Love For Sale
Sex and blackmail spice up savvy Spanish murder comedy 'Crimen Perfecto'

Start with a classic Alfred Hitchcock-style thriller plot. Toss it in a blender with a shot of the zany grotesquerie of Beetlejuice, and top it off with a frothy battle-of-the-sexes comedy worthy of James Thurber. Whip it all up to a frenzy and you get El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime), a merry margarita of mayhem from up-and-coming Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesias.

The story is set almost entirely within the insular and self-sustaining community of a gigantic department store in Madrid. For Rafael Gonzalez (Guillermo Toledo), the alpha sales clerk in the ladies' fashion department, the consumerist temple within the store is "perfect"—the pefect colors, the perfect music, the perfect merchandise—as opposed to the mundane tawdriness of the outside world.

Addressing the camera as he saunters about his domain, Rafael tells us he's an elegant man who wants to live in an elegant world. Nothing horrifies him more than the thought of living a "mediocre life." With his oiled hair, sleek suits, and suave patter, Rafael is quite the ladies' man—especially in his department, where the other sales clerks are all luscious, leggy young women bursting out of their demurely buttoned shirts, and ready to hop into the nearest dressing room with him at the slightest flicker of Rafael's roving eye.

Rafael regularly treats one or the other of his women to what they call "the full routine," a night of sybaritic abandon in the store, after hours. Paying off the night watchman, Rafael and his date help themselves to designer clothes from the fashion department, lobster and champagne from the gourmet food department, and a roll between the sheets in one of the fancy mock bedrooms in the furniture department. The only one of his co-workers who never gets the full routine is Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), whose nail-biting homeliness is literally beneath Rafael's notice.

Rafael's rival, "Don" Antonio (Luis Varela), is an uptight veteran salesman from "the dark side: the menswear department" across the aisle. Both men are competing for the position of floor manager, and when Don Antonio wins on a technicality, his first order of business is to fire Rafael. Faced with expulsion from his Eden, Rafael fights back; a nasty accident occurs in one of the dressing rooms, and Rafael must exert all his ingenuity to dispose of the evidence and regain his Paradise.

His all too willing accomplice is ugly duckling Lourdes, who has witnessed the whole thing. But the price she extracts for her silence might be a fate worse than death, as she blackmails Rafael into ever deeper and more terrifying layers of Hell. She forces him to fire all the gorgeous salesgirls and replace them with unattractive (but more efficient) women, then takes him home to her appalling family, demanding the kind of smothering marriage death can't part soon enough for Rafael.

As the action and comedy become more surreal, the movie might have veered off into mere slapstick buffoonery. But de la Iglesias keeps all the elements under control with his wicked sense of humor, imaginative use of absurdity, and attention to comic detail. Attempts to stuff a corpse into a furnace may seem overly gruesome, but by the time the smoldering dead head starts popping up to give Rafael advice, the film's loony comic rhythms are well established. And from all we know about Rafael's longing for simple elegance, we feel his frantic pain over a future father-in-law who collects all the useless "little things" sold on TV, or a prospective bride whose apartment is crammed full of hideous ceramic clowns.

Toledo is wonderfully funny as Rafael, especially reeling bug-eyed in the center of one of those Hitchcockian 360-degree rotating shots that de la Iglesias parodies so well. Scarcely an icon of grace under pressure, he becomes increasingly rumpled and demented as his "perfect" world gives way to emotional (and literal) inferno. Cervera is a real comic find, investing Lourdes with newfound stature and confidence as she manipulates the womaniziner for her own ends. It's never her looks, but the bleak, ordinariness of her dreams that Rafael finds so crushing. And on that theme, de la Iglesias devises the perfect payoff to their murderous duet in this smart and dizzy satire.

EL CRIMEN PERFECTO (THE PERFECT CRIME) With Guillermo Toledo, Mónica Cervera, and Luis Varela. Written by Jorge Guerricaechevarria and Alex de la Iglesia. Directed by Alex de la Iglesia. A Vitagraph release. (Not rated) 105 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. (***)
Review published in Good Times, Sept. 15, 2005