Blue Eyelids (2007) Párpados azules

Director: Ernesto Contreras
Writer: Carlos Contreras
Stars: Cecilia Suárez, Enrique Arreola, Magali Boysselle

Marina is a lonely woman with a menial job at a uniform business that unexpectedly awards her with an all-expenses-paid holiday at a beach resort for two. She’s been unable to find anyone to go with her when she comes across a man called Víctor in a chance encounter at a bakery. Víctor claims they went to school together, but although Marina doesn’t remember him, she impulsively invites him to join her on the trip. They decide to get to know each other better before going away, and a kind of relationship develops between two shy people who seem to have nothing in common except the holiday looming on the horizon…

Director Ernesto Contreras calls this, his first feature (shot on a tiny budget from an original script by his brother Carlos), an ‘anti-romantic comedy’. It won Contreras the prize for Best Ibero-American Feature – and his brother the award for Best Screenplay – at Guadalajara in 2007, and a Special Jury Prize for the director at Sundance the following year.

Boy-meets-girl is the oldest story in the cinema, and yet this gem of a film from Mexico shows that it can always be made to live again. Ernesto Contreras's debut feature finds its own kind of heightened, dreamy realism, a kind that skirts the frontier of reverie and hallucination in one direction, and that of gloomy disillusion in another; but it is always rivetingly down to earth on the most down-to-earth of subjects: love, sex, loneliness and the dating game. The tone is seductively elusive: mysterious and serio-comic and yet with a robust kind of frankness about what is at stake for each party on beginning a relationship…What a humane treat this lovely little film is: a pinsharp cine-poem of romance.

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