“Porno films - encounters are presented with all the charm of open-heart surgery” -- Walter Goodman

Pornography is literature designed to be read with one hand.
--Angela Lambert

1973, Spain. A man and his wife is offered to direct and star in their own amateur porn film. Desperate for money, they accept.

To their surprise, Alfredo and Carmen soon find they have previously unsuspected gifts: he, for directing erotic films, and she, for acting in them. Before long, they are swimming in cash and - to Carmen's discomfort - being recognized in public by star-struck Scandinavian travelers.

Still, the couple fail to conceive a child, which leaves Carmen increasingly depressed as Alfredo withdraws into his work. When they head to an off-season tourist resort to film Alfredo's "masterpiece," a Bergmanesque sex film called "Torremolinos 73," an unexpected turn of events brings them to a crisis.

This film's gentle, humanist vision of pornographic filmmaking as a sexual and aesthetic act of emancipation is a far cry from the graphic social realism of recent films like "A Hole in My Heart"; like Tim Burton's "Ed Wood," this is an affectionate portrait of the artist as a movie-mad amateur.

Mr. Cámara, whom viewers will recognize as the nurse obsessed with a comatose patient in Pedro Almodóvar's film "Talk to Her," gives an exquisitely calibrated performance as a beleaguered Everyman who discovers himself behind the viewfinder of a movie camera, while Ms. Peña is equally perfect as the initially repressed, then irrepressible Carmen.

The long, conflict-free middle section of the film, which includes musical montages of clips from Alfredo's contributions to the encyclopedia, slackens the pace a bit. But "Torremolinos 73" is such a joyous celebration of sex and filmmaking that viewers will forgive its director for taking time out to enjoy a little of both.
-- Review from New York Times