Las Lloronas

2005 Venevision International. Lorena Villareal, writer/director

Very strange little movie - but a little disappointing, because it felt as though the story was going to elucidate more upon the supposed "curse" upon these women, in that their male sons would die at a very early age . . . but instead it focused more upon their supposed transgressions and family secrets.

One memorable scene, when the young woman finally kills her husband - by accident, of course! (during a domestic dispute) - actually didn't really ring quite true, in that the story had not really set up his character to be as despotic as we are supposed to believe. In fact, most of the movie, she'd been sloozing around with an old boyfriend. So the audience, while we are "supposed" to be anti-husband, have not truly been shown WHY. So what we have is a scene in which he dies, and we're know we are supposed to feel some sort of relief, because she's away from this overbearing cadd, but really we're just left ambivalent.

Then the mother comes in, and at first we expect her to freak out, but instead she draws down deep and pulls out a level-headed practicality - this is actually quite interesting, character-wise, in that this is relatively unexpected, but then, when the chips are down, the strength of the mother comes to the fore - that was fairly well done.

However, the scene ends rather comically, what with clunking the dead guy's head on the stairs, etc. Almost like a bad Almodovar (who sometimes gets carried away with scenes like this himself.)

Other than that, it had some interesting cultural commentary about the self-repression of Mexican women, with the combination of folklore and Catholic ideology. But overall, the movie should have been more disturbing than it was, and it seemed as though it was reaching for something that it didn't quite attain.


VG