Law of Desire (La ley del deseo)

LAW OF DESIRE (La ley del deseo)   A-    
Spain  (102 mi)  1987  d:  Pedro Almodóvar

Considered Almodóvar’s most personal, but also one of his funniest films, a blurring of art and reality, a jumbled mix of comedy, erotic drama, over the top melodrama, and suspense thriller, murder mystery, featuring a magnificent performance from Carmen Maura, who is perfect in her sexual ambiguity as a love-starved, overly sensuous actress who turns out to be a transsexual, who all but steals the movie from everyone else.  Opening with wild orchestral music by Shostakovich from his 10th Symphony (1987): Opening titles - Shostakovich's Symphony no.10 ... - YouTube (1:27), conducted by Kiril Kondrashin no less, you know you’re in for a bumpy ride, and this film does not fail.  The opening sequence is a hilarious film within a film, which features an actor following unseen voiced instructions to get naked and pleasure himself on a bed, a beautiful set up for a slowly developing scene where the camera eventually pulls back and we see two balding old farts reading a script of overheated, out of breath gasps and heavy pants of two supposed male characters having sex.  Also featured are many signature Almodóvar touches, his love for the city of Madrid, a town filled with familiar faces and an over-testosteroned, yet inept police presence, male abandonment, an overexposed media, an almost peculiar interest in sex, telephones, dysfunctional families, dirty priests, and drug use.  This film, more than any other Almodóvar film, makes the best use of overly dramatic pop songs, where the lyrics perfectly express the emotions in such a character driven film.  In effect, Almodóvar is tapping into Latin American sentimental songs, called boleros, that are at the emotional center of this film, paying homage to different forms of expression that Spaniards had, to a certain extent, disdained before Almodóvar came onto the scene.

Eusebio Poncela plays Pablo (a stand-in for the director?), a character who’d feel right at home in Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960), whose self-centered narcissism is reflective of the gay life in post-Franco Madrid, as he parades around in silk suits and wild flower shirts wearing shades, playing the film director from the opening scene who takes home any young man that interests him, feeding him with lines of coke, so he’s pretty much butt naked much of the time, while Maura plays his sister Tina that used to be his brother, and stars in his latest one-woman-show stage production of a 1930 Jean Cocteau play, The Human Voice, a monologue about a woman and a suitcase which resurfaces again in Almodóvar’s next film as well.  Tina is also caring for Pablo’s young daughter Ada (Manuela Velasco), exposing her to the comforts of the church (where she sang as a young altar boy) in her own overtly personalized way (“I used to jerk-off in here all the time.”), breaking out into sacred song for a priest that is extremely uncomfortable seeing what’s become of this once favored child.  There is a wildly inventive scene where both Tina and Ada are on stage, Maura is wearing a revealing silk slip while talking on the phone in one of those life or death conversations, while young Ada appears to be levitating as if she's standing on thin air in a slowly moving dolly-on-wheels, lip-synching to one of the more overtly dramatic songs in the film, Maysa Matarazzo’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me)” La Ley Del Deseo (Trailer) YouTube (2:27), which works so well, she does it again going back the other way.  This becomes even more hilarious when Ada’s real mother, Bibiana Fernández, one of Spain’s most famous real-life transsexuals, shows up and wants to take her to Milan, but Ada has no interest in her mother’s cavalier and overly nonchalant lifestyle and wants to stay with the more stable and dependable Maura, who she emulates, much of which is acted out just offstage.  Again, the song lyrics brilliantly match what we are experiencing onstage.

Back to the life of the director, Pablo, who we first see with lover Juan, Miguel Molina, a younger man who is unable to commit, still exploring with the idea of love and is not yet comfortable being gay, so he returns to work in a small coastal town, leaving an opening for Antonio Banderas as Antonio, a bisexual young man who stalks and eventually seduces the director before murdering his boyfriend, making his move with such an all-consuming passion that all hell breaks loose, his first such venture into homoerotic sexuality, expressed by an overwhelming need to possess Pablo all to himself, where he shatters the ties that hold everyone together.  He disposes of Juan on a rocky cliff reminiscent of Vertigo (1958), while then covering his murderous tracks hiding behind lame excuses that are backed up by his overly protective mother.  Pablo, in despair at the death of Juan, drives into a tree and loses his memory.  At the hospital, Tina fills in all the lurid details of their past, including her love affair with her own father, which resulted in her sex change operation incest scene in La Ley del deseo with Carmen Maura (Almodovar movie) YouTube (3:00).  Tina is the emotional center of the film, especially her poignant feelings about her tortured past and her distrust of men, where her history recalls Elvira in Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden... (1978), where like Elvira, she even gets her sex change operation in Morocco, but ends up being much more comfortable in her own skin.  She’s found a new love of her life, and it turns out to be none other than Antonio on another obsessed rampage.  The police, the bungling duo of real-life father and son, Fernando Guillén and Fernando Guillén Cuervo, haven’t a clue until eventually Antonio kidnaps Tina, demands Pablo, then in an hour of uninterrupted time that he successfully negotiates, makes love to Pablo while the dramatic music blares out onto the street below, confounding the police who can only scratch their heads as a crowd of onlookers gathers in mass.  LAW OF DESIRE is one of Almodóvar’s most explicit treatments of homosexuality in his films, in its day a breath of fresh air, representing the director at his best in the early stages of his career, where his ability to combine social commentary with an extraordinary amount of risk-taking cemented his reputation as an early forerunner in advancing queer cinema.  

Matador

MATADOR        B+               

Spain  (110 mi)  1986  d:  Pedro Almodóvar

Well, they just don’t make movies like this any more, which playfully throws in all manner of highly stylized, melodramatic hysteria, opening with a hilarious montage comparing the flamboyance of a bullfighter in the ring to the wicked desires of a sexual predator, who similarly stalks his or her prey before delivering a passionate thrust to their intended victim.  Wrapped in all manner of B-movie gore that includes murder, mutilation, suicide, blood splattering, and even snuff films, and that’s just what’s on TV, viewed by a former matador who masturbates while he watches, Diego (Nacho Martinez), who retired after being gored in the ring, so now has this incessant desire to watch mutilated flesh on TV while making love to girls who play dead.  Antonio Banderas plays Angel, and the name says it all, a virginal would-be matador who is taking classes from Diego, learning the specialized art of how to kill the bull while living with his over-sanctified, over-domineering mother (Julieta Serrano), who may as well be a stand-in for Franco as the Pope, who sees nothing but evil lurking inside her son, driving Angel insane with Catholic guilt and plenty of doubts about his sexuality.  In order to prove he’s a man, that he’s not gay, he stalks Diego’s girl friend, his beautiful neighbor Eva (Eva Cobo) and attempts to rape her on the street, apologizing afterwards and then fainting at the sight of even the slightest drop of blood.  He goes to Church and confesses, then to the police department to turn himself in, where he confesses to a female desk clerk who responds, “Some girls get all the luck,” but when the Inspector (Eusebio Poncela) brings in Eva and her manic mother, the wildly eccentric Chus Lampreave, they defend Angel as a sweet kid with a horrible mother.  When they won’t press charges, Angel confesses to a string of unsolved sex murders and becomes headline fodder for the evening news reports. 

María (Assumpta Serna), a strikingly beautiful woman dressed in sumptuous high fashion, like a character out of a Fellini film, arrives unexpectedly as his lawyer.  We caught a glimpse of her earlier, as she has this wild sexual desire to murder her partner with a hairpin to the back of the neck at the moment of orgasm, continuing to grind away even after they’re dead.  The victims Angel confessed to killing may have been her own handiwork.  Carmen Maura makes an appearance as Angel’s overly affectionate psychologist, who at one point gives him mouth to mouth after a fainting spell, while Almodóvar himself makes an appearance as the prima donna director of a bullfight-themed fashion show, barking out orders, scolding one young model, “I told you not to shoot up in the dressing rooms, use the bathroom.”  But the real story is the meeting of María and Diego, both of whom have an erotic fascination with death at the moment of orgasm, so despite overheated passions, they hesitate getting too close too soon and instead stalk one another like animals in heat, or like a matador and a bull, in a dance of death waiting for the appropriate moment to strike.  They follow each other into an empty movie theater showing King Vidor’s 1946 film DUEL IN THE SUN, otherwise known as Lust in the Dust, which features an out of control love/hate relationship between Jennifer Jones, playing a sultry half-breed and the man she destroys with lust and desire, Gregory Peck, showing the scene where they die in each other’s arms.  Both know this typifies their own outcome, which only arouses their passions even more.  Meanwhile, poor Eva is jilted by Diego, having found his incomparable desire, but when she returns to his home to get him back, dressed as a highly decked out woman in red, she overhears them sharing murder stories, which she immediately reports to the police.  While all this is happening, the country is up in arms over an anticipated solar eclipse and how this produces strange animal behavior.  Angel is having psychic visions, leading the police to several buried bodies before visualizing the exact path and dialogue of the escaping couple of death, who hightail it out of town before consummating their love on the floor in front of a blazing fire, accentuated by the erect nipples of the tantalizingly gorgeous Assumpta Serna in sexually explicit foreplay of the highly aroused lovers to the sensuous music of Mina singing “Espérame en el cielo” Matador - YouTube (3:17), reaching their climax at the exact moment of the eclipse, when the screen turns red.