Sex and thrills

Noel Vera

Emilio Martinez-Lazaro's "El otro lado de la cama" (The Other Side
of the Bed, 2002) is that reliable standard, the sex comedy, only
after what Almodovar has done to the genre with "Mujeres al borde de
un ataque de nervios" (Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,
1988), you wonder why they bother trying to do this sort of movie
any more. It's just that Almodovar stuffed his film with so many
plot twists and perverse revelations, splashed the screen with so
many brilliant colors and beautiful women, and done all this with
such breathless, breakneck speed that anything that comes after--
this movie, for example--will only feel like a letdown.

Still, Martinez-Lazaro tried, and I suppose you might argue that
what differentiates this picture from others is that the characters
here burst into song--which may distinguish the picture from
Almodovar's work (though he has many sequences where image and music
work so closely together you might say he's already done a
few 'musicals'), but does recall another (and in my opinion, far
better) artist--the British TV writer Dennis Potter (only with
Potter the musical numbers are the emotional and dramatic core of
his stories, while these feel more like last-minute inserts).

Sex comedies above and beyond Almodovar aren't impossible--I
remember a film called "Amo tu cama rica" (Rough translation: I love
your rich bed, 1992), directed by the same Martinez-Lazaro come to
think of it, that was sexy, funny, sad. It helped that the dialogue
was genuinely witty, and that the latter part felt genuinely
hopeless, in that the hero was in love with a beautiful woman who
literally cannot stay faithful to him. It also helped that the
object of desire, played by Ariadna Gil (in my opinion one of the
most beautiful women in Spanish cinema--and that's saying
something), was so lovely and so faithless you could understand why
the man can't forgive her, the same time you understand why he can't
forget her. It's a situation that would keep any red-blooded male
awake all night in his bed (I know I did).

Enrique Urbizu's "La Caja 507" (Box 507, 2002) is a thriller with
two threads: one involves a capable and quite deadly killer out to
find the papers contained in a certain safety deposit box number
507; the other is the manager of the bank where the box was kept,
who had earlier suffered the tragic death of his daughter and who
learns, through a bank heist, that the contents of the box involves
the death of his daughter. One is on a quest for survival; the
other, for revenge. Eventually, the two threads come together, the
two men confront each other, and the result is memorably unpleasant.

It's a taut, well-made thriller, with clean if unspectacular
thriller sequences, and a rather bleak outlook on life. Better by
far than Martinez-Lazaro's movie--but then, thinking of Alejandro
Amenabar among others, films with sex and violence generally seem to
be better quality Spanish exports than films with sex and comedy,
nowadays (besides, I think the latter are much harder to do).
Antonio Resines is particularly fine as the banker who tracks down
his daughter's killers: his bald, blinking meekness seems
appealingly helpless, and when he later becomes more formidable,
seems intriguingly at odds with his quietly relentless nature.

(First printed in High Life, June 2005)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)