We Are 18 Years Old

Tenemos 18 años is essentially a comedy, with an eccentric freewheeling structure. … The most striking aspect of the film is Franco’s willingness to play games; the story involves layers of artifice and irony, unreliable narrators, fantasy presented as fact, pointing to the director’s furture obsession with the shifting sands of reality and illusion. Whether or not you engage with it will depend on your tolerance for broad humour of the sort that puts rollicking dance band numbers behind dialogue to indicate comic situations, but if you persist beyond the unpromising first reel you’ll find a number of quirks and oddities, and a fair amount of inventiveness. Tonally, much of Tenemos 18 años is light and frivolous, yet there’s a distinctly experimental approach throughout.