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Just admitting that a story is dumb doesn’t make it any less so. Mexican director Antonio Serrano’s La hija de canibal doesn’t get far before the unreliable narrator of the English title (Cecilia Roth of Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother) admits in her voiceover narrative that she’s been lying. Some of the more lurid and cliché’d details of her story about her husband Ramón’s kidnapping, such as her glamorous appearance and ritzy apartment, are embellishments, and so they change in a cut back to their drab and equally contrived "reality." This revisionism is a recurring device in the film, along with Lucía’s confessions of narrative excess and contrivance, and though such self-consciousness might serve to call into question the nature of truth, it mostly underscores the feverish inadequacy of Lucía’s, and Serrano’s, storytelling. That, for what it’s worth, involves her bumbling attempts to pay her husband’s ransom with the inept help of her neighbors, old revolutionary Félix (Carlos Álvarez-Novoa) and young studmuffin Adrián (Kuno Becker). A romance with the latter is in the works, or is it? This shaggy-dog variation on the erotic road movie Y tu mamá también! won’t say what’s what, and you’re not likely to care. In Spanish with English subtitles. (110 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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