Solo con tu Pareja

Now that Alfonso Cuaron has firmed his status as an A-list director by winning an Oscar, I thought I'd take a look at his first, Mexican films, one of which I hadn't seen before. His debut, Solo con tu Pareja (Only With Your Partner), co-written with his brother Carlos, was released in 1991.

As with many first features, Solo con tu Pareja is uneven. It is a screwball sex comedy with some amusing moments, but mostly tries too hard to get laughs. And it introduces AIDS as a subject, which isn't funny now and especially wasn't funny in 1991.

Tomas Tomas (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) is a playboy who has a long history of sexual conquests. He is a copywriter for an advertising agency, and is sleeping with his boss. His neighbor is a doctor who urges him to try to keep his love life a little less complicated, but Tomas ends up making a date with his nurse. A long section of the film is classic bedroom farce, as Tomas has his boss in one apartment and the nurse in another, passing between them by an outside ledge. While doing this he spies on yet another woman, a flight attendant with whom he falls in love with at first sight.

This is okay, but nothing special, and certainly doesn't show off Cuaron's gifts that we would later display. Then the film turns to gallows humor. The nurse, angry at Tomas, types "positive" on his AIDS test. When he finds out, he wants to kill himself. When the doctor finds out, he thinks it's a funny prank. We get some unfunny scenes of Tomas trying to commit suicide by microwave oven, and when the flight attendant catches her boyfriend cheating, they head to the top of the nearest skyscraper to kill themselves together.

I'm of the opinion that just about anything can be made funny, but the Cuaron brothers did not have the knack for making a false AIDS positive amusing, not in 1991 (this was three years before Philadelphia). Beyond that, the acting is crude (except for Luis de Icaza as the doctor) and the direction rambunctious without control. I also didn't laugh at gross stereotyping of Japanese tourists constantly taking pictures.

So Cuaron has come a long way since his first feature, and has certainly smoothed out some of the rough spots.