Despite a horrificly bad title and a pedestrian story, My Mother Likes Women (God, I have trouble even typing that) is a surprising good time.

Here's the setup: Three sisters dote on their divorced mother (Rosa María Sardà), a concert pianist, but find themselves shocked when she turns up attached to a young Czech girl who speaks broken Spanish. After plenty of Woody Allen-style neurosis, the trio hatches a plan to break up mom and lover by finding a surrogate for the Czech's affections. Eventually this falls on the most troubled of the sisters, Elvira (Leonor Watling), and soon enough mom is single again. Alas, she's so depressed that she's lost her girlfriend that the sisters have a change of heart, travelling to the Czech Republic to convince the girl to go back to mom.

It's so straightforward that the plot points are telegraphed from miles out. There's never any confusion about how this will end, and even the details (Elvira will find true love and quit her depressing job) are obvious from the get-go. But directors Daniela Fejerman and Inés París wisely choose to focus the movie on the radiant Watling instead of the droll romance between mom and gal. Elvira's neuroses are priceless and on par with anything Woody Allen has ever done. Watling (in addition to being a radiant beauty), wears her insecurities on her sleeve, reminding us of a young Diane Keaton. She's worth the price of admission all by herself.

Beyond Watling, the rest of the movie is workmanlike but passable. (Watling appears in about 2/3 of the scenes, so there's not much time to get bored by her absence.) Just about everyone involved with this production is a disciple of Pedro Almodóvar in some fashion (most of the cast has been in at least one of his movies), yet the surreality of an Almodóvar production is never approached or even attempted here. It's a straightforward romantic comedy, with nary a giant rubber vagina to be found. That isn't necessarily a bad thing: Sometimes you want your romance delivered without enormous prosthetics.

Aka A mi madre le gustan las mujeres.