Transpiring over a languid summer by the sea in Argentina, The Astronaut Lovers is a breezy comedy about Pedro (Javier Orán) and Maxi (Lautaro Bettoni), two childhood friends reunited years later as young men. Openly gay, Pedro is amused by Maxi’s curiosity about “gay shit” and his playful “straight dude” flirtations… but things kick up a notch when Maxi tries to make his ex-girlfriend jealous by saying Pedro is his boyfriend. Treating it like a jovial roleplaying game, Pedro starts to lose sight of what’s real and what’s fantasy.

There’s maybe no other contemporary director who has chronicled and surveyed masculinity, masculine desires, and connections between men on film with such consistency and endless curiosity as Argentine director Marco Berger (Absent, Frameline35). His latest furthers these anthropological fascinations. Harkening back to the buoyant playfulness of his early work like Plan B (Frameline34), Berger updates the tired “straight boy crush” subgenre for a new fluid generation.