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Like a Spanish film version of Will & Grace, My Mother Likes Women treats homosexuality with a glib cutesiness that creates a safe distance between its audience and reality. The film uses one woman's discovery of her sexuality as a springboard for light comedy, and if its open-mindedness is suspect, at least it seems to have its heart in the right place.
Writer-directors Ines Paris and Daniela Fejerman are less interested in the lesbian tendencies of Sofia (Rosa Maria Sarda), the titular mother, than they are in the effect those feelings have on daughter Elvira (Leonor Watling), a neurotic book editor who can't handle her mother's relationship with a much younger woman. Elvira's sisters, married lawyer Jimena (Maria Pujalte) and free-spirited rocker Sol (Silvia Abascal), cook up a plan to separate their mother from Eliska (Eliska Sirova), the Czech pianist who's captured her heart, but Elvira is just as concerned with her ambitions to be a novelist and her burgeoning relationship with a sensitive writer. The film is sunny and predictable, with homophobia casually brushed to the side even as Sofia and Eliska are never seen doing anything more than hugging passionately. If not for Watling, who gives a funny, nuanced and splendidly watchable performance, My Mother Likes Women would be too much of a trifle to bother with. As it is, it's little more than an amusing sitcom.