Review: Queens

That Queens is quite proudly a piece of fluff is evident from its opening scene, a forbidden tryst in a train bathroom. The encounter's comedic elements override all possible eroticism, from the exaggerated flirting that precedes it, to the helpful seat-mate who answers a stranger's cell phone and finds herself standing outside the bathroom door shouting messages to the phone's slightly distracted owner. The scene is shot in bright, candy-colors and features a timely split screen, used to enhance the comedy; both elements -- the latter joined by other editing gimmicks including wipes and fades -- reappear again and again through the film, a sprawling story of the first gay wedding in Spain, and the families involved.

Directed by Manuel Gómez Pereira, Queens is only very incidentally concerned with the wedding that is ostensibly its subject. Instead, Pereira uses the wedding simply as an excuse to gather his characters together, and focuses primarily on three couples and their parents. The younger generation consists of a theoretically wide range of men, but all of them are similarly dark and handsome (apart from the awful Miguel, who would be dark without the peroxide in his hair), and beset by similar, stereotypical problems. While this alone is not a problem for the film -- Queens never pretends to reach towards anything profound -- the fact that the great majority of the men are wooden and laughably selfish is a bigger hurdle to surmount. Narciso (Paco León) is a distant politician with the sexual self-control of his mother, she of the bathroom tryst, and no apparent interest in his sad-sack boyfriend Hugo (Gustavo Salmerón). Hugo, meanwhile, has his own problems, primary among them a total lack of both personality and backbone. Oscar (Daniel Hendler) and Miguel (Unax Ugalde) come from different backgrounds (Oscar is a dancer, and an immigrant from Argentina whose mother owns and cooks in a restaurant; Miguel is a native Spaniard who comes from a family with money), and despite being engaged have virtually nothing in common. The final couple, Rafa (Raúl Jiménez) and Jonas (Hugo Silva), despite having the most stereotypical problem -- they come from different social worlds -- are the least offensive of the bunch. Rafa's mother is a famous actress, while Jonas is the son of her long-time gardener; the two characters are just as lightweight as the other men, but they manage to show a hint of actual affection for one another, and that alone makes them convincing by comparison.

In addition to introducing his audience to these couples, Pereira also takes on their parents, which results in a wildly jumpy film. Because the families never converge until the wedding, the bulk of the film is spent moving from story to story, and place to place. Though the transitions are always elegantly done -- Pereira's visual style here sometimes recalls the most gleefully garish products of American studios in the 1960s, full of bright colors, splashy titles, and attention-getting transitions --- they nevertheless make it hard for the viewer to get to know anyone well, and leave us wishing the few appealing characters could be on-screen for longer than a few minutes at a time.

And there are appealing characters. Away from the nonsense of the couples and their absurd problems, Queens finds depth and affection in the world of their parents, a welcome wrinkle that unearths enough real affection and personality to save Pereira's film from itself. Most of the credit for that salvation, however, goes not to the director but to his actors: The legendary Marisa Paredes is simply astonishing as Reyes, Rafa's actress mother. Not given much to work with, she nevertheless takes effortless control of the film, adding depth, charm, and joy in equal measure to otherwise throwaway scenes. There are bits of Paredes in Reyes (the characters says she's worked with Pedro Almodovar, and is once misidentified as Carmen Maura, another Almodovar muse who appears in the film), and the actress clearly feels very at home in the role. Her affection for her character and bottomless talent combine to give Reyes a warmth and vulnerability virtually unseen throughout the rest of the film, and turn a minor character into a full-formed human being whom we find ourselves desperately wanting to be happy.

Playing opposite Paredes is Lluís Homar as Jacinto, her gardener and future in-law, and Homar matches Paredes step-for-step. Jacinto and Reyes are both impatient, set in their ways, and old enough to no longer feel the need for social niceties. When they bother to even think about the other, it's generally with disgust -- Jacinto is so low-class that Reyes has never even allowed him into her home, and Reyes is pretentious and elitist, two things Jacinto despises. But now, suddenly, they're forced together and, as happens in the movies, they find they're not quite as different as they thought. Cliched situations aside, however, the pleasure one gets from simply watching Paredes and Homar work together is almost indescribable, and it makes Queens more memorable than it has any right to be. The sparks between them are real and instantaneous, as are the fear and regret in their eyes when they think about the risk of emotional attachment; in just a few seconds, the two of then create a more convincing relationship than anything else on display in the film.

Queens is a well-made, visually lovely film; that the great majority of its characters are entirely unappealing is something that, by rights, should render it unwatchable. Thanks, however, to wonderful performances of a handful of supporting actors, the movie is frequently both charming and affecting. Though by this point in her career it's not news to anyone that Marisa Paredes is an actress of truly awesome ability, that's no reason not to treasure her truly great performances; in Queens, she's given us another to cherish. For this reason alone, the movie is worth watching.