Tatuado

Paco is a teenager living with Alvaro (his father), the second wife of Alvaro and a recently born baby, his sister. Paco was told that his mother had escaped from home when he was a baby (after making him a tattoo in his arm) leaving Alvaro and him alone. And he decides to look for her, with the help of Tero, his girl-friend, a lier teenager who escape from her house. Alvaro decides to go with them, and they go to a little town where the parents of Paco's mother live. They met the old couple, and a cousin of Paco's mother, who had been in love with her. And they discovered why she left them. Meanwhile, Tero was recovered by his father, after being 5 days out of home. The Paco's story is good, I believe there are doubts about Tero's one, she believes to be actually daughter of a couple disappeared during military dictatorship in Argentina. People cannot discover if this was true or another of her lies.

I saw this film at the 2006 Palm Springs International Film Festival. This is a very small and slow paced film that takes us on the unlikely journey deep into rural Argentina of a teen aged boy and his girlfriend accompanied by the boys father to answer his unresolved quest for the truth of what happened to his mother. The road trip leads to his mother's hometown where he hopes the answer lies. The only thing the boy has to remember his mother by is a tattoo of a mongoose on his arm that she had put on him when he was a toddler. This is good story with good characters although the characters are a little emotionally one-dimensional. This psychological drama offers up a coming of age movie falls a little short of hitting it's mark but is still a good movie. I would give it a 6.5 of a scale of 10 and recommend it.