MURMUR OF THE HEART: A Review of Tear This Heart Out

Tear This Heart Out is a movie promoted as the Gone With the Wind of Mexico, a sweeping epic set against difficult times. It was also Mexico’s entry in the Oscar race last year. The central character is a naïve teenager who falls in love with a General who fought in the revolution. It starts out promising, but as if written by Anton Chekhov, the marriage is a disaster. The wife finds out her husband has more mistresses and illegitimate children than King David and that he is evil and power hungry. It starts out promising, but the story never catches fire because the central character, unlike Evita and Scarlett O’Hara or even Georgiana, the heroine of the recent The Duchess, is simply not very interesting and the story as a whole is not that sweeping. In a world of revolution and government corruption, rampant poverty and exploitation of the working class, the heroine’s main problem is trying to find someone who can locate her g-spot. There are strong performances by Andres Ascencio and Jose Maria de Tavira. But the script by Roberto Sneider doesn’t really work.