It means 'between the legs' in Spanish, but it's not a porn movie; let's be clear from the start there is actually very little sex scenes involved and only a couple of nude scenes. It's actually a sort of thriller, and not a bad one. Miranda (Victoria Abril) meets Javier (Javier Bardem) at a secret meeting, a therapy group for sex addicts, and they start seeing each other. They almost do it that same night in a car park, inside a random, abandoned car left unlocked, but she stops and runs home. She has a husband, Felix (Carmelo Gomez), and a daughter. Things get complicated very quickly, and we learn a piece of it at the time throughout the whole movie. Javier is a famous screenwriter, and has a sort of fetish for phone-sex. Once he met a woman who started telling him stories. He was gripped by the stories or by her, by both maybe. They started an affair (Javier was married too at the time, but the marriage will soon end) and there were a lot of these stories told to each other on the phone. Now, the night he walks Miranda at the radio station where she works, a man comes up to him saying he recognized his voice from some famous tapes circulating all over Madrid. Javier learns this way that his phone-calls have been taped and distributed. One night Felix is out on the streets and sees Miranda getting in a car with Javier. He follows them only to see them having sex in a club. Felix is a policeman, and he just had his proof. His world is shattered to pieces. He doesn't tell her what he saw, but she soon guesses the truth and gets scared because she heard in the news of another policeman who shot his wife in similar circumstances (more or less, I don't know if she cheated or not but she clearly didn't want anything to do with him anymore and told him so) - a man who later has the 'nice' idea of shooting himself in Felix's house and with Felix's gun.
Javier finds out that his business partner is now living with his (Javier's) wife, and also that it was him who distributed those tapes after being blackmailed; apparently that woman threatened to expose the illegal porn videotapes he made using hidden cameras, or something like that. Things get even more complicated when a body is found in that same abandoned car that Javier and Miranda used that night. It's the body of a guy that for a long time obsessed Javier with his scripts until Javier sent him a very brutal letter to get rid of him, but also the same guy who had something to do with his business partner's illegal activities (somehow, not too clear on that...).
Felix is in charge of the investigation, and he goes to question Javier, finding Miranda there. Felix looks really out of his mind, like a bomb ready to explode. Javier informs his partner of what's going on (meaning, that the police are here asking about that dead man), and both of them meet Felix right after his confrontation with Miranda. Felix shouts at Javier but his partner gets scared, thinking Felix is talking to him, and runs out only to get hit by a car and die. The police find out about his past and close the case believing he's the murderer, so Javier is safe now, but Felix can't let it go, he's sure Javier did it, but how can he be "really sure"? He actually has no proof at all, he just wants Javier to be guilty because of Miranda. Too scared to go back home, now Miranda lives with Javier, and in another flashback we see the end of the story. Javier had gone to that woman's house to talk about those tapes and she admitted everything , but also told him that those stories were the same written in the scripts that he had rejected as scum. Apparently she wanted to avenge her friend's work and reputation. Being the addict he is, the fight ends with them having oral sex, where he finds out that she's not simply a friend of that wanna-be-writer, they are actually the same person, and in his shock and repulsion he grabs something and hits him/her on the head at least twice. So it was him! Felix was right! The film ends with another revelation. While Felix discovers he has won something (maybe a lottery of some kind, he has a ticket and he's told he's been lucky) he sees his daughter coming back from a trip and smiles: he has a precious daughter, his life is not over - we see Miranda and Javier at the airport, ready to fly somewhere together. He meets a taxi-driver coming back from a trip with his family: this was another one of the stories in the movie. This man told Javier of how his life got ruined because he didn't resist and had unprotected sex with a stranger and is now sick and his wife took the kids and left him. He doesn't have a lot to live, and we discover now that after hitting that guy Javier had called him on the phone and given him money to hide the body somewhere, money that he used to take his family to Disneyland to create good memories before he dies.
All these people's stories are tied together in some way, and the last we see of Miranda and Javier is when they go on board of the plane, taking advantage of two seats left empty by someone who didn't show up, exactly the same thing that happened in one of those script/stories, where the plane blows up killing everyone. Of course we don't know what happens in reality to 'this' plane, we only know they're happy and together, we're not told if they actually land safe and sound or not.
Anyway, the film was a pleasant surprise, well done and captivating till the end.
My guess is, with another title it would have been more successful. I watched it because it was on tv and because being old I had already read something about it here and there on the internet, but I would have never gone to the cinema for such a title.
ITA tra le gambe
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