Elisa and Marcela Reviews

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since I have a weak spot for Isabel Coixet’s work and since it was available on Netflix, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, even though it was a very interesting story, the damned thing still turned out to be rather half-baked, I’m afraid. The biggest issue was that Coixet never managed to make it more than a generic drama about some gay lovers facing our cruel world. It didn’t help that this story was sometimes pretty cheesy. I mean, for example, Marcela falls in love with the first person she meets in her school within the first 5 minutes so there was no room for this relationship to grow organically. On top of that, even though we spent the whole duration with these 2 women, we don’t get to know them at all because they were only defined by their romantic relationship which was seriously limiting. Finally, the 2 characters kept making some rather stupid mistakes which could have been fairly easily avoided. For example, why would they go live in a small village where all the inhabitants would pretty much know everything about everybody? Even more bewildering was the fact that they went back to this village after Elisa became ‘Mario’ and they got married. And, yet, there was still something quite fascinating about this story above all because you don’t get to see so many vintage gay love stories like this one. Furthermore, the black-and-white cinematography was maybe not really original but it was still quite gorgeous to behold. Anyway, to conclude, even though Coixet never really managed to make the most of this interesting story, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look.