Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 1991
4 out of 4 stars
I have been working my way through Cuarón's filmography ever since, believe it or not, I saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and I was just as pleased with this film, his feature debut, as I had been with his others. It's basically an absurdist sex comedy, at times solidly in the realm of farce, while other times it verges into even stranger or darker territory. Despite the more limited resources and the seemingly less-conducive subject matter, the film looks great and has the same sense of visual inventiveness that one sees in his later films
The protagonist is the usual lothario type, who we meet in the process of fooling around with both his boss and the nurse that works for his amiable neighbor, a good bourgeois doctor who is content to live vicariously through tales of his sexual exploits (although even this leads to problems for both characters on more than one occasion). We also learn that the hero is not particularly concerned about protection, which also becomes an issue.
I definitely wouldn't try to claim that the film is entirely original; it seems fresh enough to me, but some aspects of the story are more familiar than others. What I like is that there is nonetheless a good balance of optimism and cynicism which allows the viewer to forgive some of the lapses. More importantly, the film just gets more and more hilarious, particularly the darker it gets. It's definitely worth looking into.
Source: Image DVD
3 May, 9:57 PM
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