LIVE FLESH Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Goldwyn Films/MGM Director: Pedro Almodovar Writer: Pedro Almodovar/novel by Ruth Rendell Cast: Liberto Rabal, Javier Bardem, Francesca Neri, Angela Molina, Pepe Sancho.
New York magazine calls this movie "The Calming of Almodovar," though "Live Flesh" is hardly a laid-back production. The calmness is only in contrast to the wilder Almodovar, a product of a style of filmmaking fashionable in the 1980s. During that decade directors were encouraged to experiment freely, especially in a Spain experiencing prosperity and freedom unknown during the Franco era. His current picture owes a debt more to Alfred Hitchcock than to his hero, Luis Bunuel: Spain's most notable director departs radically from the cartoonish abandon and exploitation of the subconscious to tell a solid story with devastating consequences. Unless you remain a diehard fan of Almodovar's Age of Delirium, a devotee of the garish, wildly inventive and unrestrained in your movies, you may consider that "Live Flesh" is the director's most accessible and realized film to date. When you consider that this youthful-looking forty-six year old man plans to make his next movie far from the Iberian Peninsula--in Miami of all places--you can relax, assured that you will not leave the theater bewildered and hammered over the head with blatant caricatures passing as satire. "Live Flesh" is remarkably taut, logical, even well framed, featuring the usual elements which make life worth living: revenge, lust, and guilt and redemption.
Played out like a game of musical chairs, "Live Flesh" is a merry-go-roundelay featuring four characters whose connections to one another prove to be as surprising to us as they are troublesome to the hapless people. The opening scene is startling--comic, yet contained, with political overtones that will impress those in the audience familiar with the repressions of the Franco era in Spain. On one freezing January night, Victor--not yet even born--begins to make his presence felt as he jolts his mother from her bed screaming from labor pains, only to be born inside a bus. The streets are deserted, the Madrilenos cowered by Franco's emergency decrees that allow citizens to be arrested and detained without cause. Twenty years later, we are pitched back into the Madrid streets as we witness police officer David (Javier Bardem) trying to calm his partner Sancho (Jose Sancho), a troubled man drinking and cursing and trying to forget that his wife is having an affair with a man whose identity remains secret. As they race up the stairs to settle what they believe to be a rape-in-progress, they encounter Victor (Liberto Rabal) in the midst of a terrible argument with Elena (Francesca Neri), a drug-addicted daughter of an Italian diplomat. In a struggle over a pistol, David is shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down, his alleged shooter, Victor, sentenced to several years in jail.
The young Victor is innocent, however, and when he is not exercising in his cell, learning Bulgarian, and studying Bible he is plotting revenge--a plan which may bring to mind a similar design by Chad in Neil LaBute's wonderful tale of betrayal, "In the Company of Men." In the remarkably short interval of an hour-and-a-half, Almodovar blends a tapestry of lust, vengeance and redemption involving sexual liaisons that engage the four principals--Sancho, his wife Clara (Angela Molina), his partner David, and the young Victor.
Employing the psychological reflections common to the works of another Spanish filmmaker, Carlos Saura, Almodovar manager to cast sidelong aspersions against the Church, whose teachings of original sin lead Elena into a guilt-induced marriage with the paralyzed David, and a compulsive generosity--before her ultimate realization that redemption does not lie in effecting a 180-degree change in one's life. A liar, druggie, and crude youth, she will give way to an obsessively truthful and offensively honest inversion--which does not serve to resolve her life of unending psychic pain. Nor does the brutal Sancho learn much from his experience in brutalizing his wife almost weekly for her indulgences of infidelity.
While none of the performers is as known to an American audience as Antonio Banderas--whom Almodovar introduced to the world some time ago--those familiar with Spanish cinema will recognize names like Javier Bardem, most recently seen in "Boca a Boca." Considered by some to be Spain's top male actor of his generation, Bardem moves about in his wheelchair with more energy and speed than most healthy individuals, apparently possessed by demons that will not allow him to rest. The strikingly attractive Francesca Neri inhabits the role of a diplomat's daughter who changes from the muck of dope addiction to the solidly middle-class but repressed middle-class life. Angela Molina shines as the frustrated, abused wife afraid of leave her sadistic husband but eager to teach young Victor the sensuous arts--to realize the youth's dream to become "the world's best lover."
"Live Flesh" is a fully fleshed-out drama with Greek-tragic resonance, evoking the searing pain of individuals controlled by the Furies. Rated R. Running Time: 91 minutes. (C) 1998 Harvey Karten
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