Some three years ago, Argentine filmmaker Gustavo Taretto released his début film Medianeras, a low key, quite personal dramatic comedy about finding your other half in an overcrowded city such as Buenos Aires. Smart and biting, Medianeras was a refreshing surprise amid so much uninspired indie cinema. Now it’s time for Taretto’s second film, Las insoladas, which features six popular comedy actresses from the television arena. It intends to be funnier, cool, and still more surprising than Taretto’s début.
The bad news is that it is not. In spite of good intentions, Las insoladas looks, sounds and feels like a prolonged television episode from a series that could have been titled Six Women in Search of Paradise. Or something like that.
The story in a nutshell: on December 30, in the early 90’s, six middle-class young women spend an entire day sunbathing on the rooftop of a building in downtown BA. These longtime friends share a dream: to spend a vacation in the Caribbean, more precisely on the sunny beaches of Cuba. Not that they can afford it, but they can always think of ways of making and saving money. And perhaps they can even win the salsa contest that night, which has a cash prize of U$5,000 and for which they have been rehearsing for six months.
The general idea of the film is, I guess, to confront the real, prosaic lives of these girls with their fantasies and to draw a portrait of a sector of society in times of neoconservative policies, cheap dollars and daydreams. Cuba would be heaven on earth for them, as opposed to their daily routines as hairdressers, employees, psychologists, or manicures. That, and also an examination of the longings, wishes, thoughts and behaviour of these glamour-less Sex and the City-style girls. And that’s it.
And though Taretto has a good ear for dialogue and a keen eye for body language, which provides the film with a fair number of amusing verbal exchanges and insights, the overall result is too flimsy and underdeveloped for a feature film. There’s a series of loosely interconnected anecdotes that never escalate into full comedy or character study. In spite of the actresses’ engaging performances, their characters never reach full status. It all looks pretty good on the surface, but then again the surface is all there is to see.
Too smart for a dumb chick flick and too superficial for a smart comedy, Las insoladas is a film that will have a hard time finding an audience.
