SEX AND THE SENORA

REVIEWED - TORREMOLINOS 73: A crucial scene in Pablo Berger's charming first feature sees the hero, Alfredo, whose wife, Carmen, is having trouble conceiving, being escorted into a booth by a nurse and asked to provide a sperm sample.

Unimpressed by the erotic material provided, he unearths a passport-sized photograph of Carmen and sticks it over the head of one of the nude models.

It's that sort of film: lewd, cheeky, but ultimately comforting. Alfredo and Carmen are tested in any number of ways, but their devotion to one another never really wavers.

As the film begins, Alfredo (Javier Cámara) is employed as an encyclopaedia salesman. Wallpaper is brown. Shiny trousers crackle with electricity. Busts of Franco are still desirable items. It is the 1970s, an era of Spanish history middle-aged readers whose parents could afford foreign holidays will recall with affection, and citizens are opening themselves up to the exotic.

Alfredo's boss takes his staff away for a training weekend and explains that the firm is moving into educational documentaries for the Scandinavian market. The employees are encouraged to film themselves having sex with their wives for a package amusingly titled The World Encyclopaedia of Reproduction. After some prevarication Alfredo and Carmen (Candela Peña) agree.

The movies are successful and - is "Coals to Newcastle" the relevant cliche? - Carmen becomes something of a porn star in the Nordic countries. Buoyed up by his unexpected triumph, Alfredo decides to embark on his masterwork: a hilariously pretentious art film, blending the wrong bits of Bergman, Fellini and Resnais, titled Torremolinos 73.

Berger's picture manages to satirise the Spanish sex comedies of the 1970s - which, it would appear, resembled their British counterparts, but with less ugly shaggers - and the excesses of high-brow European cinema without ever becoming arch or overly self-conscious.

Much of the credit must go to Javier Cámara, who was so extraordinary as the nurse in love with a coma patient in Almodóvar's Talk to Her. Once again Cámara allows his inherent gentleness to sweeten a character prone to making deeply unwise life choices. With his help, Torremolinos 73 becomes as cosily enjoyable as a film about pornography, sterility and holidays with a personified Death is ever likely to get.