For 80 days (2010)

I must confess that I liked For 80 days (dir. J Garano), fully aware of how bad the plot was, and how primitively the characters sometimes were developed. One of the reasons to like it was the forceful acting of the two leading actresses, who play a pair of friends that meet in a hospital after 40 years. One of the women visit her daughter's ex-lover at the hospital. The woman's husband is a quiet, demanding man. The other woman is a teacher at a conservatory. We come to understand that these two had a sort of fling going on when they were young, but the fling was never expressed or acted on, even though it was somehow acknowledged by them both. In their sixties, they are different people, but they are still attracted to each other. So, basically, For 80 days is a love story about people who haven't seen each other for many years. It's a sad tale about people who want to reach out to each other, who fumble and try to find the right words. Regrettably, the film often choose to take a conventional road in telling the story, so that the film ends up with creating exaggerated and simplistic scenarios along with characters, at least some of them, are so one-dimensional that it is hard to take them seriously. For all this, the film has some beautiful scenes and it is good to see a film about lesbian love that is based on other types of characters than the chic, career-minded adventurer in New York. Had the script been worked on in a different way, this could have been a beautiful film about love and hope.