| SPANISH FLY : Pablo Berger's 'Torremolinos 73' [7/10] |
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| Monday, 13 June 2005 | |
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This review - of a film I originally saw back in August 2003 - was written for Tribune magazine. The picture is released in the UK on June 24th, 2005. TORREMOLINOS 73 [7/10] Spain/Denmark, 2003 Starring : Javier Camara, Candela Pena Director : Pablo Berger Torremolinos 73 was one of the crowdpleasing hits of the Edinburgh Film Festival... 2003 edition! But with even some of the most remarkable recent Spanish movies (such as Achero Manas's brilliant November) struggling to obtain UK distribution, it's perhaps a case of 'better late than never'. Nobody would claim that Berger's debut is particularly outstanding - but this idiosyncratic satire of late-Franco-era Spanish film-making is an extremely likeable, engagingly daft affair. Serious subtexts occasionally surface: this is, among many things, a wry but optimistic view of early pan-European co-operation between the chilly-but-liberated north and the warm-but-repressed south: a Danish film-crew (including ubiquitous Scandi-superstar Mads Mikkelsen) helps out budding director Alfredo (delightfully hangdog Almodovar-regular Camara) as he haltingly progresses from ‘educational' sex shorts to his 'epic' entitled "Torremolinos 73". But while the director has lofty aims to emulate his hero Ingmar Bergman, the money-men insist on the film containing some rather more salacious - and therefore commercial - bedroom scenes. The soft-core porn elements are incorporated with a touch of of the bouncy, innocent glee which gave Paul Thomas Anderson's seminal Boogie Nights such a lift - the atmosphere is ‘naughty' rather than in any way sordid, with period details (everything is orange and/or brown) captured unobtrusively. Berger's direction never approaches 'P.T.A' heights of inspiration, of course, but his script is rather cannier than you initially suspect. The most amusing (and touching) moment comes when our hero has to produce sperm so that his fertility can be checked: he goes into a hospital cubicle whose walls are covered with images of naked women, but prefers to use the passport-sized photo of his own, relatively "homely" wife Carmen (Pena) for stimulation. The picture glides along nicely on this kind of good-natured character comedy for almost all running-time, only losing momentum a little in the final stretches. But it's rare to find a movie without a single scrap of self-importance, even if film-within-film "Torremolinos 73" is the most wildly pretentious Fellini/Bergman pastiche imaginable. Sight and Sound is unlikely to agree, but on this evidence, Berger is, if anything, a rather more entertaining film-maker than either of those overrated 'masters'. Neil Young |
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