Crimen Ferpecto, dir Álex de la Iglesia (2004)

Crimen Ferpecto is a deliciously wry and bloody satire of contemporary consumer culture—in fact, the last film with such a sharp edge against consumerism was 1978′s Dawn of the Dead, where muzak still rang amongst the flesh-eating zombies. In this film, Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) is a dapper and libidinous clerk at a Madrid department store who aspires to playboy perfection. After he accidentally murders his competitor, Don Antonio (Luis Varela), he covers up the crime with the help of the one sales girl he hasn’t slept with—Lourdes (Mónica Cervera), whom he describes as “not the kind of person you would see on TV.” She blackmails him into an embarrassing relationship—embarrassing in its normalcy–Lourdes wants a husband, she wants children, she wants a home, and she wants everyone to know about their eternal love. These are all things Rafael refuses to surrender to, preferring instead his pursuit of perfection as indicated by thick men’s magazines. Make no mistake, though, Loudes “love” is as corrupt as Rafael’s aversion: to force him into marriage, she assaults him with a reality TV crew, whose smarmy host ensures that love conquers all–provided it makes room for a commercial break. In Rafael’s manic desperation, he sets out to kill her.

Toledo manages to alternate between the confidence of a ladies man and the nervy anxieties of a prisoner; Cervera, too, is unabashed in her portrayal of an unselfconsciously desperate woman who needs a husband. Both are comedic performances that recall the films of Preston Sturges, an equally dark comic master. Toledo and Cervera carry the film’s forays into the absurd, making them doubly amusing, as when Rafael interacts with the bloody ghost of Don Antonio, whose jarringly disgusting appearance recalls moments from the most radical films of Luis Buñuel; or by the end of the film, when Lourdes’ line of clown-themed clothing takes the nation by storm and Carrera becomes a steely, leather-clad fashionista—the image of consumptive perfection to which Rafael aspired.

Yet it is de la Iglesia’s dark and cynical take on the space of the department store itself which makes the film great. Everything from airplane tickets to kitchen knives can be had, side by side and without consequence. He spares no minute background detail to transform the banal space of the department store into a well-lit hell, littered with advertisements and teeming with murderous potential. De la Iglesia’s ability to juxtapose this paradise of want with bloody murder recalls the late writer J.G. Ballard, who also revealed the murderous underbelly of comfort and consumption. He lets the camera roll, giving the audience an opportunity to soak in the overwhelming space, dense with consumer goods, in which violent psychosis is born.

De la Iglesia is a filmmaker without a strong following in the United States. When I had the opportunity to see him speak in 2007, he mentioned that Ben Stiller had expressed interest in remaking Crimen Ferpecto, but that his agent had denied selling the rights to Stiller. De la Iglesia was upset: it would have given him a healthy paycheck, and increased his professional stock in America. At the time, I couldn’t understand de la Iglesia’s reasoning—wouldn’t he do anything to prevent the film from banalization in Hollywood? Yet after watching the film again, I’m confident that it was de la Iglesia’s own cynical attitude towards Americanization that would have had him laughing all the way to the bank.