FilmReviewMaybe you thought you knew what to expect from Pedro Almodovar , the modern master of camp hysteria. Live Flesh , his new film, begins and ends with two impromptu secular nativities, a quarter of a century apart, on Madrid's late-night buses. In between it features drugs, shootings, and lots of sex, some of it involving a paraplegic. On that evidence, Live Flesh sounds like the right sort of title for the usual formula. How terrific, then, that it turns out to be a model of emotional precision, a profoundly affecting essay in the realities of love and longing.
Not to suggest, of course, that the man who made Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! has suddenly turned into Robert Bresson. Whatever its seriousness of purpose, Live Flesh could hardly be accused of asceticism. It has beauty, colour, drama and exotic symbolism to spare. But these aren't necessarily the matters preoccupying us as we watch its complicated story unfold. With great cunning, Almodovar makes us concentrate instead on questions of loyalty and obsession, of duty and independence, and of how relationships are changed by time in ways that seldom turn out to be convenient for all parties.
The wonderful richness of the story - borrowed from a Ruth Rendell novel, but heavily reworked by Almodovar and his collaborators, Jorge Guerricaechavarria and the novelist Ray Loriga - derives from the tangle formed when three men and two women struggle with their feelings for each other. Five into two won't go, and as he forms and dissolves the links between the characters, Almodovar turns the film into a sort of slow-motion romantic musical chairs.
The first birth we see, during the title sequence, is that of Victor, the child of a young prostitute whose waters break on the way to the hospital. It's 1970, and the deserted night-time streets alone are enough to tell us that Spain is enduring the final agonies of the Franco repression. Affonso Beato, the director of photography, keeps his camera at a respectful distance, starting with a static long shot of the halted bus, drawing forward slowly while we listen to the yelps and groans. In an amusing newsreel pastiche, we learn that the transport authority responds by giving the infant a lifetime bus pass.
Twenty years later we're in the flat of Elena (Francesca Neri), the smacked-out daughter of an Italian diplomat. She's expecting a housecall from her dealer. Losing patience, she gets him on the phone. 'Learn to wait? I don't care what Lou Reed says. If you aren't here in 15 minutes, I'll call the police.' But first she gets an unexpected visit from Victor (Liberto Rabal), a stranger with whom she had casual sex in a nightclub lavatory a few nights earlier. She gave him her name and number, scrawled on a scrap of paper, but now she's forgotten all about it and she's trying to get rid of him when two policemen - the young, athletic David (Javier Bardem) and the older, jaded Sancho (Jose Sancho) - burst through the door, waving pistols. There's a serio-comic standoff, a la Tarantino, during which David and Elena catch each other's eye, before a gun goes off and David is hit in the back. Victor's finger was on the trigger.
From his wheelchair, David becomes a star of Spain's Olympic paraplegic basketball team and marries Elena, who renounces the pleasures of adolescence and devotes herself to funding a refuge for neglected children. But when Victor comes out of jail after serving a six-year sentence for manslaughter, he emerges with a revenge strategy which involves seducing both Elena and Sancho's wife, Clara (Angela Molina), a retired flamenco dancer.
Their eventual capitulation is hardly surprising, given Rabal's possession of the dramatic looks and brooding presence that the young Antonio Banderas brought to Almodovar 's earlier work. But the process of seduction never seems facile, and its meaning is enriched by painful complications and an uncomfortable resolution.
The key to the film is the credibility of the relationship between Elena and David, most effectively established in a tender sex scene between the cripple and his wife. The beautiful Neri and the intense Bardem make this so believable that when Victor takes a job at the children's refuge and starts to lay siege to Elena, we readily share the woman's battle with herself.
Hardly less important is the depth that Molina (who made a sensational debut in Bunuel's That Obscure Object Of Desire in 1977) brings to the part of the needy Clara, whose hidden role in the story is gradually revealed. Confronted by Victor's true motives, her response is one of the film's most thoughtful and appealing facets.
True to its nature, this visually inventive and psychologically compelling film ends with a counterpoint of tragedy and optimism, of death and rebirth. On another night bus, parked in a street thronged with the people of the post-Franco era, a second improvised delivery is taking place. This time, the father is not only identifiable but in place. 'Fortunately for you, son,' he tells the emerging child, 'in Spain we stopped being scared a long time ago.' Maybe you have to be Spanish to get the full value of that message the rest of the film is addressed squarely to the human race.
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