La Mujer de mi Hermano

Ingredients: beautiful neglected wife (Bárbara Mori), workaholic husband (Christian Meier) and sexy bohemian brother (Manolo Cardona). Combine, stirring occasionally. Anybody who’s been through puberty will be able to guess where this is headed, and director Ricardo de Montreuil and writer Jaime Bayly certainly take their own sweet time about getting there. The plot is as generic as the title (My Brother’s Wife), the performances are skin-deep (although in Mori’s case, the skin is quite easy on the eye), and the pacing is as leaden as a slow-motion snail race. At least this is one foreign-language movie where there’s no danger of it being turned into a Hollywood star vehicle. Bayly’s script is based on his own novel, which may have been more substantial (the movie can barely fill 89 sluggish minutes).