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And no limit to the number of subplots. The city is Paris, where long-estranged youngest son Victor (Leonardo Sbaraglia), an astrophysicist repatriated in Argentina, returns to visit his ailing father, Max (the great Spanish actor Fernando Fernán Gómez), a wealthy industrialist of Spanish origin, and reunite with his family. Mother Marie (Geraldine Chaplin looking like a gray-haired version of the wicked queen in Snow White) seems eager to wrap up a deal with the Dutch to buy dad’s laboratory so son Alberto (Álex Casanovas) can take over the chairmanship from inept son Luis (Roberto Álvarez), who’s having an affair with nanny Bea (Mónica Estarreado) that’s sending his wife, Pilar (Adriana Ozores), up the wall, but then who is Victor to complain since he’s renewing his romance with ex-flame Carmen (Ana Fernández), who’s also Alberto’s former wife, right under the nose of new girlfriend Elaine (Leticia Brédice), whom he brought with him from Argentina? And meanwhile, who is Rancel? The last question is the only one of interest in this film; too bad Spanish director Antonio Hernández treats it almost like a footnote. It’s the name that Max, increasingly paranoid and perhaps rightly so, keeps muttering, the name that sends Victor on a search that takes him to a railway station from some 40 years ago and a scenario reminiscent of Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie. Although Sbaraglia is no match for Chaplin and Fernán Gómez, the dynamic among the three as they wrestle with memory and delusion, desire and repression, almost prevails over the soap-opera clutter. In Spanish with English subtitles. (125 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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