Amor es Amor (Spanish) [Love Is Love]

This is exactly the sort of wildly over the top 90s gay comedy that you really can’t treat seriously, and honestly, that’s basically why it works at all. If you go in looking for a fun little watch, a couple of laughs, and a willingness to just roll with how ridiculous everything gets, that’s the best way to take it, because beyond that there really isn’t much happening. The plot is paper thin, and every performance is pushed so far past normal that it feels like some kind of spoof, even if I couldn’t tell you what, specifically, it’s supposed to be spoofing.

The film is set in Mexico City in the nineties and follows Enrique, an up and coming telenovela star. He’s about to score a major contract with a production company, until they find photos of him with his boyfriend and realize he’s gay. His dad can’t accept having a gay son and, because of that, can barely even talk to him. In order to save the contract, the head of the studio proposes that Enrique pretend to be romantically involved with a fading pop star who’s trying to make a comeback, and who also happens to be secretly sleeping with the studio owner. Enrique and the singer both go along with the plan, which obviously drives Enrique’s actual boyfriend crazy. Then Enrique gets into a sudden accident and loses his memory completely, with no idea who anyone is. His dad uses that opening to slide back into his life, showing him tabloid stories and videos to convince him that the singer is really his girlfriend. The boyfriend, meanwhile, is pushed out entirely because he technically isn’t family. Enrique starts to believe the version of events everyone is feeding him, but he still can’t make himself feel anything real for the singer or be intimate with her. So his boyfriend gets a job on the soap opera set just to remain near him. And eventually, in exactly the way you’d assume, Enrique starts remembering the more time he spends around his boyfriend, until everyone finally has to accept what’s actually true.

The movie goes all in on camp, which you can honestly figure out from the poster by itself. The story is very simple and not especially well executed, but the nineties setting does make the whole absurd setup easier to buy into. You are very clearly not supposed to take any of it seriously, whether it’s the memory loss plot or the ending where the final episode of the telenovela is broadcast live and Enrique declares his love for his boyfriend on national television. Everything is turned all the way up, exaggerated from every possible angle, and it’s probably taking shots at telenovelas in general. The cast is mostly fine, although it’s honestly hard to know whether they’re bad actors or just deliberately going huge. The actual laugh out loud bits are pretty rare and spaced pretty far apart. This is the kind of thing you put on during a lazy afternoon when you have absolutely nothing better to watch. I really wish someone had told me that before I started. (4.5/10)