Habitación en Roma (Julio Medem, 2010)

Two young women holidaying in Rome experience a one-night romance before parting to continue their straight lives. Room in Rome probably fancies itself as a lesbian-curious version of Before Sunrise, but fails to make the characters' connection palpable or, despite making the pair unfeasibly good-looking, the bonding between them work erotically either. It's hard to dismiss the director being a heterosexual man with foggy notions of what women actually do or feel as a reason for this: odd, since Medem once demonstrated a real grasp of both male and female emotional involvement and eroticism in sensitive and vibrant dramas such as Lovers of the Arctic Circle and Sex and Lucia. But that was ten years earlier and it's clear that this is now a middle-aged director with nothing left but wish-fulfilment issues. The script rather pathetically makes the Spanish one an engineer and has the pair demonstrate expert knowledge of renaissance art and personages in between their bouts of tasteful frotting to claim distance from being mere soft porn, but the attempt is far too transparent to convince, and thoroughly undermined in any case by a torrent of excruciatingly twee dialogue in contrived English.

3/10