La Mujer de Mi Hermano

Featuring a magnetic international leading cast (Uruguayan Bárbara Mori, Peruvian Christian Meier, and Colombian Manolo Cardona) – and simply gorgeous original music by Angelo Milli and cinematography by Andrés Sánchez – La Mujer de Mi Hermano (My Brother’s Wife) is a stylishly moody, yet unfortunately lacking, movie.

Based on a novel by controversial Peruvian author Jaime Bayly (Don’t Tell Anyone), La Mujer de Mi Hermano is an angst-y exploration of relationships (a crumbling marriage, a strained brotherly bond), and the passion and secrets that surround them. It also marks the feature-film directorial debut of Peruvian filmmaker Ricardo de Montreuil.

It is a little bit of a shame that while the movie is so beautifully looking, it is also terribly unfocused. (The movie's much too much about and essentially told from the perspective of the titular wife.) Nevertheless, the story's gripping enough – at least for the first act and most of the second.

Zoe (Mori) and Ignacio (Meier, who also starred in Don’t Tell Anyone) appear to have a wonderful marriage: They are good-looking and doing well (they live in an ultra-chic, ultra-modern home, all concrete, glass, and chrome), and, though childless, seem to really love each other.

After almost a decade of marriage, however, Zoe has come to realize that her marriage to Ignacio no longer carries the passion it once did.

Fiercely methodical – or avoidant – he will only make love his wife on Saturdays. Emotionally adrift, she's left to search for what's missing in her marriage in someone else, and soon finds it and herself seduced into the arms of Gonzalo (Cardona), her husband's carefree artist brother.

At first, Zoe becomes reinvigorated by the romance; both she and Gonzalo enjoy their many rendezvous, and he becomes a sort of confidant, offering Zoe a new perspective on her somewhat puzzling husband.

But eventually her decision spirals into a series of events that drives the three through a gauntlet of despair and resentment, as painful secrets from the past are brought up, and the time for everyone to face the truth fast approaches.

Being familiar with Bayly’s oeuvre, I can tell you that his stories are usually engrossing and very, almost too specific. (Most of them are set in his native Lima; the screen version of La Mujer de Mi Hermano is set in Mexico City – surely idiosyncrasies were lost in translation, as it were.)

By relocating the story, for not telling it from the brother-in-law's point of view, and by upping the melodrama with every twist and turn, La Mujer de Mi Hermano lacks energy, and finds its mood less invigorated by plot than by passionate performances.

My Rating **1/2

Photo: Lionsgate Films.