However honestly I might try to subtract forty years from my time on this planet, I fail to grasp the essentials of what makes an adolescent think, act and masturbate (or at least try to) as if nothing else in the whole wide world could attract or interest him. It seems the powers overriding that tricky age of being neither a child nor yet an adult have come to a sticky mess: I am not surprised so many of my male teenage students are failing miserably at school. If, as this film seems to want us to believe, sixteen-year-olds get to the level of football, trying to make it off with the girls or just simply doing it sitting on the toilet, it would suggest that something terribly wrong is going on somewhere. We all went through pubescence, but I am sure that years ago we managed it with more decorum and less fantasy, and got our girls in the end, anyway!
If this film only exists to show us the painful pangs of a frustrated teenager, it might have been better not to have made it. However, there are a few scenes which trigger off a few tweaks of conscience, albeit in a largely detached way, rather like observing cats on a rooftop in their wild sexual combat.
`Más pena que Gloria' is a 'coming-of-age' film though rather more explicit than most; supposedly the film's title, but I would surmise that in itself it is more a summary of its own content.
