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Ferpect Crime review
:. Director: Álex de la Iglesia
:. Starring: Guillermo Toledo, Mónica Cervera
:. Running Time: 1:45
:. Year: 2004
:. Country: Spain
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It is no secret that Álex de la Iglesia has built his reputation and filmography on outrageous dark comedies, loaded with sex and violence. After his take on modernized and spaghetti westerns (Perdita Durango and 800 Bullets), this time Iglesia has set his camera on beauty, ugliness, jealousy & the curse of marriage, with the most unexpected background, the women's section of a Spanish department store.
Rafael (Guillermo Toledo), a middle-aged womanizer who works at the women's section of the store where he was born, has two obsessions in life: seducing his co-workers (and customers to make his sale quota) and becoming floor manager. After accidentally killing his nemesis for the floor manager position during a fight in a fitting room, Rafael is blackmailed by Lourdes (Monica Cervera), the ugliest employee and the one, obviously, he has always ignored. From there, his life turns into a nightmare as he is forced into a marriage from which the only exit might be murder.
As in most of his films, Iglesia's humor is cruel and the bursts of violence are as unexpected as hilarious. The filmmaker's taste for provocation is what makes his cinema so unique and vibrant and it usually works, contrary to gratuitous vulgarity, because his films are soaked in irony and self-derision. His movies are undeniably in the tradition of the idea we have of modern Spanish cinema, defying normalcy and morality, but contrary to Pedro Almodovar (Bad Education) whose approach is more social-oriented and Bigas Luna, who's a master at carnal feasts (Jamón, Jamón), Iglesia is a satirist who likes to bend the rules of genre cinema. In Perdita Durango (Dance with the Devil) and 800 Bullets, he pushed the boundaries of western and Tarantinoesque pictures while here, he offers us, among other things, twisted versions of a Hitchcock movie and romantic comedy. His world is usually filled with anti-heroes as there is usually never a positive figure in the lead, most of them being some kind of monsters or social freaks, but once you accept the rules of his cinema, you know you'll be rewarded with strong doses of shamefully contagious humor.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
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