La Mina de oro
2010 · 10m · Mexique
Directed by Jacques Bonnavent
Genres: dark comedy, drama, romance
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
Betina, a woman in her fifties, meets love on the Internet and leaves behind her monotonous city life to travel across the country and join her virtual fiancé.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A fifty-something woman catfishes herself into the heartland chasing a digital phantom—it's a premise that should be maudlin garbage, but Bonnavent twists it into something genuinely unsettling, where the absurdity and the pathos won't separate. Nobody else would've trusted the audience to sit in that uncomfortable middle.
Bonnavent positions this squarely in the tradition of road narratives and romantic comedies, but the 2010 lens on internet courtship and displacement reads as formally prescient; the tonal balance between dark comedy and melancholy demonstrates considerable structural control.
The film's power hinges on a single sustained choice—treating Betina's delusional optimism with complete visual sincerity rather than winking at her—and that commitment to her interiority over judgment is what transforms a slight premise into something genuinely moving.
Reviews
La mina de oro est d'un cynisme grinçant. Il regorge de touches expressionnistes qui en font une œuvre dans laquelle le spectateur rentre facilement.