Spanish filmmaker Manuel Martín Cuenca, following the narrative pattern of a TV soap opera, braids together, in modern Madrid, some proverbial lives of quiet desperation: an expatriate Cuban smuggler, a crippled unfaithful wife, an ex-con chess master and his bartending former cellmate, an overworked social worker and her teenage Oblomov who will not leave his room, plus peripherals. Nothing overly sensational happens, only the mustering of sufficient courage to carry on. For all the overt angst, the film offers an invigorating escape — an immediate involvement, a thorough engulfment, in the lives of believable people, always so much more involving than those of unbelievable people. One line of dialogue could stand as a pithy fictional credo: "The world outside is pretty fucked-up. Sometimes you need to invent another." With Nathalie Poza, Eman Xor Oña, Leonor Watling, Javier Cámara. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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