(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 12 April 2002

EKOW ESHUN:
It's a great film, because like a Mexican film that came out last year, Amores Perros, it's local in scale, but it's global in ambition, in that it speaks to youth culture.

It reminds me of Jules et Jim crossed with Trainspotting, because it has this naturalistic element to it. I really like this blend of things that happen.

Equally, it's about the interior lives of two 17-year-old boys. It is messy, sometimes ugly and awkward. But it's also funny, passionate and quite sensitive.

MARK KERMODE:
I thought it was like Porky's directed by Gaspar Noe. The thing I really like about it, there were two films going on. It was a ten-year project.

The guys got together and said, "Let's make a film about two guys going to the beach." Ten years later, they got round to making it, and by that time they had grown up.

What you get is this movie about these two guys going to the beach with this woman, with this incredibly intrusive voiceover, which works to disrupt the narrative in a way which you would never get in an American movie.

One can't generalise about national cinema from five films, but Amores Perros worked is because it has comparisons to American films like Pulp Fiction, but with a Mexican edge to it. Of course there's also a comparison with American Pie. It is a film about two kids going out and losing their virginity, but it happens to be done intelligently and smartly, not by a bunch of dumb Americans.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
I knew the boys would go for this, this is such a masturbation movie!

KIRSTY WARK:
It's such a boys' movie!

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
When he talks about adolescent sexuality, he means boys' sexuality. Nothing wrong with that. I saw it at the seven o'clock showing in the West End. Absolutely packed full. The guys were laughing like drains. They couldn't stop laughing, and the girls were fiddling in their make-up bags thinking, "Oh, my God."

...It is soft porn movie with a rather better storyline. It's very funny. The sex is good. It's better than seeing the stars on screen, which is what we are usually treated to. It's fun, it's easy, but it's not a great movie.

...It's not Jules et Jim, it's The Rachel Papers goes to Mexico.

MARK KERMODE:
That's a terrible thing to say!

EKOW ESHUN:
One, it's not pornography. Pornography deals with fantasy. This film deals with the ugly reality of teenage sex. The other is that it has got a great social subtext.

You see all these scenes of real Mexican life through the windows of their car. You see soldiers stopping people at checkpoints. You see dead people run over.

It's a teen farce / romance. But at the same time it's also a genuine contemporary account of what modern Mexico feels like.

KIRSTY WARK:
What about the Mrs Robinson figure, then?

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
She is pretty good. At the start of the film, you have two girlfriends. We can't possibly have any women of any note in this film, so we send them off to Italy straightaway.

How to get rid of the girls in the first ten minutes of the movie. Pack them off to Italy! Then you get your Mrs Robinson figure, sure, but she is such a victim.

MARK KERMODE:
She is the one person in the movie who you sympathise with and empathise with. For a start, she is sexually intelligent. Everything about her is better than the two guys.

The guys don't know how to have sex, don't know what they're doing, and don't know how to have a decent relationship. These movies are not about blokes trying to get off with a woman. They are about blokes' relationships with each other.

KIRSTY WARK:
In terms of Mexican society, though, the sex really shocked the censors.

MARK KERMODE:
In America it shocked the censors as well, I think films that shock the censors are by nature a good thing. Not only is it not porn, it's not soft-core, it's hard- core something else.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
No, because we are not allowed to see the sacred shrine. That's always turned away from us. The woman can open her legs but we are not allowed to see what goes in there.

MARK KERMODE:
She doesn't open her legs.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
Oh yes she does. She has to take her knickers off.

KIRSTY WARK:
$2 million goes a long way when you have got a good script and great setting.

EKOW ESHUN:
This is the second most popular movie that's ever been made in Mexico, and it's sold very well around the world.

Despite some of the things Jeanette says, it's not some weird filthy teenage masturbatory fantasy. It's quite genuine, honest, warm, and it speaks of a life that most people have shared in some way or another. Whether you are male or female, it rings quite true.