Catalan director Ventura Pons is something of a Berlin fixture: "Idiot Love" sets a festival record by being the sixth consecutive feature by the director to premiere here. It’s an original love story, self-deprecatingly ironic but also fizzing with eroticism.

If Italian director Nanni Moretti ever decided to take on the subject of sexual obsession, the result might be something like this. The film’s best feature is the odd couple chemistry of the central relationship between self-confessed idiot Pere-Lluc and spiky, controlled downtown-girl-made-good Sandra.

(…) "Idiot Love" is a tender, refreshing and quirky ride, and could just as easily have screened in the official competition as in its Panorama sidebar slot. (…) It is unlikely to break out in more than a handful of non Spanish-language territories.
Pere-Lluc is 35, and he’s an idiot. Not of the Lars von Trier variety: he’s not feigning mental disability in order to challenge society’s assumptions about what is normal. He’s just an immature, irresponsible kind of guy who drinks too much, can’t hold down a relationship, and (like all self-respecting idiots) gets his penis out at parties and threatens to stab it with a carving fork.

Santi Millan, a well-known Catalan comic actor, has the right face for the job. He’s what Shakespeare would have called a mooncalf: a likeable, self-destructive dreamer, so lost to himself that he feels that "my life and I are parallel lines on opposite sides of the street".
Then two things happen to Pere-Lluc: his best friend, an Argentinian actor, dies in Buenos Aires, and he walks into a ladder which belongs to feisty blonde Sandra (Cayetana Guillen Cuervo), who runs an advertising banner business.

This is the beginning of an obsession which passes through several distinct phases: first Pere-Lluc is the stalker, spying on the married Sandra, then he becomes her lapdog, allowed to entertain her while she waits for her husband after work; then the sex kicks in: hot, frenetic, and not choosy about the location.
Weeks, or months, into this phase, it occurs to Pere-Lluc to ask Sandra her name. Then, around the classic 75-minute point, comes the setback.

It’s the mismatch and the flaws in the characters that make them interesting: Pere-Lluc is amusing but also totally useless, and about as dynamic as a limp balloon, while hard-headed Sandra has a provocative, trashy side to her that does not bode well for the future health of this affair.

Cinematographer Mario Montero’s edgy, jagged, on-the-hoof shooting style serves the subject well; full of fast-forward sequences with washed out colour, it stresses the breathlessness but also the precarious nature of this quirky love affair.