Las Vegas Weekly

June 18, 2008 · 12:23 PM

Keeping it too real in “Donde Estan Sus Historias”

By Jennifer Grafiada

Photo: Courtesy of CineVegas

The majority of the 73 minutes of ¿Donde estan sus historias? are unexciting ones, time that I could have better spent. I was forced to sit at a dinner table, multiple times, and watch a family eat their meal in awkward silence. I was stuck in the back of a pickup truck with an ugly and boring woman. I had to watch someone peel an entire orange. Worst of all, I had to follow along behind the protagonist as he trekked across a trash-littered desert. The hand-held camera effect induced motion sickness.

The characters don’t say much—either they are too stupid or there just isn’t anything worth talking about. Consequently, I felt myself alternately nodding off (I’ve had some late nights at the Cinevegas parties) and letting my mind meander.

Ans everything in this movie is so ugly. The actors are ugly. Their clothes are dirty. The landscape is despicably unattractive, and their houses atrociously decorated. The only beautiful thing I noted was the produce in the open-air market. It made me want to go to Mexico just for the food. Otherwise, Mexico is portrayed as a poor, barren place where the people are uneducated, ugly and inarticulate, have accomplished nothing and aspire to nothing.

The films singular laugh-out-loud moment comes when an infertile middle class couple sits their housekeeper down and offers her 10,000 pesos to conceive a child. The unassuming, overweight housekeeper is flummoxed. “You want me to have sexual relations with Senor Bill?” she asks. Desperate for a laugh, the whole audience chuckled. If only that wasn’t the only entertaining moment. If only we could have watched the sex.

The only other notable scenes were close-up shots of this housekeeper as she stands over the sink washing dishes and later in the shower after having mechanical, mercenary sex. In both scenes, as she stands there silent, solitary and downtrodden, I could see her thoughts and the unexpressed sadness in her eyes.

I suppose the director was after this kind of raw simplicity. He wanted to portray real people in real time living real lives. But reality isn’t always entertaining; I think I prefer my movies with a Hollywood lacquer. I don’t need to spend an hour and a half of my life getting inundated with the message that life sucks and then you die.

Share This