Dumb, brash and pointless but unfortunately doesn't know it.

cinephiliac

This film is entirely watchable if all you want is some attractive wallpaper to scroll across your television for 90 minutes. If you're looking for a smart pulpy film with a witty script and entertaining cut and paste plot, then this is not it, and you'd be best advised to avoid like the plague.

Unfortunately this is another one of those films by an underexposed director who wanted to try his hand at writing and directing just like his heroes, only without a modicum of their talent. The film achingly wants to be considered in the same vein as Tarantino for its slice of life dialogue, or Russ Meyer for its pop out technicolour scenery and underdressed girls, but can't reach beyond imitation of those particular styles into something original.

The screenplay is underwritten, which is to say, under edited (a good editor would have trashed the majority of it); it's wall to wall filler that can only echo and mangle the best junky dialogue in all those great indie films I won't bother to mention. The quotidean dialogue of those films, memorable for its sheer wit and off-kilter verisimilitude, is transposed into Women In Trouble with no sense of irony. Two women in an elevator strip off and yak about life problems, their apparent no bullshit attidude at odds with their heartfelt sob stories, intercut between leering two-shots breast-high-upwards which thoroughly undermine any hint of emotion. If you're actually listening to the dialogue it's a murky pool of run-on-sentences and non-sequiturs with no subtext. Or, the subtext of a writer-director forcing words into the mouths of babes (who should know better), words which sound every bit like the whiny insouciance of someone who wishes he understood women, men, and how to write them into a film.

A short paragraph on the directing. Every scene could and probably should be pulled from the film and taught to young film school undergraduates as a basis of how not to produce a pulpy modern film. The hyperactive cutting best left for MTV, the jarring array of angles which hinder any attempts at narrative and subtext, the aforementioned shots which exist purely to titillate, to barefacedly exploit with no sense of awareness or wit. The angles which could only be described as down-top, for example, pitch the film towards a particular market, but the director doesn't have the balls or honesty to go all out (as Meyer so famously did), and wraps them in pseudo verbose dialogue and pseudo starry casting. When Almodóvar places the camera above his leading lady, cast downwards, it is as if he is peeking, like a naughty schoolboy, unable to believe his luck. She is in on the joke, and so the audience are invited to share in his and her cheeky saucy but playful film-making. Almodóvar loves his leading ladies, as do many other filmmakers who have played the same trick. Gutierrez does not love his ladies or he would not prance around them looking for the best shot of their cleavage, or writing their characters into situations where, quelle surprise!, they just happen to get their kit off. He would not make an exploitation film which tries to pass itself off as something else. What could be more exploitative, to his cast, to his audience?! I could go on and on but I'm sure you're getting the idea by now. It's not as if this film is offensive in the strongest sense, it's just stupid, and awkwardly collegeboy-ish in its sexual ethics, and doesn't have the key characteristic of being honest with its motives. If you like intelligent films by men about women that have respect for the actresses involved and the audience at large (both male and female) then avoid this, or spend 90 minutes squirming in your seat (no pun intended).

score 4/10

cinephiliac 18 November 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2343099/