If you speak Spanish, you know why the two-color scheme
exists in that title. If you don't, it gives the film another
title within the main one. "YOU are unfaithful" inside
"Unfaithful Women."
Big fuckin' deal.
Many of us, including me, used to enjoy a lot of those Italian
sex comedies from the 1960s and 1970s. The best ones provided an
interesting mixture of legitimate narrative, nudity, philosophy,
and buffoonery that made them relaxing and pleasant to watch.
Perhaps you wonder why people don't make movies like that any
more. Well, they do. In Chile. This 2004 film is basically an Edwige Fenech movie for the new millennium.
It begins with a bang. In more ways than one. A
Santiago couple pulls into one of those ornate love motels, and
engages in some really spirited stripping and sex. There's one
bang. Then they light an after-sex cigarette. Their problem:
the hotel has a gas leak. Bang number two.
Backtrack a bit to earlier in the same day. The woman we've
been watching in the motel is a famous news anchor. She is seen
hosting a TV program about the astronomical rate of infidelity
among Chilean wives (62% of them cheat - highest percentage in
the world by far, according to the story.) Oh, isn't that
ironic, based upon what we know! During the course of the
program, she has a big fight with her male co-anchor. She
corners the producer and says, "I'm the star. Get rid of that
guy." The producer says, "He has an iron-clad contract." She
responds, "Then give him shit jobs out in the field that will
keep him away from me, and maybe even cause him to quit." Fair
enough. The producer assigns the poor schmuck to a midnight
report from the fire station, where nothing ever happens in
Santiago.
Until now.
As we already know, tonight there will be an explosion in a
posh motel, and when the male anchor covers it with a live
report, who does he find in a hotel room, close to death,
but his much-despised and very naked female colleague!
This is one of those movies with several parallel stories,
all of them about female infidelity in some way or another, and
the other stories were nowhere near as clever as that one. Some
of them were outright bummers, like the one about the woman who
falls in love with her step-son, and the pain they cause her
husband (his dad).
There was one very funny scene in one of the other stories.
A young woman has never had an orgasm. She gets some tips from a
horny friend, and starts using her new vibrator while locked in
the bathroom. When the vibrator runs out of battery life, she
swipes the batteries from the TV remote. That might have worked
fine except that her cold fish of a husband wanted to watch the
big soccer game, and didn't know where to find the spare
batteries ... so he had to find his wife to ask her ...
That scene was played out purely for farce, but the film
follows the general format of the Italian sex comedies and
therefore doesn't stick entirely to wacky bedroom hijinks. I
mentioned the pain caused by the father-son thing. Well, I
didn't mention that the news anchor was a married woman who had
lied to her husband about where she was on the night of the
explosion. So he was home babysitting their daughter and ...
watching TV. Get the picture? That provided some somber moments,
but not quite as somber as later on when the husband threatened
to kill her and himself with a pistol.
Frankly, the tone shifts in this film can be very
disconcerting, and they seem very close to unnecessary in a film
with such lightweight ideas. Yes, granted, cheating is a bad
thing which leaves a trail of pain behind, but maybe the
painstakingly accurate documentation of that pain should be left
to Atom Egoyan and Inniaritu and the other arthouse hot-shots,
and should be downplayed in a fuzzy sex comedy which uses lots
of artificial pastel lighting schemes to relate the trials of
trying to hide giant dildos from your mom and husband.
Still, one cannot deny that life includes both comedy and
tragedy, and I did very much like the main story about the
anchorwoman. I think Mujeres Infieles would have done well to
stick to that one and develop it still further. Unfortunately,
the film's creators felt that they needed several simultaneous
stories to make whatever points they were trying to make about
infidelity, gender inequality, and the general cluelessness of
men. One story, after all, is just an anecdote, but six stories
is a trend, don't you know.
Since it's a sex comedy, you're probably wondering about the
nudity and sex. Well, like the movie itself, it started out like
gangbusters. The sex scene with the news anchor and her lover is
hot - great dialogue, great full-frontal nudity from both of
them, passion, fun, and great photography. It's two animals in
heat. Then the scene between the woman and her stepson is
tender and loving, also beautifully photographed, showing two
people sharing love and sex with the true loves of their lives.
Both of those scenes took place in the first nineteen minutes of
the film, after which I thought this movie was going to be a
record-setter in both the quantity and quality of sex scenes.
But that was it. The rest of the film offers just the necessary
resolution in those two stories and never moves beyond tease in
the other stories.
Oh well. My take is that it's a film that was terrific in
many ways, and had the potential to be great. After the dynamic
opening scene in the motel, with the hot sex and the explosion,
I was ready for a great film experience. It didn't live up to
that promise, and ended up being just a pleasant, lightweight
time-waster with some outstanding moments.
A solid C. Not a genre classic in the Italian Sex Comedy
sub-genre, like The Sensuous Nurse for example, but a solid and
watchable entry. (And certainly, to my knowledge, it is
the top entry in the Chilean Pseudo-Italian Sex Comedy
sub-sub-genre.)
- Maria Jose Prieto plays the
news anchor. Here is a
zipped
.wmv of her sex scene.
- Viviana Rodriguez is the
woman who falls for her stepson. (Zipped
.wmv)
It's certainly a very colorful movie, as you can see below: