There is a beauty and grace in the group’s middle class existence that hides the orbit of loneliness and disconnection revealed by each individual in this long movie plagued by poor subtitling.

The DVD cover showing two women kissing is somewhat misleading. The film is mainly about heterosexual affairs and the concept of not really knowing what is going on with the person that is presumably the closest contact in life, a spouse. No one in the film seems to grasp what is going on with anyone else, instead their lives overlap in a shallow, perfunctory way without intimacy or connection.

This is most poignantly examined through the character of Sofia, a single woman who is not conventionally attractive and works in a bookstore, and spins a tale of a French lover who she may or may not actually be involved with. The further into the film and her story we get, the more confusing the truth from the lie becomes.

Irene, an agent married to an air traffic controller, withdraws from everyone in her life. She is elegant and beautiful, but as her husband observes, the kind of person that gets nervous when you hug them. At lunch with friends, she is silent while they bicker and gossip, eventually leaving her alone at the table looking wistfully at a young woman nearby. When she spots an old college friend, Silvia (Aurea Marquez), during a photo shoot at her office, she becomes anxious and even more socially awkward. She works out her attraction to Silvia alone on the couch before her husband gets home. The tension between her wanting to meet with Silvia and not being sure about her feelings is wonderfully played out through her suddenly youthful flirting and almost walking into a pole.

But all this awkward shyness with Sylvia seems disingenuous when she finally reveals that she has had a few affairs with women. It is moving, however, to see her slowly break off ties to her comfortable life with her husband while she searches for a way to obtain the freedom to be herself. And the difficulty and complexity of making that type of life-altering choice is painfully depicted in the final scene.

The most interesting stories are the ones involving the quirky side characters. The hot Leonor Watling, who played Alicia in Almadovar’s Talk To Her, plays bartender Cristina who becomes a revenge fuck for betrayed husband Mario after he discovers his wife’s affair with a fellow actor. The two spend time together talking in a restaurant and she soothes his ego as a good catch, which eventually leads them to bed. Her character does have a twist that involves Silvia, but the vagueness of a reference to a shared accident and the maddeningly poor quality of the subtitles makes it somewhat unclear if they were once girlfriends. Watling won a Cinema Writers’ Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress, which seems odd since her role is very short and not as striking as her looks.

Eva, another less developed character, is the marginally employed single sister of Irene who seems to have a closer and more open relationship with Manu, Irene’s husband, than Irene does. Eva gives him massages while they talk and laugh, but asks her sister for help to start her own body therapy business. She is the exact opposite of Irena: light, playful, warm, and direct. Unfortunately, her character is the least explored of the group, even though she is part of the core of women and it is insinuated that she is sleeping with Manu.

In The City is well acted and filmed to take full advantage of the lushness of Barcelona from the perspective of the city dwellers. The story is in a very natural style but it takes so long to get going that I was confused about the time progression and exhausted before the story drew me in. The huge cast didn’t help--it was difficult to follow who was related to whom for the first hour. Spanish speakers will likely get a lot more out of it than those who have to contend with the typo laden subtitles.

The sensitive, mature portrayal of a bisexual woman trying to balance obligation and guilt with the need to be true to herself is a refreshingly different perspective from most English language films' exploitation of bisexual women as titillation for a male audience, and worth seeing at least for the different cultural perspective.