LIVE FLESH (1997)
"No one ever owns his youth or the woman he loves."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Liberto Rabal, Francesca Neri, Javier Bardem, Ŕngela Molina, José Sancho Directed by Pedro Almodóvar Written by Almodóvar, Jorge Guerricaechevarria & Ray Lorriga Cinematography by Affonso Beato
LIVE FLESH is as lurid and sensual as you'd expect, with a title like that. It's a sultry melodrama populated by larger-than-life people, brought together by a series of far-fetched coincidences. It is preposterous and outrageous, but by the time the final credits roll, you've actually come to care about these peculiar people and their mixed-up lives. Pedro Almodóvar takes sensational material and, through a tricky artistic balancing act, manages to keep it both touching and wildly implausible, without ever becoming too sappy or too silly.
It is a tale of five criss-crossed lovers. Sancho (José Sancho), an abusive, alcoholic cop, is married to Carla (Ŕngela Molina), who is cheating on him. Victor (Liberto Rabal) had sex with a stoned Elena (Francesca Neri) in a public washroom a week before, and is determined that she honour a date she barely remembers agreeing to. Sancho and his partner David (Javier Bardem) are called to Elena's apartment when Victor appears there, demanding that she go out on the date with him, and is then mortally offended when she tells him that he was a lousy lover and she isn't interested in him. Four of the five characters meet, there is a struggle, and a gun is fired.
Fast forward several years. Victor has just been released from prison, ending his sentence for the shooting of David. David, paralyzed from the waist down, has become a wheelchair basketball star (this is one of many nice touches that give the movie its quirky allure) and is now married to Elena, who is living clean and helping deprived children. Carla is still trapped in her marriage to the violent, possessive Sancho, and she begins an affair with Victor. All five will feel the effects of that one gunshot for the rest of their lives, and those lives are irrevocably linked.
This plot could have been lifted straight from a weekday afternoon soap, with one major distinction: this soap opera is less than two hours long, even though it has enough sex and betrayals and reversals and confrontations to keep a daytime show running for a year or more. In other words, it keeps all the fun stuff, but leaves out the tedious exposition. The atmosphere is fun too. Almodóvar films Madrid lovingly, in bright colours, whether it be a verdant, sun-drenched cemetery or a city bus at night where a baby is being delivered. He has an eye for sensuous details: the beads of sweat on lovers' bodies and the flash of gunpowder from a gun's muzzle are as important as any of the plot twists. LIVE FLESH shares some of film noir's sensibility in the intoxicating way it combines moodiness and melodrama.
But as exuberant and over-the-top as it is, LIVE FLESH is also a trenchant examination of sexual politics, and Almodóvar does justice to the complexities of desire. Several of the relationships have a sadomasochistic element--be it mental or physical--and, in all of them, what is called love is really a welter of guilt, insecurity, need, lust, and martyr complexes. In his own inimitable fashion, the flamboyant Spanish director is exploring some murky territory here; he could easily get lost, but does not. It helps that the women are not demure and passive, seeking only to please their men, as they so often are in American films. No, here they have their own desires, and are not afraid to act on them, or speak about them--as Victor finds out in one tender, amusing scene, when Carla explains to him why he has a long, long way to go before he can become the Best Lover in the World, as he would like to be.
There is something absurdly touching about this hope of Victor's. His motivation is simply to prove to Elena--a woman he did not know, whom he had sex with only once--that he is not a bad lover. This motivation, which drives the entire film, is the motivation of a hurt, insecure adolescent. And here, I think, is the key to the movie's success: all these characters are, on some level, simply confused adolescents acting on desires they do not fully understand. Their sometimes humourous, sometimes painful struggles are the struggles we have all been through, and you can't help but feel for them.
A Review by David Dalgleish (February 22/98)
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