Better Than Perfect

The Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia has a style pitched somewhere between horror comics and a sprightly 1950s corporate comedy, and both suit the department-store hell of his pitch-black farce El Crimen Perfecto. This multilevel bubble world stocks everything from lobsters to bedroom suites; the smarmy protagonist, Rafael, has everything he needs for romantic conquest on site, dates included. The place is a terrarium of conspicuous consumption, and Rafael, who was literally born in the store, is its Venus flytrap—a preening women’s-wear honeydripper whose gift is knowing what his customers need to hear. A lot of insecure women (men, too) hear a man’s voice in their heads when they shop. It’s a voice that sets and enforces the standards of beauty, one that says not just “Buy this” but “Buy into this.” Played by Guillermo Toledo, an actor who looks like a seedier, more smug Dennis Miller (if that’s possible), Rafael embodies that voice. He even uses it on us, the first time we see him—in his mirror. The great fun of El Crimen Perfecto is in watching Rafael get chomped by a superior predator: a mousy shopgirl named Lourdes played by Monica Cervera, a vivacious comedienne who suggests Elaine May on uppers. With her bug-zapper eyes, Bride of Frankenstein hair and a face that tapers like a shark’s (and exposes as many teeth), Lourdes is the exception to Rafael’s credo that he loves all women. Too bad she saw him try to dispose of the co-worker he accidentally killed. The movie begins and ends too broadly, but the middle section, in which Lourdes makes the hapless Romeo her love slave and demolishes his life, made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen this year that didn’t feature Wallace & Gromit. Whether mauling her man in a photo booth or gazing ominously at a reality-TV wedding show, Cervera’s ravenous expressions are funny enough. But when set alongside Toledo’s stricken face—he resembles an aristocrat who mistook a urinal cake for a dinner mint—it’s like a call-and-response of perfect torture. El Crimen Perfecto is the first of Iglesia’s movies to play here, despite the many fans of his 1995 Antichrist comedy Day of the Beast. His florid style could pass for a trashier, zanier Pedro Almodóvar (who produced his 1993 debut Accion Mutante), but I prefer the messy exhilaration of his uneven work to Almodóvar’s fussy, smoothly controlled melodramas of late, even when it rockets off the rails. In the berserk finale, Lourdes destroys the last vestige of Rafael’s pride by obliterating the standard of beauty itself. When the world is a puffed-up consumer-culture bubble, all you need to deflate it is a little prick.