Spanish writer-director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo follows up his button-pushing satire Gordos (2009) with something decidedly gentler: a comedy about arrested male development, modeled on Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket and The Darjeeling Limited. Three 30-ish cousins, seeking debauchery after one of them gets dumped by his bride-to-be, return to the seaside resort town where they spent summer vacations in their teens. Instead they discover the good life and, in predictable "feel-good" fashion, greater maturity. Arévalo borrows Anderson's technique of defining characters through outsize quirks (a traumatized war vet wears a big eye patch and has numerous phobias) but conveys none of his underlying melancholy. Because the men's problems seem fairly simple, there's no real sense of progress when they're resolved. In Spanish with subtitles.
Reviews