Rating: B-
Dir: José Luis Gutiérrez Arias
Star: Raúl Méndez, Anouk Ogueta, Paula Luckie, Miriana Moro
a.k.a. Dame tus ojos or Abril y Mayo
This isn’t quite what I expected. I guess the best way to describe it, is as a Mexican cross between Natural Born Killers and Haute Tension. April (Moro) and May (Luckie) are two teenage girls, on a lethal crime spree involving kidnap, murder and the removal of eyeballs – hence the title. April is the daughter of a senator, but never gets her hands dirty. She leaves that side of things to May, who in between brutal homicides, wants to be reunited with her father, much to April’s disgust. Their relationship is passionate, fiery and apparently united by a shared, general loathing for the rest of the world – and its male inhabitants in particular.
On their trail is alcoholic cop Alejandro (Méndez), and his ex-wife Valerie Algorta (Ogueta), a tabloid TV journalist. They’re a pretty dysfunctional couple as well, albeit less murderous. Alejandro’s hot temper gets him in trouble after beating up and shooting at a group of teenagers. Meanwhile, Valerie is sleeping with another cop, David, to get information about the investigation, and won’t let anything get in the way of her story. Least of all her ex-husband, who is not too happy when he sees David coming out of Valerie’s room. All of the resulting friction does considerably more to hamper the investigation than help it, obviously, as David and Alejandro try to catch up with April and May’s bloody rampage.
I feel the main problem is these two halves don’t gel, or at least seem part of the same film. Each are interesting on their own terms, and you could say they share a similarly world-weary attitude (to put it mildly!). However, just as you find yourself engrossed in one thread, with almost atomic precision, the movie will switch to the other, with a different mindset. You thus need to recalibrate your brain to the different frequency of approach, and I found the repeated resets took me out of the experience. By the time the two stories ended up… well, maybe not merging, so much as occupying the same time and space, I was suffering from a moderate case of cinematic whiplash.
For some reason, every shot has that weird sepia tone, which seems obligatory for movies set in Mexico since Traffic. It doesn’t mess about though, and should deliver the nudity and violence desired by any discerning viewer. Watching April and May, blood-spattered and wearing just their panties, tormenting a Brazillian missionary whom they have abducted, is nightmarish stuff. It ends in the way I thought it might – well, right up to the point where Valerie throws a spanner in the works, becoming far more involved than any journalist should. This is fitting, since none of the characters here exactly look good. At least May deserves some sympathy, being sanity challenged, to put it very mildly. Nobody else has that excuse, and should certainly know better.