You can’t say the dark Spanish comedy “The Coffee Table” isn’t dark enough. It involves the tragic, accidental and bloody death of an infant. But considering the subject matter, maybe the “comedy” could have gone a little further.
Director and co-writer Caye Casas presents us with a “couple in trouble,” a hideous piece of furniture, the pathological liar selling it to them and a wife and new mother so hateful, right down to the 17,000 cigarettes Spanish timbre of her voice, that finding someone or some outcome to root for here is a chore.
There are deadpan laughs in this “How will I ever tell her about the accident?” comedy, but they are few and far between, and strained.
Maria (Estefanía de los Santos) and Jesús (David Pareja) are a long-married 40ish couple who just had a baby. When you see and hear their interactions in the furniture store, you pick up pretty quick on why it took so long for them — or him, at least — to take that step.
Maria is a bit argumentative. Short-tempered. And she calls the salesman (Eduardo Antuña) out on every lie he attaches to this two “fake” gold nude nymphs balancing a glass top table her husband is determined to buy.
Whatever decisions they’ve made as a couple, this one she’s left to him. And she sure as hell isn’t interested in letting him make it. Judging from the item in question, we see her point.
“I don’t want this table in our home,” she growls, in Spanish with English subtitles. But Jesús is still listening to the “Swedish design” and “Chinese” price and “bulletproof glass” claims by the BS artist salesman who hears a lot more about their marriage than would seem necessary as they bicker in the store.
She decided it was now or never on having a child. She dubbed the baby Cayetano, naming him for someone her husband bristles is “a fascist bullfighter.” But at least he gets to pick the table, right?
Imagine his horror when, after assembling the glasstop, noting a “missing screw” and being left alone with the baby for the first time, he trips and the baby bullfighter is killed. Blood everywhere.
Any man who has ever been married will pick up what might be the worst consequence of this. Maria’s justifiable flip-out over this is sure to include the ultimate “I TOLD you so!”
He tries to clean up the blood — he’s injured, too. He tries to secure cleaning products from the neighbor’s 13 year-old monster teen, Ruth (Gala Flores), who INSISTS that he “tell your wife about us.” The little psycho has apparently invented an attraction and “relationship” in her mind, which Jesús cannot talk her out of.
As our incompetent table-shopper struggles with his first babysitting nightmare, he re-encounters the salesman, fends off his younger brother (Josep Maria Riera) and the brother’s pregnant and much younger girlfiend (Claudia Riera) and tries to figure out how to tell his ill-tempered wife this terrible news.
The performances pay off. But the story elements with the funniest possibilities — the salesman, the crazed 13 year-old — dangle out there without any payoff. The biting banter in the opening scene is almost funny, in a cringey way. The building suspense is more pained than amusing, but as such it gives the picture a pathos that the script sets out to upend.
And the horror of what has happened, described in gory detail late in the third act, never quite plays as “We know we shouldn’t laugh, but we must.” Because we — or at least I — didn’t.
Rating: unrated, profanity, dead baby subject matter
Cast: David Pareja, Estefanía de los Santos, Josep Maria Riera, Gala Flores, Claudia Riera and Eduardo Antuña
Credits: Directed by Caye Casas, scripted by Cristina Borobia and Caye Casas. A Cinephobia release.
Running time: 1:31