Director - Gabriel Rojas Vera
This movie excited me for two reasons wholly unrelated to the quality of the film. First, it’s always exciting to see Bogota on the big screen. To see a neighborhood you know, and match up its celluloid with the picture in your mind. I was there! La Candelaria, OMG! It’s not the most common occurrence, and it still feels cool. Second, I could understand this movie with absolutely no subtitles, the first time that has ever happened. It helped that they spoke with those famously clearly enunciated Bogota accents, and that I more or less know the slang here after living here for a few years. I even knew when Karen invited her boyfriend to Monserrate that he would say no, because a lot of people here believe that couples who visit Monserrate together will break up (Colombians are a superstitious lot). I felt a sense of accomplishment watching “Karen Llora en un Bus”, but that was a matter of this movie being in the right place and time in my life.
The film itself is not very good. The story it tells is entirely predictable and hard to relate to. Let’s take it from the top. Karen (Angela Carrizosa Aparicio) is a rich guy’s wife, and is expected to basically take care of him and do nothing else. We only start to know her when she is running away from her spouse, crying on the bus. She moves into a flophouse in the downtown La Candelaria neighborhood, and things start out difficult. She has to shower with cold water, and there are roaches in the bathroom. The other people who live in the building are more or less bemused by her horror – just take a shower and step on the bug, you spoiled princess! But this is a big change for her – no more luxuries. She is on her own now.
Gradually, she begins figuring out how to be independent. Turns out she has a hidden love for theater – she mentions Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” as her current reading. But if she had this hidden aspiring dramatist beneath the doting housewife surface, why did she marry some rich guy with no personality in the first place? In another convenient plot twist, Karen is invited out by the young party girl who lives in the building for a double date with a rich married guy and his friend, who conveniently turns out to be a playwright himself! They talk of art, and drink beer in artsy La Candelaria cafes, and suddenly Karen feels alive with possibility. No more making coffee for Jose Q. Negociante, who nevertheless makes several failed attempts to get back together with Karen and apologize. We can see that it is over the last time they get together, when Karen substitutes the coffee her ex ordered for her with a beer, giving him the shock of his life. A woman drinking beer in the afternoon, the horror!
Sorry if there are spoilers here, but you will discover all of these plot “twists” a mile away as you watch this film anyway. You’ve seen the gringo version of this movie before, maybe in “Eat Pray Love” or any other film where a woman divorces her overbearing husband and starts really living. It is difficult to feel for a character like Karen; we never see any motivation for why she would ever marry a vanilla guy like her husband, and one wonders why she didn’t get cold feet beforehand. There are a couple scenes of her mother saying that Karen needs to go home and fix her marriage, but Karen shows a spine that apparently hadn’t existed before in refusing her mother’s demands. When is the moment that Karen realized the marriage was over? You’ll never know, because the film doesn’t show you. You could make another whole film with the parts missing in this movie that would make Karen seem selfish and less sympathetic for entering and leaving her marriage on a whim, and the overall message of this film seems to be “Get a hobby that your wife likes or she will leave you.”
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