I feel it’s necessary that I talk about this film as everyone else seems to be raving about it.

​

I gave it one star purely for attempt. At the end of the day it is still a film so a lot of work will have gone into it but that’s not to say I enjoyed it in any sense. It took me two days to get through it, I had to turn it off half way through on day one because I kept falling asleep. On day two I started it from about 10 minutes before I turned it off just in the hope that I would catch something I missed to try and drive me to the end, I found nothing.

​

I found it painfully pretentious, clearly I am missing something because to me it also had no story whatsoever. The family were vile people who I had no interest in watching and honestly, couldn’t care less that her husband was cheating on his wife and mother to his children. I don’t think the mother showed any compassion toward her children who were dealing with a horrific event in their lives. The lead character (I don’t remember her name) was fairly endearing but for the most she came across as pathetic. I just didn’t warm to any of them. There were so many moments in it that had no relevance whatsoever to the main story, the martial arts training scene and the rich American’s holiday home but to name a few. I liked the inclusion of the protests and the civil war happening in the town but that was only to be over shadowed with the main character going into labour which bored me to my core.

​

Since watching the film a few weeks a go I have tried to understand the relevance of it being in black and white. It was clearly a conscious decision of, I assume, the director but it didn’t seem necessary to me, if I’m missing something then can someone please enlighten me? If anything it made the film harder to watch because not only did I have to follow the subtitles (which I actually didn’t have a problem with, I usually have subtitles on anyway) but I also had to try and read the times of day and locations without the use of colour which when you’re reading text at the bottom of a screen is fairly difficult.

I have read that Alfonso Curon made this film as a reflection of his life growing up in 1970’s Mexico, which is great, good for him. But did it need to be so self-indulgent? Couldn’t he have just written a book or a memoir that his fans could read? Honestly.

​

I don’t get it, I didn’t like it, it was boring, too long and quite frankly too vain for my liking.