40 Years Young

The chicken would not act.

A night shoot in Cancun. Erick Elias, Gaby Espino, one hen, and a call that ran until 6 or 7 in the morning. Adal Ramones came down the next day, fresh, and asked how the animal work went. Elias told him the bird refused to act and would not take direction. They improvised. The scene never made Pietro Loprieno's cut. latestnetflix.com's view is that Espino told SensaCine Mexico she felt safe sharing it because almost nobody saw it except the people who lost those hours.

That is the gossip this 81-minute Mexican comedy actually has. Not a leaked salary. A hen with notes.

Pool laughs and friend jealousy.

Ramones and Elias also walked SensaCine through a pool scene that collapsed into a laugh attack so complete the crew stopped pretending it was still a take. Elias said the good times between Cesar and Paolo told you more about the friendship than a crying scene about the wife. Ramones went further. He said there were more jealous-friend beats than fights with the pretty woman in the plot, more friction between the two men than between the couples.

They shot it in a Cancun hotel for four or five weeks during the pandemic, living on top of each other instead of going home between calls. Ramones told Noticine the bubble made the relationship. Both men took kitchen lessons so they could hold a pan like they owned L'Allegria, the Italian-Mexican restaurant the film invented. The Cinemaholic later had to remind readers the place is fiction, even if an eatery with that name exists in New Jersey.

Italian pages, a 60-year-old cuarenton.

Loprieno wrote and directed. Italian-born, Mexican cinema debut per Cine Premiere, Corazon Films producing with Roberto Fiesco and Iliana Reyes on the line. In Fuera de Foco's press sit-down Ramones said the script started in Italian and then had to become Spanish, a translation you can hear in the rhythms if you know to listen. The original title is Cuarentones, slang for people in their forties. IMDb's trivia is the joke the poster will not print. At release Elias was 41. Ramones was 60.

Elias told Milenio he identified more with Paolo's lightness than with Cesar's crash. "This is a very fun stage, they are the new 30," he said. Ramones, who hit with Otro Rollo in his mid-thirties, told El Sol de Mexico he never even noticed his own forties crisis because he was busy raising a family and a late-night show. He also said he could sit with his kids and watch it.

Theaters got it March 10, 2022. Netflix's English card, 40 Years Young, landed May 4 in the US, 81 minutes, with Elias, Ramones, and Espino on the marquee. Infobae clocked nearly 7 million hours in a week and a Top 10 slot, a lot of midlife for a movie critics mostly shrugged at. Ready Steady Cut called it colorful and flat. IMDb sits around 4.5. The Corazon Films trailer still sells the life-as-recipe pitch. The hen kept the last laugh.