La virgen de agosto

I want to warn all those who have not watched this movie yet to please avoid wasting more than 2 hours of your lives with this third-rate film. The plot is absurd (staying in your city in August, okay... Moving to another apartment just for the summer?), the situations are forced, the dialogues are unreal, the performances are poor, the tempo is inadequate (the film is way too slow)... The conversations are silly (they sound like teenagers going through their adolescent crisis more than grown 33 years old people discussing about real problems). Hard to tell where the movie is going (if it is going somewhere).

One could say that the film fails in every possible way. The worst movie I have seen in 2019 and (without a doubt) one of the worst of the decade. If the director were not the son of Fernando Trueba, this film would have never been released.

I went to watch the movie the first night it opened in Athens and I was not disappointed. It has a very specific social context, the social world of thirty something Madrilenos who seem very easygoing and direct in their affective relationships, something that a traditionalist Catholic or practicing Muslim might find strange or unfamiliar. They are steeped in the hedonistic mentality of our times although they do not lack warmth or emotional depth. I have visited Madrid once and had a very good time therefore I had an additional motive to like the movie and I have to admit that I was very moved when I saw the heroine staring for sometime before the lady of Elche( Dama d' Elche), a striking Celtiberian sculpture, that I had also admired when visiting the Archeological museum of Madrid. Everybody seems approachable and easygoing and one wonders if the movie seeks to portray a 68 utopia in the present. There are some memorable scenes such as a an impromptu theatrical on the road or an alternative therapy session which display elements of life that high culture now and in the past views with disdain or at least condescension although they are chunks of the lived experience of many people. I advice you to watch this movie unless you are socially conservative and your sensibility might be offended by what a certain section of the public considers as the degeneration and laxisme of modern metropolitan life. Otherwise this experiment in sociability and soulsearching has its charms.

I have been in Madrid in the summer and can't appreciate how the stifling heat adds to the general feeling of malaise that the main character displays. Because I love the capital so much, I was predisposed to like this movie. While I did enjoy seeing aspects of life in Madrid-visits to museums, parks, and bars- I thought the main character was not fleshed out enough to make for a compelling story.

But as usual these weak AF writers has this woman and the people she meets acting like a bunch of high school teenagers. In fact I was more mature in my teens, than this supposed 32 year old woman.

And the gratuitous sex near the end was the icing on the stupidity cake. Especially when you factor in how many women are kidnapped/raped and killed everyday in the world. These writers have her doing some of the dumbest shiitake imaginable.

They could have address her issues without the sex, and with less childish antic and conversation. I guess the plus would be that they didn't at least on film have relations with the english and the welsh dudes they met at the bar and followed to a hole in the wall speakeasy.

I found this extremely boring, and I like thinking movie that can cause you to pause and reflect. But this did the exact opposite and had me FF in spots and especially with the sex scene which frankly this film could do without. But weak writers will use that old ploy to get buttocks in theater seats.

One hot mess that will bore you to sleep when you're not FF past the unbearable nonsensical drivel that you will encounter.

Some people might enjoy this, I'm just not one of them.

2 out of 10.