Marga: Concha Valasco	Pedro: Carlos Fuentes
Benjamin: Miguel Garcia	Sergio: Alberto San Juan
Miguel: Jesus Cabrero	Bruno: Victor Ullate Jr.
Silvia: Merce Pons	Directed by: Juan Luis Iborra & Yolanda Garcia Serrano

Bottom Line: Juan Luis Iborra and Yolanda Garcia Serrano's simplistic "Km. 0" is to Pedro Almodovar's groundbreaking "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" as Paul Thomas Anderson's vacuous "Magnolia" is to Robert Altman's epochal "Short Cuts."

Story Line: All roads in Iborra-Serrano's large-scope, yet small-minded, multi-character movie, don't quite lead to Km. 0, a plaque marking the cartographic focal point of Spain. That is, however, the farcical conceit of this movie, being sold as the most fun in the summer sun, on the hottest day of the year since…Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing."

Fight the Power! City heat in Lee's film brought social tensions hip-hopping to the surface of our national consciousness. I can't speak from experience about Spain, but the contrite anxieties of the fourteen-plus characters in "Km. 0" are utter nonsense anywhere in the world. The plot is instigated by mistaken identities among the characters planning blind rendezvous at Km. 0. As one cynic explains the characters' motivations: "Sex and money - the two things that move the world." It's a screwball comedy spinning around miscommunications and duplicity - like a compass about Km. 0. Morally without direction, these characters do the wrong thing.

Iborra-Serrano's specious handling of the plot mechanisms relates to aspiring actress Silvia's (Merce Pons) manipulative bid for sympathy, "I'll do a course in massage and live off of other people's pain." The flat televisuals - two-shots or shot-reverse-shots - show no indication of the directors' interest in affecting spectator vision of the world. (On the screener tape I viewed, it gave the movie a deceptive sitcom charm - unacceptable for big-screen viewing.) Despite the pan-sexual cast of desperate romantics, prostitutes, and `mos, Iborra-Serrano fail to deconstruct and update pop codes to the erotic fantasies and heart anxieties of outsiders, as Almodovar did in such classics as "Women on the Verge" and "Live Flesh."

Instead, like P.T. Anderson's hoodwinks, Iborra-Serrano rely on cross-cutting the numerous subplots to impose bogus symmetries, rather than the spectator secrets Altman revealed in the world's poly-significant signs of domestic despair in "Short Cuts." In "Km. 0," Pedro (Carlos Fuentes) is a film student who wears a tee-shirt with a camera on it, one of the characters is named "Amor," etc. How obvious can you get?

Iborra-Serrano shamelessly borrow the spuriously spontaneous musical number from Anderson's "Magnolia" to link the pathetic ambitions of three of the female characters. In an impromptu audition, Silvia does Kander and Ebb's "Maybe this Time" from "Cabaret." Though sung in Spanish, it's the cinematic translation that corrupts. Still, it's preferable to when Silvia recites Shakespeare - killing Juliet all over again; and a bar denizen's teary-eyed response mimics (easily pleased) movie audiences. Maybe this time? Maybe not.

"Km. 0" massages real-life tensions, capitalizing on the audience's pain and hope. The filmmakers tie all the loose ends with some last-minute angelic intervention - a money-and-sex cop-out. It is not a revelation. Iborra-Serrano might be dropping frogs on the spectators' heads.

Tell Me More: There is one almost-undeniable moment in Iborra-Serrano's "Km. 0." Marga (Concha Valasco) drinks away her terror at a bar, to which all of the characters eventually convene. This lonely wife of a neglectful husband comes to believe, through one of the film's characteristic mistaken identities, that the escort, Miguel (played by Jesus Cabrero), she just paid to have sex with, is her long-abandoned son. However, in the moment to which I refer, Marga realizes that her son is actually the escort's roommate Benjamin (Miguel Garcia) - a gay man who comes to the bar to celebrate his new-found love, picked up in a ruse at Km. 0. Benjamin screams, "I'm dying to hug someone." Marga takes the chance to deliver a maternal gesture.

But note: The scene normalizes homosexuality through the narrative trick of potential incest. Films like "Km. 0" coarsely manipulate the desire for acceptance - by one's mother, by the movie audience - as cynically as they do the desire for love. The art-house coding of "Km. 0" is only superficially superior to the faithless hetero, honky romances in contemporary Hollywood romantic comedies.

Still, "Km. 0" provides a distinct form of pleasure. While the women are camp cartoons, though Valasco as the horny/horrified mother is a woman on the verge of a nervous humanity, the men almost bust through the narrative clichés to convey a kind of free-form dreaminess. Cutie Fuentes, as Pedro, conveys an innocent bewilderment; using his hands as a viewfinder, he's a prettier picture than the shots he frames. Cabrero's long eyelashes give escort Miguel's pleased-to-please buoyancy a graphic tenderness. Straight-laced hetero virgin Sergio (Alberto San Juan) and his maybe-gay guardian angel share an uncanny moment of male bonding in a public bathroom. Garcia's Benjamin and his new lover, dancer Bruno (played by Victor Ullate Jr.), strip down desire to a suggestive tease of intimacy (conveyed through an elevator-door confession). Carne tremula! It is according to this subversive law of desire that Iborra-Serrano should have mapped out their farce.