Kiki, Love To Love

Synopsis:  Five stories of sexual fetishism set during a Madrid summer.

Imagine Pedro Almódovar’s twin made a film in his brother’s style and it was completely unfunny or that Judd Apatow moved to Spain and became an art-house director. That is pretty much the measure of this film which according to its publicity was the No.1 smash hit of the 2017 Spanish Film Festival where it premiered at the Opening Night Gala “to riotous audience reactions’. I’m not sure exactly what that last part means but if it meant the audience storming the box office for a refund I’d believe it.

Kiki, Love To Love is actually a Spanish language remake of Australian director Josh Lawson's 2014 film The Little Death.  If we are well used to English language remakes of foreign films disappointing despite the reverse direction Paco León manages exactly the same result, replacing the suburban vernacular charm of Lawson’s film with a glossy but often tasteless and generally empty repackaging of the original.

Not that the film fails simply as a remake. Taken in itself it is under-cooked. One of the hallmarks of Almódovar’s films is a sense of genuine empathy that the director has for his eccentric, troubled characters, a quality that infuses his comedy with real life and makes it rewarding. One would like to say that in Kiki the characters are simply laughed at but there really are no laughs to be had as León moves from one story of sexual quirkiness to another, culminating in a standard celebratory ensemble climax (so to speak) that in no way feels deserved (the closest the film comes to achieving some genuine connection in this respect is the sequence involving a plastic surgeon and his wheelchair-bound wife).

There is one exception to the M.O.R. tepidity and that is the clever opening titles which juxtapose our civilized and animal aspects. Not that they are actually suited to a film about fetishism as an antidote to libidinal disappointment.

Clearly this is a Spanish thing and just the French are fixated on adultery so their Southern neighbours are into kinky sex, No problem with that but presumably it means that the laughter this film has apparently provoked is of the nervous kind.

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