Where to start with Torremolinos 73? The style is old-fashioned kindly farce with some very cheerful and silly sex-scenes. It might have strayed into Billy Wilder acidity like Kiss Me Stupid but prefers to be defiantly optimistic about human nature. I really rate this film for its gentle good-humour, its love for its characters and of movies in general. The director (Pablo Berger) has succeeded in satirising the early 1970s, its mindsets and quirks, from a distance of thirty years, which isn't too easy. And the references are exactly those that obsessed us all in the early 1970s. The first part lays out how an encyclopaedia salesman is finessed by his boss into making sex films with his wife under the pretence that they are for the "Copenhagen Scientific Research into Sexuality Institute" or some such. The inhibited, average-looking (which is the point) and very broke couple find the financial benefits much to their taste but she's not so keen in being recognised in public by strange foreign men. The wife Carmen (Candela Peña) also wants a baby but husband Alfredo (Javier Cámara) is firing blanks. Meanwhile Alfredo has discovered his inner auteur. There are some very funny sequences of titillation, Alfredo-style, with Carmen rather resigned to it all.. After he pens an epic script entitled Torremolinos 73 he and we are surprised when his boss goes ahead with the project, insisting however on an upgrade to 35mm and a support tech crew (from Scandinavia of course). Part two consists of the shooting of Alfredo's script (which steals from the plot of Durrenmatt's The Visit) at Torremolinos. The Scandinavian crew can't quite believe they're working on this project but young Magnus (Mads Mikkelsen with blond hair) is thrilled to be there and clearly even more thrilled to meet the wife (perhaps he's seen the "research" films in Scandinavia?) Alfredo's script of course can't help but pay homage to The Seventh Seal (chess and beaches), various bits of Fellini (dwarves yet), Antonioni (barren landscapes) and possibly even Jean Cocteau's Orphée (Carmen in her suit and flat hat resembles either Maria Casares as the Princess/Death or a young version of Helena Rubenstein – take your pick). (One of the pleasures of this film is the bizarre costuming for Carmen's "research" films and for the movie within a movie. Clearly this husband is not as buttoned down as he appears). For me the funniest bits are of Carmen and Magnus roaming the landscape for the cameras, she in her severe suit and shovel hat and he as Death in cloak and scythe. They play chess on a pedalo, run up and down beaches, take rides on the merry-go-round and eventually get to the climax of the film within a film. And Mads Mikkelsen is hilarious in the small but pivotal role of Magnus, delivering a sweet natured character who manages to keep a straight face and his dignity enveloped in cloaks, scythes and sex scenes. I've missed telling you the joke with the horse (too rude but very funny). There's a happy ending, of course. And a movie is born. Go see.
Review of Torremolinos 73
