MOVIE REVIEW

This "Bed" is a knot of very tangled sheets.

By Kevin Thomas, Times Staff Writer

It's easy enough to understand why "The Other Side of the Bed," with its good-natured skewering of infidelity and its generous display of sex and nudity, was a critical and popular success last year in Spain. It's a serviceable date-night movie — provided the daters are willing to sit still for subtitles or are fluent in Spanish. However, the film is too commercial and obvious to have much appeal for the usual art house audience.

In a Madrid cafe the beautiful, blond Paula (Natalia Verbeke) breaks the news to her boyfriend, Pedro (Guillermo Toledo), that she has fallen in love with another man, omitting that the other man is his best friend, Javier (Ernesto Alterio). It does not come as a shock that Javier's ravishing live-in lover, Sonia (Paz Vega), soon feeling lonely with Javier so increasingly away on "business," finds herself consoling poor Pedro, a likably shaggy young man badly hurting from Paula's departure.

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In the meantime, the slippery Javier piles on lies and excuses to Paula for not leaving Sonia. Javier and Pedro hang out with their taxi-driving pal Rafa (Alberto San Juan), a male chauvinist who brags to his friends of his prodigious unfaithfulness to his girlfriend. The guys are uncomfortable with homosexuality, but their attitudes toward women are not much more enlightened than those toward gays, for which the filmmakers zap them with some humor.

The film, which gets very complicated, is occasionally crass, sometimes amusing but on the whole fairly shallow. Writer David Serrano and director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro deftly pass out the just deserts before they're through, but their characters don't have enough substance or wit to make them engaging. Toledo's Pedro is by far the most multishaded and appealing presence, while Alterio's Javier and some of the other men are downright repellent. Nonetheless, Martínez-Lázaro melds his attractive cast into a smooth ensemble, and his film is stylish and well paced.

The film is at its most original when it incorporates a series of musical numbers linking the major sequences, in which the stars perform, with a chorus of singer-dancers, songs that illustrate their shifting moods and feelings. "The Other Side of the Bed" is consistently sleek but works best if no more is expected of it than a mild diversion.

'The Other Side of the Bed'

MPAA rating: Rated R for sexuality, nudity and language

Times guidelines: Wholly inappropriate for children

Ernesto Alterio...Javier
Paz Vega...Sonia
Guillermo Toledo...Pedro
Natalia Verbeke...Paula
Alberto San Juan...Rafa

A Sundance Channel presentation. Director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro. Producers Tomás Cimadevella, José Antonio Sáinz de Vicuña. Screenplay David Serrano. Cinematographer Juan Molina Temboury. Editor Angel Hernández-Zoido. Music Roque Baños. Choreographer Pedro Berdayes. Costumes Inma García. Art director Julio Torrecilla. In Spanish with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Exclusively at the Beverly Center Cineplex, Beverly Boulevard at La Cienega Boulevard, (310) 652-7760.