7/28/2023 0 Comments El hijo de la novia![]() ![]() While Nino reminisces about the older, simpler days when he opened the restaurant, Rafael confesses that he is considering selling it to a corporation. The film sets up the generational divide between father and son early on, as Rafael explains that harder times are making it difficult for him to keep his father’s restaurant business afloat. His performance is fully matched by that of Héctor Alterio, bringing a salty vitality to his role as Rafael’s father Nino. Yet, with his expressive face, Darín makes this foul-mouthed restaurateur sympathetic. He is unresponsive to his adoring younger girlfriend, late to pick up his daughter for the weekend, and hasn’t visited his mother in the senior home for an entire year.ĭarín often plays a porteño, an Argentine climber or arriviste, and Rafael is certainly such a hustler. We know he’s due for a fall from yuppie grace as we see him barking into his phone, cursing over missing food orders at his restaurant, and refusing to spring for marscapone for the tiramisu, telling the chef to use cream cheese instead. It is typical Oscar material, but it succeeds outside Academy parameters for a couple of reasons: it offers strong, engaging performances from all of its leads, and it leavens the hokiness of its storyline with some broad humor and fast pacing.įrom the opening shots - juxtaposing Rafael’s eyes as a young boy, gazing with adoration at his mother, with his eyes as a man, baggy as he watches television on another sleepless night - we know that something has gone wrong since Rafael’s boyhood. The film, a Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee in 2001, translates very well to the video format. His hectic lifestyle is a recipe for midlife crisis, and we know that his old-fashioned, sentimental father and ailing mother will be a part of it when it comes. In a plot familiar from umpteen Hollywood movies, Rafael Belvedere (Ricardo Darín, recently seen by North American audiences as a con man in Nine Queens) is a restaurateur with no time for his personal life and a cell phone that’s always ringing with some new crisis. That, essentially, is the story of this sentimental film, just released on video, from Argentinean director Juan José Campanella about an overworked businessman whose mother has Alzheimer’s disease. ![]() ![]() “For her son to remember, a mother needed to forget,” is how a mock slogan for The Son of the Bride might read. ![]()
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