Go ahead, it's okay-you can laugh at the sick and twisted parts.
For all the achievements of modern science in mapping the human genome, there remain gaping lacunae in our knowledge. For instance, has anyone identified the gene that makes mothers actually prefer the lime-flavored Life Saver? Or the one that caused a great number of otherwise sane people during the '80s to purchase the music of Phil Collins? And what of the gene that enables one to find perverse hilarity in some of the sickest, blackest situations ever to be filmed, such as those to be found in
Crimen Ferpecto
?
Cinemagoing Santa Feans aren't a particularly dark and twisted bunch: we tend to favor movies starring heterosexual parrots, penguins and/or Audrey Tautou. Mercifully, Álex de le Iglesias (who teamed up before with ***image2***Guerricaechevarría for their bleakly funny
Common Wealth
) makes films without our delicately offended sensibilities in mind, and to hilarious end, in this 2004 comedy of ill manners.
Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) manages the Ladies' section of a large flossy Spanish department store. Between his mesmeric ability to sell clothing to wealthy women and his equally magnetic prowess with the leggy beauties who work for him, Rafa has it all; we know this because he tells us so, in a blissfully unironic direct address to the camera. "When I see something I want, I take it," he advises us, and this includes his ambition to become floor manager for the store. But there's unexpected competition for the job in the form of Don Antonio, his arch rival from Menswear (Luis Varela). When an altercation between the two men leads to the literal (if accidental) elimination of Antonio, Rafa panics. Salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), a homely clerk whom Rafael has always fastidiously avoided; now, thanks to her nerves of steel and quick thinking, he's in her debt. And don't think Lourdes won't seize the opportunity to do a little corporate and social climbing of her own.
***image1***The script for
Ferpecto
(whose title joke deliberately references the misspelling of an old noir film) couldn't be more razor-edged, savage or laugh-out-loud funny. There's no place for us to stand in the narrative that's comfortable, no character's perspective that's sympathetic. You can't really root for either the misogynist Rafael or the mentally ill Lourdes in their pitched battle of wits, since neither one is likeable. Where another film would install a main character or two with whom one could identify at least in part,
Crimen Ferpecto
settles happily for a vast amount of amused panache in service of amorality, served up by whippet-smart actors (Guillermo Toledo recalls a demented cross between Antonio Banderas and Daniel Auteuil, while Cervera pulls off some combination of Gilda Radner and the actress who plays Hel in
Metropolis
).
Topping the script is a sizeable visual helping of director de la Iglesias' wild lysergic surrealism, a particularly Spanish delirium seemingly inherited straight from Dalí: colorful, pungent and hallucinogenic. If only for its disturbingly amusing fantasy sequences, hie thee hither to take in this pitch-dark and nauseatingly hilarious comedy. And please: Laugh loudly and freely, without shame, so the rest of us snickering nastily in the theater don't feel quite so self-conscious.
