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My Mother Likes Women

(2004) no stars Unrated
93 min. Lauren Films. Directors: Ines Paris, Daniela Fejerman. Cast: Leonor Watling, Rosa Maria Sarda, Maria Pujalte, Silvia Abascal, Eliska Sirova.

Though they dedicate My Mother Likes Women to their progressive parents, co-writers/co-directors Ines Paris & Daniela Fejerman have constructed a graceless film about hateful people in a foreign world which I can only hope will be unrecognizable to whatever unsuspecting audience finds this misbegotten, mechanical mope-fest.

93 minutes tick off endlessly during this predictable and unrealistic movie in the Hollywood romantic-comedy mode. Displaying no gift for the physical comedy demanded of her, Leonor Watling (Talk to Her) plays Elvira, one of three daughters shocked and appalled by their divorced mother's new mate: a girlfriend! Rosa Maria Sarda (All About My Mother) plays the mother, Sofia, whose relationship with a youngish Czech woman named Eliska utterly lacks chemistry.

No worries there, since the film has no apparent interest in the lesbians except as objects for Elvira's neurotic, bug-eyed tics. Elvira has work issues (her boss abuses her), mental-health issues (her therapist hits on her), and personal issues (she compulsively repels the new man in her life), so when mom starts liking women, all hell breaks loose. Elvira's harpy sisters, played by Silvia Abascal and Maria Pujalte, goad her into taking the lead in their collective effort to break up the Sapphic couple.

None of these plot threads is funny, and nearly all of them are ghastly. In one scene, Elvira demands her love interest to screw her hard and call her "whore"; in another, one of Elvira's sisters unveils—to her whole family and a packed nightclub—her new song: a vile dressing-down of her lesbian mom. To teach them a lesson, the miscalculating filmmakers make the characters irredeemably awful but then kiss their "boo-boos." Miraculously, the horrible events of the first hour and fifteen minutes accrue to an easy, tidy, redemptive resolution which plays like the movie waking up from a bad dream. Apart from some Prague scenery in the last act, My Mother Likes Women is thoroughly ugly.

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