Sexo, amor y otras perversiones: A una mujer decente
2005 · 11m · México
Directed by Carlos Sariñana
Genres: dark comedy, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
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
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Sariñana refuses the obvious move—instead of moralizing about desire, he tangles eight stories into a kaleidoscope where perversion isn't the plot, it's just how people touch each other when nobody's watching. The structural audacity alone would bore most programmers, which is exactly why it works.
The interweaving structure recalls Altman's Nashville or more recently Crash, but Sariñana's commitment to tonal variation—dark comedy bleeding into genuine tenderness—shows a filmmaker conscious of how anthology form can interrogate desire as a formal problem, not just a thematic one.
The stroke of genius is the elevator sequence: one girl trapped, one girl outside, the camera refusing to cut between them, forcing us to hold both her immobility and her invisibility at once—a single technical choice that transforms a gimmick premise into something that actually *means* something about how desire isolates.