Elisa y Marcela review - same-sex marriage drained of passion
(The Guardian Spain)

Isabel Coixet transforms the real-life story of two Spanish women who married in 1901 into a bafflingly joyless affairWriter-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.Coixet also has a supercilious habit of concluding scenes on an `iris out` transition, a dwindling circular window on one character, as in a silent movie - an apparently playful touch out of sorts with the heavy-footed seriousness of what has gone before. And the film is lumbered with two very torpid and undynamic performances. Continue reading...