La chica que quería estar más fea
2018 · 12m · España
Directed by Gerardo Sanz
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy
Tones: darkly comic, provocative
Friends Andrea and Patricia go out to pubs together, where Patricia loves meeting boys, flirting and looking beautiful, while Andrea feels trapped in a superficial, passive role. Andrea decides to solve the problem effectively.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A girl decides to make herself ugly to escape the performance of beauty—except the film doesn't let you know what that actually *means* until it's too late, and the punchline lands like a grenade. This is the kind of premise that sounds glib until Sanz executes it, and suddenly you're laughing at something that shouldn't be funny.
Sanz channels a lineage of European coming-of-age comedy that prizes restraint and implication over explanation; the film's formal economy—sparse dialogue, considered framing of the pub scenes—trusts the audience to read what Andrea's solution really costs her.
The entire film hinges on a single performance choice: Andrea's face when she reveals what she's done, a moment of such controlled ambiguity that it reframes everything before it and makes a 12-minute sketch feel like it contains an entire character arc.