Amor es Amor (Spanish) [Love Is Love]

This is exactly the kind of over the top 90s gay comedy you can't really take seriously, and honestly that's the whole appeal. Go in expecting a fun time, a few laughs, and just embracing how ridiculous it all gets, because outside of that, there's genuinely not much else going on here. The plot is razor thin and everyone's acting is cranked up way past normal, so the whole thing plays more like some kind of spoof, though I couldn't tell you exactly what it's spoofing.

The film takes place in Mexico City during the nineties, where we meet Enrique, an up and coming telenovela star. He's on the verge of landing a huge contract with a production company, until they discover he's gay after finding photos of him with his boyfriend. His dad refuses to accept that his son is gay and barely speaks to him because of it. To keep the contract intact, the studio head suggests Enrique fake a romance with a fading pop star trying to relaunch her career, someone the studio owner also happens to be secretly sleeping with. Both Enrique and the singer agree to the setup, much to the frustration of Enrique's actual boyfriend. Then a sudden accident wipes Enrique's memory clean, leaving him unable to remember anyone. His dad seizes the opportunity to worm his way back into his life, feeding him tabloid stories and videos to convince him the singer is his real girlfriend. Meanwhile the boyfriend gets shut out entirely since he isn't technically family. Enrique starts buying into the story he's being fed, but he can't bring himself to actually feel anything for the singer or be physically intimate with her. His boyfriend then lands a job on the soap opera set just to stay close to him. Eventually, exactly like you'd expect, Enrique's memory comes back the more time he spends around his boyfriend, and everyone's forced to finally accept the truth.

This film leans fully into camp, and honestly you can tell just from the poster alone. The story itself is pretty basic and not particularly well done, but setting it in the nineties actually helps sell the whole absurdity of it. You're clearly not meant to take any of this seriously, from the whole memory loss angle to the finale where the last episode of the telenovela airs live and Enrique publicly declares his love for his boyfriend on national television. The whole thing is dialed up to eleven, exaggerated in every direction, and it's probably poking fun at telenovelas themselves. The cast is fine across the board, though it's genuinely hard to tell if they're just bad actors or intentionally hamming it up. The actual laugh out loud moments are pretty spread out and few. This is the kind of movie you throw on during a lazy afternoon when there's nothing better to do. I really wish someone had warned me about that going in. (4.5/10)