Paraiso Travel

Yes, one of the leading women turns out to be manipulative and appalling, but the woman at the restaurant and the woman who runs the stand next door are almost saintly, and even the woman who turns to topless dancing turns out to have a considerable heart.

This is not remotely a portrait of all Latin women or men. It is a story about one fairly naive guy who undergoes a series of adventures in a land where he can't speak the language and emerges with new knowledge.

Some of it is funny, some of it is heartbreaking. If I have any criticism -- and it's not much of one -- it's that the end titles are way more sophisticated stylistically than the movie they follow, and so they don't quite match. Big criticism, yes? Other than that, it's fascinating to see a film a lot of which takes place in a New York that seems to be a parallel and largely unseen world to the one Anglos like me live in. The idea that New York contains entire cultures that co-exist without much contact is intriguing.