphically enhanced widescreen transfer, at its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1. Excessively heavy contrast is the main fault here, keeping the image from being any better than on the high end of average. A lot of detail ends up being lost in the film's many dimly lit scenes, with any dark areas looking completely black. Luna's Game is, overall, a very subdued film in terms of its palette, but the rest of the colors that do appear in the film look natural. The print is clean, but some edge enhancement does show up. On the bright side, the English subtitles are optional.

Audio

Luna's Game has a decent Dolby 5.1 Spanish (Castilian) soundtrack; there's not much use of surround sound in this mainly dialogue-centered film, but the track sounds clean and balanced. The musical part of the soundtrack is attractive and is generally balanced well with the rest of the track. A Spanish Dolby 2.0 track is also included. The English subtitles are optional.

Extras

The main special feature is an eleven-minute set of deleted scenes. Cast filmographies are also included, along with trailers for Luna's Game, The Girl of Your Dreams, Common Wealth, Shanghai Spell, Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella, and Move Over Mrs. Markham.

Final thoughts

If you are fond of movies about playing poker, Luna's Game is probably worth a rental. As a drama to stand on its own, though, it doesn't really work, as there's no real narrative power here, and it doesn't work particularly well as a character study, either. Rent it.