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.
