Although director Chus Gutiérrez’s Spanish language comedy Sin Ti No Puedo (Can’t Live Without You) on surrogacy feigns highfalutin ideas on the darker side of surrogacy, it is as formulistic as they come.
There is a gay couple at the center of the plot. Alex (Alfonso Bassave) and David(Mauricio Ochmann) have liberal family and friends. They seem comfortable being what they are. At the beginning, the couple announces its decision to have a baby. Everyone including Alex’s parents are overjoyed.
Sin Ti No Puedo story
The question is, how to go about it? A “solution” if one may call it that, presents itself at David’s doorstep when his long-lost sister Bianca (Maite Perroni) shows up. This, presumably, is meant to be the triggering point in the potentially volatile plot.
Instead, everything seems to go progressively downhill. Bianca who has a case of arson in her past (she burnt down her own home and family) seems to be born to make trouble. Any sane household would avoid her like an expired medicine. And David is rightly wary of having his sister back.
David’s partner Alex is more than glad to have Bianca’s back, and the rest of her, as it turns out. Before we know it, Alex and Bianca are in the swimming pool, doing very little swimming.
Sin Ti No Puedo plot
The next thing we know Bianca is announcing her pregnancy to Alex. Is she really pregnant? Or is she just trying to create a rift between her brother and his lover? The ‘rift’ sequence is laughably anti-climactic, with Alex confessing to having sex with David’s sister as if he had just eaten a cookie just before dinner.
From what we know of her in the course of an overburdened narrative, Bianca is not to be trusted. Lamentably, we get the same feeling about the director as the narrative progresses.
There is a growing sense of despair as we watch director Chus Gutiérrez and her writer skim over the surface of what is potentially an ambitious family drama about long-dormant secrets and how these colour the present.
Rather than plunge into the inner world of the family, the narrative remains stubbornly aligned to the surface. The Gabriel Garcia Marquez probe that we are led to expect, makes way for a silly shallow melodramatic tussle for supremacy among three people who don’t seem sure of what they want.
I am not sure if a three-way arrangement for Alex, David, and David’s sister with Alex being shared by both siblings, works for them. For the audience, it seems like a highly embarrassing menage a trois, best left unexplored.