‘Mango’ Review – Netflix’s Painfully Derivative Fruit-Themed Rom-Com Isn’t Sweet Enough
Call me naive, but I genuinely thought that Mango was going to be a deceptive title laced with some kind of hidden meaning. But no – it’s genuinely a movie about mangoes. You could give it some points for novelty, but really, the mangoes aren’t that important; they’re instead just a backdrop for a deeply predictable rom-com that plays out and ultimately ends in exactly the manner you’d expect it to. The mangoes are the auto-shop in Maintenance Required or the Colorado weather in Finding Joy, just something for the leads to bicker over all the way from meet-cute to happily ever after.
Mehdi Avaz’s Danish-language Netflix original, written with Milad Schwartz Avaz, is sweet enough (like the mangoes), but completely lacks any distinguishing characteristics or meaningful ambitions. Sometimes that comfort and familiarity can be reassuring, but the leads lack chemistry, and the mother-daughter bonding plot threaded through it all is tired from the off. I wish I liked it more, since it’s handsomely shot and entirely inoffensive, but it just never gave me much of a reason to.
The plot, such as it is, finds Lærke (Josephine Park) travelling to rural Malaga, Spain, to try and convince a Danish expat named Alex (Dar Salim, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf) to sell his floundering mango plantation so that a luxury hotel can be developed on the land. Lærke is a careerist who has neglected her relationship with her teenage daughter, Agnes (Josephine Højbjerg), so she comes along on the work trip under the illusion that it’s a mother-daughter vacation.
Lo and behold, Alex isn’t interested in selling and is immediately hostile to Lærke, who makes fun of his mangonade – like lemonade, but with mangoes – and throws his financial woes in his face to try and strong-arm him into the sale. But none of these movies have ever been on the side of the aggressive capitalist, so it takes Lærke no time at all to realise that she’s being asked to do a deeply amoral thing, and it’d probably be better for everyone if she and Alex just fell in love and found a win-win situation instead.
The path to this painfully inevitable conclusion winds through the usual miscommunications, fallouts, and reconciliations, with most coming a tad earlier than they ordinarily would in the runtime, as if the movie itself is aware of its own derivativeness and is trying to speed through things as quickly as possible. This ends up being a surprising upside, since Mango has a more engaging second act than movies of this type typically do, but the broad strokes are still the same.
The relationship between Lærke and Agnes doesn’t make up for it either. The latter’s dynamic with Alex’s sister-in-law, Paula (Sara Jiménez), is more compelling, but is more of a footnote to the main arc of a workaholic mother leaving her daughter unattended, and her daughter acting out for attention. We’ve seen it all before, and while it’s resolved satisfyingly enough – would you believe, for instance, that both ladies need to just open up and have a conversation about it all? – it’s as incurious as the main romance.
This idea of very basic communication skills being the solution for the entire plot of a rom-com is not new, nor is it unique to Mango, but I found it really noticeable here all the same, with every major conflict feeling frustratingly easy to resolve. It’s like the characters are checking their watches to see how much of the runtime is left before deciding whether or not they’ll act like reasonable human beings or kick off for no reason. This makes every relationship feel inauthentic, so the ultimate payoff is dampened; you know it’s all going to work out, and that everyone will develop a better understanding of themselves and each other, so it’s just a case of getting there. You will eventually, but sticking with a movie just to see it go through the motions isn’t something I’d enthusiastically recommend.