Guillermo Martınez

It’s a cold, rainy Saturday night in Spanish Harlem in November 2017, but inside Camaradas El Barrio the scene is a fuego! The wine is flowing, the mofongo is tasting good and Fernando García’s sextet is percolating on the bandstand with a fiery abandon that is palpable to the crowd. As they launch into a wild, whirlwind descarga take on the Duke Ellington-Juan Tizol classic “Caravan,” García fuels the clave with his left foot on the cowbell while traversing the kit with polyrhythmic aplomb as pianist Gabriel Chakarji lays down an entrancing montuno.

Sometimes the game of love requires a little cheating… Part bed-hopping sex comedy, part riotous farce, part musical comedy, The Other Side Of The Bed is more of an identity crisis than a movie. The story of two couples in search of love, this was a critical and commercial smash in Spain, where its good-looking characters' deliriously complicated infidelities obviously struck a chord with the native audience. The formula's complicated enough: A is seeing B, who's living with C, who's in love with D, who's married to A. Or something. Forget love triangles, this is a world of rectangles, quadrangles, and hexagons in which characters hop from bed to bed as though their underpants are on fire. Javier (Ernesto Alterio) is going out with Sonia (Paz Vega) while secretly sleeping with Paula (Natalia Verbeke), the girlfriend of his best friend Pedro (Guillermo Toledo). Pedro's heartbroken about being dumped, till he finds a new friend of his own (no prizes for guessing who it is).