Carmen y Lola is a simple story told extremely well.
From a cultural standpoint: While my lesbian friends will no doubt find this tale of two Romani* teenagers (a high femme and a lipstick lesbian, no less) in the suburbs of Madrid a tad cloying while the skinny young women parade about in their short shorts and tight T-shirts, I, as an over-sensitive gay man, found the girls' relationship completely and totally endearing.
From a filmmaking standpoint: Carmen & Lola takes absolutely zero risks as concerns the story and the style, yet the purity of the film shines through thanks, in large part, to the acting. The lead actresses (Rosy Rodriguez as Carmen, the cishet beauty engaged to Lola's cousin, and Zaira Morales as the innocent yet self-aware lesbian Lola) are on point, but the supporting cast are phenomenal, especially when considering all but one are non-professional Romani.
The bottom line: As the film began to reach its conclusion, I caught myself hoping for a happy ending harder than I have for almost any film to date, which means that the 'sexual correctness' and the 'grand filmmaking' questions meant little to me when compared to how emotionally involved I became in the movie. And that makes the film a good one, in my book.
*Many English readers will know this population as 'gypsy', though I use the term 'Romani' here as many consider 'gypsy' to be pejorative. Note that, in the film the population refer to themselves as 'gitana' and 'gitano', which are the Spanish translations of 'gypsy'.
Also note, if you enjoyed Carmen y Lola you really need to see Rafiki, a Kenyan film much in the same vein.
Judging from the other reviews, it goes to show how easy it is to miss an eating disorder... That's the true horror story of the film.
The clues were everywhere:
- her gazing at the cake shop,
- her half-eaten salad at her lunch break,
- her childhood photo from the "Pork Queen Fair" when she was overweight,
- Ganush's granddaughter remarking that she used to be fat,
- the multiple times that Ganush rips out her hair and vomits into her mouth,
- the sounds of buzzing flies/creaking doors/etc. everytime she felt her stomach growling,
- her disgust with the cake she made,
- her binging on the ice cream and the obvious lie she told her boyfriend about her being lactose intolerant,
- her drinking only coffee at the diner, before succumbing to binging on an ice cream again,
- her resisting the temptation of the "free cookie" and rewarding herself by buying a new coat.
The fact that her boyfriend wasn't the one who died but (in reality) her getting run over by the train, shows that it was all in her head as she was becoming more and more psychotic, either because of undernutrition or because of an underlying form of schizophrenia.
