Americano (2011)

Most films are make believe, not documentaries.. so when you view them, you are doing it with a great leap of imagination and a blind eye at times. Americano is an interesting film, well scripted and acted. At forty-six Selma Hayek.. bit.ly/18K8d2A ..is still undoubtedly an exceptionally beautiful woman, and here once again she performs well in what is a fairly basic role... one that might easily have not been taken as serious by many actors of her stature. She's well know, but in truth is under-appreciated for just how good and dedicated an actor she really is. She's a very smart and interesting woman, continuing to please audiences with her ever expanding body of work.

I wanted to like this film, it started nice with good characters but then it just went nowhere. The director did nothing with the most interesting characters (the father, Linda the friend, and the owner of the bar. No sense of believability or rational thought. Parts of the film really ask you to suspend all belief.SPOILER the Frenchman just happens to run into a kid who has a connection to the bar where Lola works - c'mon.Selma walked through her part and was totally unbelievable as the whore. I wish I could talk of the plot holes but there really was not plot to pull together.

Mathieu Demy has made a vanity piece about nothing, except what a charmless pompous and humorless man looks like brooding and boring an audience for hours. This guy leaves his beautiful girlfriend, about whom he is oddly, babyishly equivocal, for a mindless senseless and deeply ugly excursion into SoCal and Mexico, where he makes all the wrong solipsistic empty-headed moves of a spoiled rich reckless and cowardly dope. The director is obviously a rich kid, spoiled, with cinema bloodlines that allow him to shoot self-indulgent nonsense with truly great co-stars. I was embarrassed for them. The film is to self-serious to be hilariously bad, it is just inept and annoying. Sad.

Demy's story is not without charm, and in between the stutter in a simplistic seen it man traveling abroad to recover the body of his parent, and in the process searching and maybe finding himself story, revolving around a bunch of pretty much generic characters, his lead written for himself en-tête, there are some small finds, like Chaplin's play, or Hayek's yet another stripper character. Unfortunately, however, the most outstanding negative feature is not even the direction, which exemplifies how any setting can be displayed from the most unflattering and bleak angle, from Paris to L.A., with the most uninspired framing you could believe possible, or the shaky borderline earthquake documentary camera work, nor the dialog, which is not a stand out, but in the film quality itself. It reminded me of the execrable film grain of the civic education videos they used to project at the cinema before the movie in my home country 25 years ago during the communist era. I guess Demy found a stash somewhere. Slightly worn.Also, on an even more humorous note, it will provide food for thought for those planning on some day spending a long weekend in Tijuana.