Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1999) from Tuna

Pantaleón y las visitadoras was made in Peru, primarily with Peruvian money, had a mostly Peruvian cast and crew, and was nominated for a Goya for best foreign film in the Spanish language.

There is a problem in Peru with unrest among troops stationed in the jungle, and a high incidence of sexual assault upon local women. The army comes up with a solution, and assigns straight-arrow, married, conservative Captain Pantaleón Pantoja to go under cover and put their plan in place. The plan is rather simple: the Army will run an unofficial cadre of hookers. The women will be circulated among the military bases on a regular rotation schedule. Each soldier who uses the service has the cost deducted from his pay, half to the girls, half for operating expenses. Captain Pantoja is little like Candide in that he is able to overcome his own extremely conservative beliefs in order to follow his orders efficiently. He throws himself into the task, and has soon recruited a former madam to interface with the girls, brought five on board for the test case, and pulled off a a major success from the very beginning. He invents a whole new vocabulary for his reports. The girls are "visitors" and each encounter is a "rendering." He plans carefully with research and computer analysis, and determines that each visitor can handle up to 20 renderings each day, and starts to staff up for the job ahead.

Life is not all roses, however. His wife is suspicious of his hours, a local shock DJ is sniffing around the project, and one of the girls (Angie Cepeda) is doing her best to seduce him. She was increasingly hard to resist. Just to add to his challenges and opportunities, his wife becomes pregnant.

Critical response was very strange. The few US reviews thought it was an unfunny comedy, with one exception. One reviewer admitted that it had nudity from lovely women, sex, some very funny moments, and wonderful locations and photography, but said it lasted way too long. It has mainly been released in Spanish-speaking countries, but is now available on a very nicely done DVD with subtitles. This film doesn't spend all of its time in any one pigeon hole, and has plenty of interesting minor characters to add even more color.

Scoop's notes in yellow:

This is actually the second time that the 1973 novel by Mario Vargas Llosa has been made into a movie. Shortly after he write his book about the Army's presence in the remote jungle portion of Peru, Llosa decided to make it into a movie. Although he had never directed before (and has not directed since), he decided that he personally would be the helmsman for this one. Since the film was highly critical of the Peruvian society and Army, he made the film in the Dominican Republic. He tried to maintain the complexity and integrity of his novel, without regard to commercial viability. As you might well imagine, the project was a disaster, and the stench from it was so bad that it would be three decades before anyone else would attempt a film from Llosa's novel.

The new version, freely adapted from the novel in order to make a commercial and completely contemporary film, is the most successful Peruvuan film in history. Truthfully, that isn't saying much other than "the film achieved some international distribution". It probably grossed less than a million dollars world-wide, but it received some exposure in many European countries, including such unlikely places as Norway and Switzerland, and that's a big deal for Peruvian cinema.