Mujeres infieles (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

If you speak Spanish, you already know why the two-color scheme exists in that title. If you don't, the yellow portion gives the film another title within the main one. "YOU are unfaithful" inside "Unfaithful Women."

Big fuckin' deal.

Pretty decent movie, though.

A lot of us, including me, enjoy several of the 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. Bang number one. Then they light an after-sex cigarette.  Unfortunately, the hotel has a gas leak. Bang number two.

The story then backtracks a few hours. 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 about her! 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 today.

As we already know, tonight there will be an explosion in a posh motel, and when the male anchor accompanies the firefighters there and delivers a live report, who does he find in a hotel room, close to death, but his much-despised and very naked female colleague!

Not a bad yarn so far. It got me hooked.

Unfortunately, the film doesn't stay with that story. This is one of those movies with several parallel stories about one theme, in this case female infidelity, 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 stepson, and the pain they cause her husband (his dad). 

There was one very funny scene in one of the other stories.  A prissy 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 refined mother and uptight 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, but 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 the film is 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 the end of 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. The sets and lighting schemes were colorful, and it was clever plotting to have her hated co-anchor showing up to humiliate her, because that never would have happened if she hadn't bitched to the producer. I was really into it for about fifteen minutes. The film didn't live up to that early promise. It ended up being just a pleasant, lightweight time-waster with a few outstanding moments.

 

DVD INFO

  • No features
  • widescreen transfer, anamorphically enhanced

UDITY REPORT

Viviana Rodriguez - breasts

Maria Jose Prieto - the full monty

The Critics Vote ...

  • No major reviews online.

 

The People Vote ...

  • IMDB summary. IMDb voters score it 5.4/10. I thought it might be a little higher. I hung a seven spot on it.
The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics, or a C- from our system. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

Our own guideline:

  • A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre.
  • B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. In order to rate at least a B-, a film should be both a critical and commercial success. Exceptions: (1) We will occasionally rate a film B- with good popular acceptance and bad reviews, if we believe the critics have severely underrated a film. (2) We may also assign a B- or better to a well-reviewed film which did not do well at the box office if we feel that the fault lay in the marketing of the film, and that the film might have been a hit if people had known about it. (Like, for example, The Waterdance.)
  • C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by people who enjoy this kind of movie. If this is your kind of movie, a C+ and an A are indistinguishable to you.
  • C means it is competent, but uninspired genre fare. People who like this kind of movie will think it satisfactory. Others probably will not.
  • C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie, but genre addicts find it watchable. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film, but films with this rating should be approached with caution by mainstream audiences, who may find them incompetent or repulsive or both. If this is NOT your kind of movie, a C- and an E are indistinguishable to you.
  • D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-. Films rated below C- generally have both bad reviews and poor popular acceptance.
  • E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre.
  • F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

 

Based on this description, this film is a solid C. It's not a genre classic in the Italian Sex Comedy sub-genre, like The Sensuous Nurse for example, but it is a solid and watchable entry in a genre I miss. (And certainly, to my knowledge, it is the top entry in the Chilean Pseudo-Italian Sex Comedy sub-sub-genre.)

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