Sexo, amor y otras perversiones: A una mujer decente
2005 · 9m · México
Directed by Javier Patrón Fox
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, sensual
Under the motto asking about personal perversion, eight stories interweave: a woman wakes in an unknown apartment, subway lovers meet, two women flirt in a bathroom, a girl stays captive in an elevator, a student declares love to a teacher, and other affairs tangle desire and disappointment. Porn actors find love while a pathetic plan aims to please an elderly mother.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Javier Patrón Fox refuses to let you settle into a single story—eight interlocking vignettes of desire that ping-pong between porn actors seeking authenticity and elderly mothers getting seduced—it's the kind of formal audacity that makes other programmers squirm, which is exactly why it works.
The interweaving structure echoes early Almodóvar's polyphonic approach to desire, though the film's tonal volatility—darkly comic one moment, genuinely tender the next—feels more fractured than formally considered, less a deliberate lineage than a collision of impulses.
What elevates this from premise-driven chaos is the sound design cutting between scenes: that subway intimacy bleeds into an elevator's fluorescent hum, and suddenly the juxtaposition does the thematic work that the overlapping narratives alone couldn't carry on a 2005 budget.