Sólo con tu pareja (1991, Alfonso Cuarón) (Patreon)

46/100

Second viewing, last seen 1997. Cuarón had by that point already made A Little Princess, which I'd seen and very much liked (honorable mention on my original '95 list); while I didn't foresee him becoming what he is today, I did make a point of catching up with his debut feature when it belatedly came to NYC (as part of a "recent Latin American cinema" program at Lincoln Center, for which it was given the dopey English-language title Love in the Time of Hysteria). According to contemporaneous email, I mildly enjoyed it back then, deeming it "a reasonably good time" and concluding with "Nothing earth-shattering, but I can see why Hollywood came a-courtin'." Maybe I just hadn't yet experienced enough skilled farce, though, 'cause it looks exceedingly feeble to me now, distinguished primarily by Chivo's almost disconcertingly (for this context) elegant lighting. Plotting relies heavily on each woman improbably cooling her heels for a small eternity while Tomás rushes off to deal with another conquest, and then veers into bad taste by building its climax around a false AIDS diagnosis and potential joint suicide. (That aspect caused the friend with whom I originally saw Sólo to abruptly make the rest of the film a solo outing for me*. Wasn't a dealbreaker in my case—I wound up comparing it to the then recent-ish, now forgotten Dabney Coleman comedy Short Time, about a cop who mistakenly thinks he's terminally ill and keeps trying to get himself killed in the line of duty—and it still isn't, really. But less laughing = more cringing.) Surprised that I once rolled with the movie's fundamentally adolescent sense of humor, which can think of nothing more hilarious than inadvertent public (male) nudity. And even that's inconsistent: Why should we identify with Tomás' frantic shame when he loses his towel before onlookers while scaling the ledge of his building, given that he makes a daily ritual of sprinting nude down several flights of stairs to retrieve his newspaper? You don't do that if you're not secretly okay with being seen. I've also never really warmed to Daniel Giménez Cacho—his scene is probably my least favorite in Memoria, and he was a big stumbling block for me as/in Zama—so watching him play a smug Lothario has zero appeal. All in all, there's precious little here that suggests a major career lies ahead. I suspect that my younger self engaged in some motivated reasoning.

* Not as rude as it probably sounds. He and I hadn't gone to the film together, just both happened to be there and met up, which generally happened multiple times per week. I took no offense when he bolted mid-film without saying goodbye; we both did that all the time, would shoot the other an email later.