"Drama/Mex" tells of three everyday people in Acapulco whose lives intersect over the course of a two-day period. The characters include an attractive young woman named Fernanda (Diana Garcia), who's having trouble deciding whether to stay with her current beau (Juan Pablo Castaneda) or to return to her thieving cad of an ex-boyfriend (Emilio Valdes); a middle-aged business man named Jaime (Fernando Becerril), who's contemplating suicide as a way out of his unhappiness (there's a hint that he might be having an incestuous relationship with either his daughter or stepdaughter); and a half naïve/half streetwise girl named Tigrillo (Miriana Moro), who's in the process of learning how to rip off rich, male tourists for fun and profit. The last two characters meet when Tigrillo slips into Jaime's beachside motel room to steal his wallet right at the moment that he has a loaded gun to his head. Together, these two people with relatively little in common beyond their happening to be at the same place at the same time, manage to forge an unlikely relationship that defies easy labeling.
"Drama/Mex" is a homespun, slice-of-life drama that isn't obsessed with making big dramatic gestures or revealing grand universal truths about human nature. Instead, it simply introduces us to its characters and lets their stories play out naturally, with very little manipulation or fanfare. Though the narrative is clearly contrived to some extent, the film still manages to capture the random nature of life as we live it. The characters don't necessarily "learn" anything from their experiences - but they do emerge from those experiences, to some degree or another, "changed" people, willing to look at their lives from a decidedly different vantage.
Superb performances (especially by Becerril and Moro) and direction (by Gerardo Naranjo, who also wrote the screenplay), and a refusal to tie everything up into a neat little bow at the end add to the movie's overall quality and appeal.
