The trouble with pornography, at least for those who aren't pornographers or porn fiends, is that it often makes people giggle like teenagers in middle-school sex-ed class—partly as a defense against the shock of intimacy, partly because cultural taboos are being literally exposed in front of an audience. The great Boogie Nights got the giggles out of the way in the first half, which affectionately sends up the awkward mechanics of a porno shoot, then gets down to the serious emotional consequences of working in the skin trade. By contrast, Pablo Berger's mild comedy Torremolinos 73 never gets over the tittering naughtiness of a middle-aged couple shooting amateur erotic movies, and unlike in a Philip Glass composition, the film's one note doesn't add up to a symphony.
Based on a true story, Torremolinos 73 takes place in the early '70s in General Franco's Spain, a stifling puritanical environment in which sexual expression was just one of many things being repressed. Looking decidedly less than potent with his balding head and cheap polyester suits, Javier Cámara (Talk To Her) works a dead-end job as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, barely making enough to pay the rent. One day, his sleazy boss proposes that their company expand into the lucrative world of homemade sexual-education videos, which will be distributed exclusively to the burgeoning Scandinavian market. Desperate for money, Cámara and his shy, adorable wife Candela Peña, who thinks of nothing but having a baby, start filming themselves in various cheesy scenarios, and their amateur productions become a runaway success.
Though never unpleasant, thanks largely to Cámara and Peña's warmly convincing performances, Torremolinos 73 only really takes off when it deals with the filmmaking process. Tutored under a man who claims to have worked with Ingmar Bergman—he even offers a bullhorn with "Bergman" inked on it—Cámara takes such a liking to arthouse cinema that his grand black-and-white opus is inspired by that masterpiece of Swedish eroticism, The Seventh Seal. With a premise this ripe, the film seems bound to swell into Pedro Almodóvar-like outrageousness (or even Almodóvar-like melodrama, for that matter), but Berger's script flattens out into genial complacency. When a look at sexual perversion in Franco's Spain can be labeled a pleasant diversion, something's missing.