Nothing comes of the love triangle. Nothing much comes of Georges' plot to bomb the Grand Duke's carriage, either. Georges' gang that can't bomb straight makes a few inept attempts, but proves better at killing innocent bystanders than villainous czarists. They spend almost every minute sitting or standing around plotting, and muttering pseudophilosophical banalities, like jerkoff Raskolnikovs. Some intelligentsia. Each terrorist gets a trite motive: One had a wife killed by Cossacks, another struggles to reconcile his Christian pacifism with his revolutionary imperatives. Not one character moves one millimeter in any dramatic arc. The characters do not really interact in any way. Even the most action-packed scenes are bizarrely inert.
There is a certain sleepwalker elegance in all this, and the movie always looks gleamingly good. But you'd never imagine that this guy helped foment the battleship Potemkin revolt, and the film is no Battleship Potemkin. "I got very tired during shooting," Panin has said. "The subject matter seemed to suck the life out of me like as a vampire." It sure did. (NR) TIM APPELO
Ariztical Entertainment
Eating's Stiles, Carnes, and Lunsford (from left) are cuter than their material.
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Torremolinos 73
Runs Fri., May 13–Thurs., May 19, at Varsity
The funny thing about Spanish director Pablo Berger's debut feature—besides the fact that it's about an encyclopedia salesman who becomes a porn auteur—is that it's as much a work of standard-issue erotica in places as the Super-8 skin flicks it satirizes.
Alfredo (Javier Cámara, the male nurse in Talk to Her) is getting door after door slammed in his face. No one's interested in buying an entire set of encyclopedias, so his firm agrees to work with a Scandinavian publisher compiling a reference set on human sexuality. Each volume comes with a Super-8 film illustrating the, um, mating rites of a particular culture. Alfredo gets a choice: make homemade porn with his wife, Carmen (All About My Mother's Candela Peña), for 50,000 pesetas a pop—or find himself a new job. Hmmm . . . tough call.
Throughout, Berger pokes fun at conservative '70s Spanish mores, which make easy grist for his satiric mill—perhaps a little too easy. In one scene, Carmen overhears her boss' huffy review of Last Tango in Paris: "That wouldn't happen in Spain!" And when adult filmmaking agrees with both Alfredo and Carmen (he becomes a sought-after director, she a porn star), the industry screws up their marriage. A quick scan of Jenna Jameson's recent memoir will tell you that's par for the course, and the rest of Torremolinos is, too. Cámara and Peña invest real energy in their characters, making their plight as affecting as it can be, yet the film falls short as both satire and porn. If buying an encyclopedia as a pretext for watching dirty movies is absurd, isn't concocting an outlandish plot just to show comely actors coupling even sillier? It may contain plenty of sex, but in comedic terms, Torremolinos 73 amounts to 91 minutes of foreplay with no money shot. (NR) NEAL SCHINDLER
