Selected at the Florida Film Festival and seeking film award success, 'Your Iron Lady' is written and directed by Jorge Xolalpa Jr., adapting the unpublished book of her mother Teresa Ramirez Galan.
What I can't fathom enough about Your Iron Lady is how poorly it was written. The entire time, it felt like Xolalpa was trying to cram too much of his family's storyline into the whole hour and thirty two minutes, which in numerous occasions, lost track of what this entire movie was supposed to be about. The screenplay, which I was lucky enough to read, comes off very amateur and mundane to say the least. Each scene in the movie felt like a drag and utter mess. There were a lot of scenes in the movie where something important would be going on with the character Teresa and her family, but, you -- as an audience member -- didn't at the slightest most, not feel any sympathy for these characters and their situations at all. The same goes for Teresa's daughters in the story as well. Yes, we understand they came with Teresa in the United States, but the sisters played a drag. A wholesome amount of unnecessary subplots for these supporting characters where you just feel lost the entire time, trying to figure out who's this movie actually about, which sums my purpose to say that each scene is filled with a lot of unnecessary situations that don't make the movie go anywhere. Now determining how many drafts there was for this screenplay, I'd assume it needed a lot more. There's just too many gaps in this movie that need to be filled, which makes the movie drag and drag. Your Iron Lady's story is not enough to make it interesting or even at the most, enough to deliver a great story. What it does is feel like a bore and something we've already watched already, but executed horribly. Your Iron Lady feels more, if anything, like a telenovela series than an adapted movie.
The direction for this movie is very interesting and unattractive to say the least. There's some scenes in this movie, like the one where Teresa is talking long distanced to her son while her daughters watch along in the room, that is very well directed. But for the most part, there was a lot of post production issues in this movie, like the subtitles in the beginning that were rough to see, that should've been fixed before submitting something like this to a film festival, where as a director, you should be picky about little issues like this, especially since this is a movie dedicated to Xolalpa's mother in general. The direction for this biopic is seemingly dry and bland, where there's nothing special to pick from it.
Another issue with this movie is sound production. There's a couple scenes in this movie where the sound is very irrupted, where certain characters could be yelling, which makes the audio sound very unincorporated. Another one would be, again, the subtitles. One big issue with the movie was the wigs these actors had on. It just looked sloppy and completely noticeable where you can figure out they had wigs on and it wasn't their natural hair.
The only bright part of this movie is Victoria del Rosal's performance, which saves this mediocre screenplay from its complete downfall. Del Rosal's performance for this movie is exceptional and very well acted. Not extremely powerful, due to the scripts bland intakes that try to make you feel moved but don't. However, del Rosal is fine and very likable for her performance for the role of Xolalpa's mother Teresa.
Overall, Your Iron Lady is a very stilted story with shoddy direction and a narrative that is none at all interesting or at all important. Whatever the message Xolalpa Jr. is trying to paint for this movie, it drastically fails and is to be blamed on the screenplay for its lacking characteristics of cramming too much into this 1hr. 32min. storyline that feels too rushed, crummy, and sloppy. I believe if Xolalpa took the time and gave this movie a couple more drafts and some actual criticism from different people to shine the light on the cons of this movie, then he could've had something somewhat decent.
