Americano

I saw the movie on TV5 and found it a great film. Why? Well, it's exactly the type of movie that I have lately been interested in. Like the movies of Michelangelo Antonioni, who was an inspiration for my latest novel, and like the movies of Sautet or Godard etc. The French movies from the sixties and seventies, in which not too much is happening (my wife always says, what the hell are you watching? Nothing's happening, there's no plot). Americano also reminded me of Paris Texas by Wim Wenders. Like Paris Texas it has this curious quality of a road movie mixed with certain story telling and autobiographical aspects. Anyway, who wants a straight story? I also liked the actors very much. Apart from that, the images are always fascinating. A star cast for a visual spectacle.

Mathieu Demy has made a vanity piece about nothing, except what a charmless pompous and humorless man looks like brooding and boring an audience for hours. This guy leaves his beautiful girlfriend, about whom he is oddly, babyishly equivocal, for a mindless senseless and deeply ugly excursion into SoCal and Mexico, where he makes all the wrong solipsistic empty-headed moves of a spoiled rich reckless and cowardly dope. The director is obviously a rich kid, spoiled, with cinema bloodlines that allow him to shoot self-indulgent nonsense with truly great co-stars. I was embarrassed for them. The film is to self-serious to be hilariously bad, it is just inept and annoying. Sad.

Salma Hayek and Mathieu Demy meet in Mexico because he wants to give her his mother's paintings. His mother left them to her. Were the mother and Hayak friends or more than that? Remy has a girlfriend he is having sex with at the opening. Something happens to him With Hayek. I do not know what. His car is stolen. Hayek has a son. That is the theme that mothers love their sons even Though they can't care for them. The strip club where Hayek works is also a brothel. Hayek is now 57 married to a French billionaire. She gets paid for sex. The owner of the club cuts Demy's ear. At the end Hayek gets the something from his mother. I have no clue what this film is about. Good luck.

Most films are make believe, not documentaries.. so when you view them, you are doing it with a great leap of imagination and a blind eye at times. Americano is an interesting film, well scripted and acted. At forty-six Selma Hayek.. bit.ly/18K8d2A ..is still undoubtedly an exceptionally beautiful woman, and here once again she performs well in what is a fairly basic role... one that might easily have not been taken as serious by many actors of her stature. She's well know, but in truth is under-appreciated for just how good and dedicated an actor she really is. She's a very smart and interesting woman, continuing to please audiences with her ever expanding body of work.

this movie should be retitled 'the masochistic frenchman' - what a self destructive character Demy portrays. truly this story (which is very interesting in concept) is just torn to pieces by the main character stealing every scene and turn in this story! i didn't believe in his characterization at all.

i understand his feeling of abandonment by his mother and the resentment he expressed in having to deal with her estate. but there is not enough background into his personality to support his deep hatred complication. (example - his tossing away of everything in the apartment without care). and just why would he care so much about Lola? a person he has not had contact with for decades! again - not enough character development to support the obsession and misery he endured on her behalf. it's just wasn't believable. and why would he steal the automobile? the telephone conversation he has with his father in which the father psycho analyses his son is just pointless by the time it shows up in the story.

the only shining actor is geraldine chaplin! she is marvelous as the caring but dominating neighbor and not enough of her side of the relationship with the mother is made clear. the writer is too mysterious with his implication that Lola and the mother had something going in their 'friendship'. then the little Mexican boy - what? was that suppose to be Lola's son? not made clear. and the cemetery scene - again - what? sorry this flick is just too full of who, what, when, where, holes; and then he goes back to his lover in France. if you are a person that likes incomplete plot lines - check this movie out!