Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto

Nadie hablará de nosotros must have been in the right place at the right time. Otherwise it is hard to understand how it could have won so many Goyas. In some ways it seems like a ripoff of Pulp Fiction: a sympathetic character finds a way to steal some money from gangsters; one of the gangsters' hired guns has some second thoughts about his métier; beatings and shootings abound. The key difference is that Tarantino's story is so stylized, with the fragmented storytelling style and cool soundtrack, that the violence is as shockingly laughable as it is just plain shocking. Díaz Yanes' story, instead, includes a bunch of details that might add a more direct social message: Victoria Abril's character is a recovering alcoholic, working as a prostitude in Mexico City, whose husband is a comatose bullfighter, whose mother in law is a former political prisoner and torture victim of the Franco regime, and who thinks nothing of going back to prostitution when she cannot find respectable employment in Madrid; the killer who goes to Madrid to get her has a terminally ill daughter and thinks God may be punishing him for his sins; his partner is a gourmand who loves to cook and introduce people to new taste sensations. All this makes for a jumbled mess of a movie; there is adequate tension and interest, as a crime thriller needs, but it does not push the boundaries of the genre and does only a mediocre job of fulfilling them. Including graphic scenes of violence, physical and psychological, against Victoria Abril does not qualify as groundbreaking, entertaining, or even interesting.