Don't Tempt Me (2001)

At first it's a film for a multilingual and multicultural public. Then it's a film with several levels. Actors are simply fantastic. The idea of the three kingdoms of the World, Hell, Earth, Heaven, everyone with a specific language (English for Hell, Spanish for Earth, French for Heaven) and Latin for the Court, is very hilarious and suggestive. More: the idea of a snobbish, Forties, b/w Heaven, where the good angel Lola (Victoria Abril) is a star of the stage in the Paradise, a stylish theater/restaurant, singing AND DANCING (!!!) "Meditação" by Jobim (white dressed) and later "I wanna be evil" (black dressed), both in Rita Hayworth style, is only one of the thousands engaging details and quotes that fill the film. Also the opening is very hilarious: the good angel, Abril, and the bad demon, Cruz, masked while robbing the supermarket, are debating about the theological and philosophic reasons of Good and Evil. Rarely a film is so clever, surrealistic, funny, well played, well turned and balanced like this one. If you forgive me the analogy, it's like a drink with Cukor, Capra, Hitchcock, Fellini, De Palma, Risi, Brooks, Truffaut, Oury, shaken and served with a perfume of Almodóvar. Excellent.

This unique story revolves around an angel from Heaven and a fallen angel from Hell who are both sent to Earth to compete over the soul of a boxer.In great contrast to so many of her Hollywood movie roles, Penelope Cruz is shot in this film as a less than desirable character. In fact, the most enjoyable part of the movie results from the fact that the angel from Hell that Cruz is playing is the condemned should of a former mafia hit-man or thug, so all through the movie she is playing an angel pretending to be a human, but also was only ever a man in real life so she has to pretend to be a woman while fulfilling her angel role on Earth. So Cruz pretending to be a man at heart who is awkwardly trying to pretend to be a woman creates a magnificent off-kilter dark comedy. If for nothing else, the movie is worth viewing just to see Penelope dance around her room (in the style a man would dance) to the original 1970's song "Kung-Fu Fighting".

In Agustin Yanes' SIN NOTICIAS DE DIOS (badly translated into English as DON'T TEMPT ME, which in reality should have been NO NEWS FROM GOD), Heaven is a luxurious black-and-white nightclub perpetually set in the Fifties, administered by Marina D'Angelo (Fanny Ardant) and entertained by Lola (Victoria Abril). Hell is a soup kitchen where people speak English, where its administrator (Gael Garcia Bernal) looks like a kingpin right out of "Miami Vice" and where Carmen (Penelope Cruz), a lipstick lesbian works as a waitress, much to her disgust (since she later reveals she was a drug lord on Earth and weeps when seeing GOODFELLAS). Both angels have been summoned by their bosses to claim the soul of one stupid boxer (Demian Bichir). Here is when the story turns into PULP FICTION, but with none of its originality. True, some of the funnier scenes involve business transactions between diplomatic representatives of Heaven and Hell and some rich dialog between Ardant and Bernal, as opposites who appear to have quite a bit in common (more than they would dare reveal but only hint at through JD Salinger's book "The Catcher in the Rye"). Other than that, I didn't quite get the whole mess that the convoluted story is and a subplot where two cops (Cristina Marcos and Luis Tosar) are also after Bichir's tail leads nowhere. It's a shame, because there is a scene where the very masculine character Cruz plays (a man trapped in a sexpot's body) threatens Marcos with doing something rather nasty to her with a fork, but that never happens. As a matter of fact, Cruz's character is really the only interesting one of the lot (Abril's Lola is thankless, suffering in elegant silence until she decides to shoot 'em up) because of the ambiguity she represents. She would have the been the real reason to concoct a story out of as a person sent back to Earth as Hell for some serious expiation in the wrong gender. SWITCH, but with a dark twist. Needless to say, that didn't make the cut and all that remains is this half-baked attempt at a post-modern mediation of what it is to be good and evil and the grey area in between.

Many observers have noted that at first glance on paper one might think this is a Pedro Almodovar film, what with Victoria Abril cast in it, among other things. Well, I haven't seen too much of Almodovar's work, and I knew nothing about director Augustin Diaz Yanes when I entered the theatre to see this film. But I wonder, did Almodovar show such promise so early in his career? From the first few minutes I was captivated by the movie and I stayed enthralled throughout. By the time Penelope Cruz was dancing around to "Kung Fu Fighting" I knew this was a rare film indeed (and no, it's no rip-off of 'Pulp Fiction,' either!)For all it's audaciousness, the premise has been used many times before. Like 'Paradise Lost,' the battlefield is Heaven, Hell and Earth. But the specifics are a little more prosaic: angels from Heaven and Hell fight for their survival over the soul of a rather ordinary mortal, a not-to-bright or personable boxer. Heaven and Hell are presented as distinctly mortal-like places--Heaven is nice, but hardly the celestial paradise we envision, and Hell is unpleasant, but nothing nearly as bad as Dante imagined. The two places are run like competing businesses, it would seem, and the CEO God (and presumably Satan in his own realm) is AWOL--apparently he's too tired or disinterested to bother with the details of running the place, leaving that task up to lesser creatures. Right now Hell seems to have the upper hand. Heaven is somehow almost bankrupt and may well go under if they can't snag this one earthbound soul, the aforementioned boxer, who fate has cast in some great future role that we never fully understand. But there's trouble brewing in Hell, too, and even though they've got the advantage over Heaven at the moment, there are internecine power struggles to worry about there. So each each side dispatches an agent to try to win over Manny, this boxer who unwittingly holds the fate of this world and those beyond in his hands.That's where Abril and Cruz come in, and they are just a joy to watch for the almost two hours this flick runs. Abril is Lola the heavenly angel who ingratiates herself in Manny's life as his wife, and Cruz is Carmen, who poses as his long-lost cousin (Manny isn't the brightest crayon in the box so he can be convinced that all of a sudden he has a five-year marriage he doesn't remember.) Lola and Carmen thrust and parry throughout the film, but on a surprisingly cordial level--Carmen isn't as bad as one would expect a denizen of Hell to be and neither woman seems possessed of any otherworldly powers; they go about their business in a very earthly way. You combine a great script, two outstanding performances and excellent direction and not surprisingly you get a first-rate film, as good as any I've seen this year. This is not quite Orson Welles and 'Citizen Kane' here, but it put me in mind of it, it's that good.