February 12–19, 1998

movie shorts

Live Flesh

Like a teenager wriggling inside his first new suit, Pedro Almodóvar hasn't taken well to maturity. Even his most ardent fans have noted the flagging passion of his recent movies, particularly last year's DOA The Flower of My Secret. Live Flesh, which takes its involved plot from a Ruth Rendell novel, restores the director to technical form, and it isn't a bad movie if you're not expecting the kind of wholesale audacity that characterizes flagship Almodóvars like Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown. Instead, Live Flesh slackens the pace and takes more time with characterization, aiming more for the furrowed brow than the dropped jaw. Liberto Rabal is Victor, whose unusual birth on public transit opens the movie in attention-getting fashion and forecasts for him "a life on wheels," a prediction that comes true in spades. Thrown in jail for accidentally shooting a police officer in the home of a heroin-addicted Italian consul's daughter to whom he has just lost his virginity, Victor emerges determined to win back the daughter (Francesca Neri), even though she's cleaned up her act and married the policeman (Javier Bardem), now a famous wheelchair athlete. The policeman's ex-partner and his adulterous wife are also involved in a plot that twists and turns around themes of jealousy, dedication and betrayal. Rabal bears more than a superficial resemblance to Antonio Banderas, and his borderline-sociopath character is not unlike the obsessive fan Banderas created in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! The difference is that Live Flesh doesn't have the earlier film's anarchic giddiness, so rather than being one more lunatic in a crazy world, Victor comes off as genuinely unstable, which makes it hard to sympathize with him as much as the film wants you to. Watching Live Flesh, you get the sense of two different films at war with each other, of an artist struggling to forge a new style but unable to relinquish his past.

—Sam Adams