In this Spanish [un]comedy My Mother Likes Women, by directors Daniela Fejerman and Inés París, three grown women act like a maniacal Junior High school clique on a rampage (yes, worse than Jodie Foster and her cohorts in Foxes) when they find out news that causes tranquilizer popping, car crashing, and bad song-writing.

What’s all the fuss about? Their mother, a famed concert pianist, has fallen in love with a…woman! Shock of shocks!

Divorcée Sofia (Rosa María Sardà) introduces her new live-in lover, Eliska (Eliska Sirová), to her adult daughters at her birthday party without any unnecessary to-do. The two play a dual piece on the piano in exhibition of their togetherness, grinning contentedly.

The three daughters—Elvira, Sol, and Gimena, named after the women in El Cid—are not moved by the pair’s harmonious notes. In fact, they look slightly as if they will throw up. Not only is mom Sofia’s new love interest female, she’s Czech (evidenced by the broken translation of her Spanish in the English subtitles) and bakes foreign-tasting cakes Elvira quickly throws out; she’s twenty years younger than their mom (making her around Sofia’s children’s ages); and she’s nice, talented, loving, and beautiful.

Oh, and she obviously makes their mom happy, thus she must go (moms, you know, aren’t supposed to have good sex lives).

This farce about homophobia-laced group-think is ultimately not so funny. At a post-reveal freak-out session, the daughters grind their teeth about needing to accept their mom’s sexuality. Elvira (Leonor Watling of Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her) is taking it the hardest. When her sister asks the hyperventilating Elvira “Why are you so afraid of it [mom’s lesbianism]?” she answers that she’s afraid “I may be like her,” meaning that perhaps she’s caught some familial “contagion”—the reason for her abstinence with men of late.

Like witches around a brew, the women slurp down cocktails and swear they’ll find someone to seduce Eliska away from their mom. Agreeing that it’s the “vicious thing to do,” but seemingly wishing their mom to be miserably alone rather than gay, they even call themselves brouhas (witches).

First stop? The sisters head to the local dyke bar to find someone capable of wooing Eliska. The youngest sister, Sol (Silvia Abascal), who sports bright red punk stripes in her hair, turns out to be quite the chick magnet. Elvira gets hit on by a dashing woman in a swank suit coat and tie—such an alarming event for her psyche that she heads straight to the shrink. From the couch, she self-diagnoses: “Maybe the lesbian in me is attracted to Eliska. Every girl wants to take the place of her mother.”

To cure herself of her Freudian hee-bee-jeebies, Elvira practically rapes a male author she meets through the publishing house where she works. “Call me a whore. Stick it in me,” she frighteningly begs.

Meanwhile Sol publicly humiliates her mom at a rock concert. In front of Sofia, Eliska, and a packed bar of strangers, Sol’s band premieres their new song “My Mother Likes Women,” which might as well be this film’s nasty little theme song, with lovely lyrics like “I felt like committing suicide when she told me she has a woman licking her belly.”

Despite her cruelty, since Sol seems so lucky with the ladies, Sol is deployed to seduce Eliska at a family picnic. Although Sol pulls off her shirt and tries to exhibit her breasts to Eliska, bookish Eliska goes on reading, barely distracted. Elvira will have to be the one, given her intellectualism, to crack Eliska’s fidelity, the sisters finally declare. Elvira gets Eliska drunk and the two do kiss, but Eliska reasserts her love for Elvira’s mom and turns down Elvira, who does seem ready to go farther (more out of actual desire than ruthlessness).

I could go on, but is this list of sick plot details enough to show how misguided this movie is? Although the film veers towards a happy ending that reinforces the mother’s right to be happy with whomever she loves, the depiction of the daughters’ deep-seated disgust with lesbianism and yet their hypocritical willingness to sleep with their mom’s girlfriend (anything to destroy the relationship) is truly troubling.

For a film that tries to be funny, this seems like more of a tract on how to hate. Also, lesbians are shown as the scary “other” that no one wants to be (or wants their loved ones to be), and lesbian tendencies within oneself are clearly something that must be guarded against (and battled with straight sex) at all costs.

Although a bow-tie ending seeks to make this story have a liberal moral, what stands out is the main content in the box: lesbianism as difference, capitalized on for some thin laughs.

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