Untitled

Manuel Gómez Pereira

Entre las piernas (Between the Legs), in competition at the Berlinale, mixes labyrinthine plotting, Hitchcockian suspense and telephone sex. Nick Roddick dials M for Manuel Gómez Pereira, its director.

'Right now, many filmmakers are being too explicit. We're losing the idea of playing a game with the spectator'

Just as I am about to pick up the phone and call Manuel Gómez Pereira in Madrid at his production company, Bocaboca Producciones - named, presumably, after his 1995 Spanish hit, Boca a boca (Mouth to Mouth) - I receive a fax from my friend and colleague John Hopewell.

He thinks that I may need some background information. "Manolo is an amiable, completely unpretentious guy with a mop of lush Latin (ie, dark) hair and sad, beagle eyes," writes Hopewell. "All of which", he adds helpfully, "is (a) irrelevant, and (b) not instantly obvious on the phone."

Actually, it turns out to be extremely helpful, since the interview unfolds with a degree of structural complexity that entirely befits Pereira's new film, Entre las piernas (Between the Legs). A convoluted Hitchcockian thriller about sexual obsession, it comes across like a Vertigo that goes all the way. (Imagine Javier Bardem every bit as conflicted as Jimmy Stewart, but bonking repeatedly, and you're in the ballpark.) So knowing that I'm talking to someone with beagle eyes helps to keep a lid on things.

A fair exchange

Pereira, who had previously declared himself quite happy to give a telephone interview in English, has now decided that it would be better to talk through an English-speaking colleague. She does a sterling job, but the nature of the communication at times resembles one of those classic music-hall routines in which messages are distorted as they are relayed from person to person.

Buried in it all somewhere, too, is the irony that Mouth to Mouth is about telephone sex, which also an important strand in Between the Legs. At best, what we have here is interruptus (albeit, of course, extremely safe). All of this goes to explain that what follows may not entirely do justice to a director for whom precision is clearly a very important thing.

Pereira immediately confirms this in his answer to an early question about what he told his actors. "Lots of precision in the movements, but not too much obvious intensity," he says (she says). "Sometimes the work you have to do with an actor is to avoid there being too much drama or, in comedy, to prevent the actor going so far overboard that the spectator stops believing in them."

He also confirms the Hitchcock parallel (about which nobody with a smattering of cine-literacy is likely to be in much doubt after the credits, which echo both Vertigo and Spellbound, accompanied by a score - by Bernardo Bonezzi - of which Bernard Herrmann himself would have been proud). But Pereira does it with typical self-effacement. "It is only honest to follow the master of this kind of film, but without trying to imitate, which would be very pretentious on my part.

"The credits are very important, because they point the audience in a certain direction. When I talked to the composer, I told him that there is a romantic part to the story, but also a desperation in it. There's a love theme in Vertigo that is very painful, just like the love story itself. In the music, we wanted that sort of feeling: a desperate, painful love."

The starting point for Between the Legs is a therapy session for a group of people who are obsessed with sex. Out of the first meeting grows a relationship between Miranda (Victoria Abril), a broadcaster married to a policeman, and Javier (Javier Bardem), a screenwriter whose apparent calm almost certainly hides a more seriously troubled psyche. "He's probably the coldest character," Pereira says.

"I think his head works more than his heart. After all, he is a screenwriter. But there's a lot happening on the inside."

Other strands in the story involve a motor-mouth taxi driver dying of Aids; a transsexual specialising in phone sex; a cop whose wife walks out on him; a dog; a body in the boot of a car; some pornographic tapes; and a few nasty sidelines run by Javier's colleague.

Fully engaged.

Pereira freely admits that it is "a rather diabolical theme. There are plots and sub-plots that open up as the story goes on, leaving the spectator wondering how it is all going to be solved, which is what should happen in a thriller. Then, as the story goes on, the structure closes up again."

But the whole process requires a lot of concentration and a willingness on the part of the audience to play the game. "Right now, many filmmakers are being too explicit," he declares. "We're losing the idea of playing a game with the spectator."

But he remains adamant that, although the ending of the story is open in the sense that we can only guess what happens to Miranda and Javier after they board the aeroplane at the end, Between Your Legs is absolutely not an "open text" in the modernist sense.

"All the other questions - the ones about the plot - have been answered," he insists, brushing aside my conviction, after one viewing, that there are still a few loose ends. "If the spectators think there are still open questions, it is because they haven't been concentrating closely enough." This presumably goes for me, too.

"Here in Spain", he adds consolingly, "many people understand everything the first time, which is good. But some don't, which is just as good, because it means they have to go back and buy another ticket."