La Pieta (1 Star)

This is the 22nd film in the Stuttgart Fantasy Film Festival.

If you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed that the number of this film is out of sequence. There's a good reason for this. When the film was shown on Monday it had to be stopped after five minutes because there were no subtitles. The festival hosts apologised and promised to fix it. The film started again, and it played for six minutes, once more without subtitles. The festival hosts claimed that the subtitles were present (whatever that means), but they weren't being shown. They experimented for more than half an hour with the film stopping and starting, but still no subtitles. They said they couldn't continue, because they didn't want the following film to start too late, but they promised to screen the film at an alternate date. That was today.

The film started. After a couple of minutes the first Spanish words were spoken, and the English subtitles were shown: "It's cancer". The audience erupted into applause, though not because of the content of the spoken dialogue.

Before the film started the director, Eduardo Casanova, said that he wanted the viewers to tell their friends that it's the best film in the world, even if it's not true. I'm sorry, Eduardo, I can't do this. This was the worst film of the festival, and one of the worst films I've ever seen. There were scenes I found so disgusting that I felt like walking out.

The plot: Libertad is a woman who pampers her son. Mateo is in his 20's – the actor is 23 – but he sleeps in bed with her at night. He's diagnosed with cancer, but she refuses to accept it. She argues with the doctor, telling him, "You must have made a mistake. I'm the one with cancer". She takes the tablets prescribed for her son, and she shaves her head so that she looks just as ill as he does.

A subplot is that Libertad and Mateo follow the news of the political events in North Korea, including the death of Kim Jong-Il, which would mean the film's taking place in 2011. In dream sequences they see themselves dancing in North Korea.

I don't like films about cancer, but there are other things I don't like. There's a scene with a close up of Libertad peeing towards the camera. The scene is totally irrelevant. I've heard that some men get off on things like this, but I find it disgusting. The suicide scenes (for instance, Libertad's ex-husband jumps out of a window) add nothing to the film. I also didn't like to watch Libertad breast-feeding Mateo.

Does the film have any sort of meaning? I doubt it. I wish I hadn't seen it.