So My Grandma’s a Lesbian! (Salir del ropero) is a Spanish comedy that is available on Netflix. It takes the familiar story of a young lady getting engaged to a person not suited for her and narrating it with a new idea of a grandma getting married to her long time girlfriend. I liked the film for the beautiful scenic locations of the community it is pictured – breathtaking were the mountain terrain, the ocean and the cobblestone streets – and for these reasons, the film gets a higher rating than it deserves.
Eva (played by Ingrid García Jonsson) is a young lawyer from Spain, she is getting engaged to a wealthy Scottish gentleman. To communicate the conservativeness of her fiancée family, she describes them to her mother to be pro-Brexit and pro-Trump. Not to lose their acceptance she tries hard to project a perfect image of herself and her family, often it means hiding the details of her ‘uncommon’ family – a single mother who gave birth to Eva at the age of 15 and then to leave her at the care of her grandma Sofia (played by Verónica Forqué). Adding to this is the latest news about Sofia getting married to her childhood best friend Celia (Rosa Maria Sardà). The idea of her grandma lying to her all the years and the fear of losing her marriage, Eva is devasted. The film tells convincingly on how the proposed lesbian marriage gets processed within the family, received by the small community and the church is told in an interesting way.
I liked the character of Celia, she is naive, yet bold, simple yet sure of what she wants and goes for it. Celia talks to the local priest and to her son about her communication through letters and phone to the Holy See, who she affectionately calls as Pope Paco, on hearing about her proposed same-sex marriage and her plea to have the Church recognize it to have said: “Trust me, Celia. I’m working on it”. Others around her think she is mentally unstable. She keeps saying to Sofia it is time for them to “come out of the wardrobe”, Sofia corrects it to ” come out of the closet”, for which Celia reacts ‘closet’ sounds masculine and it is ‘wardrobe’ that sounds feminine – the actual words in Spanish may have sounded better but we are able to get the humour.
While I enjoyed the two grandma characters, Ingrid García Jonsson as Eva impresses us with her natural and measured acting. Barring these three, the others like the character of Jorge who comes as Eva’s childhood love and Celia’s son were all stereotypical. Had care been taken to define them better, the movie could’ve been a lot more engaging.
The movies did make us think of elderly marriages and that too of same-sex in a more understanding way!
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