Film review: Apariencias

Apariencias, which means appearance, is a South American romantic comedy movie. The story revolves around Carmelo (Adrián Suar), an extremely shy person, who falls in love with his colleague Veronica (Andrea Del Boca), but struggles to express his feelings. In a twist, Veronica finds him demonstrating in a gay rally and thinks he is gay. Instead of telling the truth, Carmelo pretends to be gay and builds lies around this to get closer to Veronica and win her over.

I watched Apariencias a year ago when I was doing the level 2 Spanish course. None of my classmates or my teacher knew about this movie. I watched it just because it was available for free, not really by choice, but I’m glad to have seen it. Apparently South American Spanish is easy to understand as people talk slowly, so it was a good pick any way at the time.

I didn’t know much Spanish, so watching a movie without subtitles was very ambitious, but strangely I enjoyed it. I had to pause several times in between and refer to the dictionary to find the meanings of whatever words I could make out in their conversations. It was hard work, but I felt great when I understood what was going on in the movie. Everything fell in place when I watched it for the second time.

As Apariencias was the first Spanish movie I watched, and I put lot of effort to understand, it’s always going to be the most memorable movie for me. Also, it was a nice movie, which made me laugh despite having difficulty in understanding the language. Therefore I can say without hesitation that Apariencias is the best foreign language movie I’ve ever seen.