Sex, Shame & Tears

Two flats in Mexico City, facing each other in the same building. In one live Carlos and Ana; their marriage has been over for a long time and neither says so. In the flat opposite are Miguel and Andrea, in the same condition. That week two old friends appear: Tomás comes back after years and stays with Carlos, and María moves in across the way. The new arrivals upset the balance in both households. The narrative moves between the two flats and what is said grows steadily more direct. Antonio Serrano directs. Demián Bichir, Susana Zabaleta, Jorge Salinas and Cecilia Suárez are in the cast. The source is a stage play the director had produced. The film was a large commercial success in Mexico and among the most watched domestic productions of the period. The structure is close to theatre: two settings, six characters and unbroken talk. The matter it works at is the silence of middle class relationships; nobody says what they want and everybody says something else. The register is sharp and sardonic; the narrative does not try to make any character sympathetic. It belongs to the revival of Mexican cinema at the end of the nineties and is one of the commercial examples of that wave. Its limit is structure; the narrative is built symmetrically and some of the correspondences are too tidy. Who it is for: viewers who like relationship comedy and films built on talk. Who it is not for: the characters are unpleasant, little happens, and the ending is bleak.