ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rise of a new genre in Mexican cinema in the 1990s: the romantic sex comedy, a middlebrow cultural form that was born from changes in a national cinema culture that saw the development of the multiplex in Mexican cities and the development of a new professional bourgeoisie working in new mediascapes. Most critics writing on the middlebrow see it as a mode that borrows from both high and low cultural spaces, and, following Bourdieu, both makes the difficult accessible and intellectualizes the popular. Sex, Shame and Tears has a number of points in common with Love in the Time of Hysteria and its success is also due to the way it turns the romantic sex comedy into a middlebrow cultural form. The early part of the film is pure farce: loud arguments, sexual partner swapping, jealousies and humour dependent on essentialist gender stereotypes and sexist jokes.
