Weekly Film Review: Me La Debes

‘A family of three, plus the maid and daughter's boyfriend look pretty normal on the outside. But in actuality, they are all having affairs with each other. The boyfriend is sleeping with the mother and daughter, and the father is sleeping with the maid. Do they all know about each other's affairs?’

‘You owe me one’ (me la debes) is a Spanish film made in 2002 and depicts the genre of comedy and drama. The duration of this film is 12 mins and throughout this short film, the themes are love, lust, family, status, sex and deception. This was written by Carlos Cuaron, cinematography by Alexis Zabe and edited by Sebastian Garza. This film contains a sex farce, which is a light comedy; is centred on sexual pairings of characters as they move through doubtful plots throughout the film.

In the opening scene, the scene focuses on the portrait of the family that consists of the Father, Mother and Daughter, which suggests that they are a patriarchal family where the Father holds great dominance over his family. This also shows whose present and introduced in the film; or could suggest who’s most important in the film. Furthermore, the frame of the picture was gold and they had an old rotary dial, which suggests they’re traditional and the gold can emphasise their wealth, suggesting that they’re a middle class family.   A scene after that, it gives a long shot view of the whole desk and the scenery around it, above the desk is a statue of Jesus, which can symbolise that they’re religious as well. This already gives the audience an idea of what the characters are like just by these two scenes.

This is also displayed by sound, in the beginning scene while showing the portrait, classical music was shown throughout this scene, which also highlights that they’re religious, have traditional values and that they have class (stereotypically).  Also, in the opening scene the use of the barking dog, can suggest its importance later in the film. The barking dog was used throughout the film and could highlight a way of this sound is used to build up tension. Furthermore, the sound of the television, barking dog and classical music got louder and louder, suggesting that it was getting louder until she reached her climax. this film contained a lot of diegetic and non-diegetic sound as a lot of sound was coming from the characters, television, barking dog, but also from the classical music.