Rich in Love รวยเล่ห์รัก (2020) [ บรรยายไทย ]

Bruno Garotti’s new romantic comedy Rich in Love, or Ricos de Amor if you prefer, gives away a lot of itself with its title and premise. While I’m generally uninterested in the love lives of the wealthy, being bitter and petty as I am, it’s nonetheless my job to engage with these tedious genre films. While the occasional gem, such as To All the Boys I've Loved Before, might be nestled within these overstuffed thumbnails, Rich in Love is much more akin to something like Airplane Mode – a thoroughly unlikable affair with a setup seemingly designed to be groan-worthy and off-putting.

That setup, for what it’s worth, finds Teto (Danilo Mesquita) working incognito at his wealthy father’s company and falling in love with Paula (Giovanna Lancellotti), for the benefit of whom he fabricates a much more humble blue-collar background. Uh-oh. Whether or not Teto can create a life for himself beyond the luxurious one laid out for him by his father’s success is just one of many questions posited by this largely uninteresting endeavor which leans into its comedy at the expense of its romance, and loses its central love story in a thicket of warring themes and subplots.

That having been said, Teto and Paula have some measurable chemistry which helps to keep their trite arcs slightly more engaging than they might otherwise be. But they’re consistently undermined by a light script that asks little of them and nothing at all of the audience. Problems are arrived at, skimmed over and casually moved away from without much fuss, and while that kind of unchallenging comfort-food style can be welcome, it rarely proves memorable. Some cultural specificity gives Rich in Love some texture, but not enough; it’s a frivolous thing so imbalanced that it can’t help but topple over into aimlessness.