Live Flesh

Live Flesh seems like a summary of Pedro Almodóvar's cinema, evoking themes of desire and eroticism, the link between the physical and the sentimental, and the effervescence of a blossoming relationship, with pleasure and pain, tragedy and love all side by side. However, it also represents a landmark in the evolution of his cinema. It is as if, from this point on, Almodóvar began to trust more in his ability to tell a story in a more visual way, not just through a myriad of ideas, a frenzied plot, and a creative hyperactivity that dominated many of his earlier films like Matador (1986), but in a more meticulous, more methodical manner.

The idea of letting each image tell the story in its own time (that is, without swallowing it in the vertigo of the next shot and a different idea), and of prizing the coherence of the plot, is present from the very first sequence. This prologue shows the birth of Victor, one of the main characters, on a bus. The scene frames the story's beginning during the Franco dictatorship in a Madrid of empty, lifeless streets—something this birth seems to arise to contradict. Through a long take showing the bus from the outside, Almodóvar draws attention to our voyeurism, but also to this change in his visual approach, which is more contained and at the service of the narrative. Working for the first time with an adapted screenplay based on a story not his own (a novel by Ruth Rendell), and with the collaboration of writer Ray Loriga, this is a story of a remarkable circularity. It begins and ends with a birth, with a shootout opening and closing the story, like a clock—as an advertisement on the bus in the first sequence says—with an absolute precision that the filmmaker will also seek.

Twenty years have passed since the opening scene, where we find Victor looking for a girl he met the previous night, while a pair of police officers patrol the area. One of them (Sancho), the older one, drinks to forget his wife's supposed infidelity and the black eye he gave her, and the younger one (David), played by Javier Bardem, tries to restrain his colleague's irascible behaviour. Victor finds the girl, Elena, but the two end up arguing, and the police have to intervene. What follows is the first "duel," with Victor and the officers pointing guns at each other. Almodóvar alternates between the different points of view of each character, playing with unpredictability and tension with a mastery worthy of Hitchcock, once again evoking classical cinema only to immediately subvert it.

The outcome of this sequence is fundamental to the film's central part. Some years later, we find David in a wheelchair, a paraplegic due to a gunshot, and married to Elena. Victor, in turn, upon leaving prison, looks for Elena again, developing an obsession and a plan for revenge, but ends up becoming romantically involved with Clara, Sancho's wife. In a web of connections between characters, revelations about the past, and impulsive acts to heal heartbreak, a deconstruction of Spanish society and its power structures is played out, in a Spain that is gradually learning to free itself from the conservatism of the dictatorship. In addition to the link to Hitchcock (reinforced by the presence of a character in a wheelchair spying on another through a camera, as happens in Rear Window, 1954), this is an approximation to the cinema of Buñuel: on a television, we see an excerpt from Ensayo de un crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz,1955), and Clara is played by Ángela Molina, an actress from Buñuel's Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977)—a work that shares with this Almodóvar film an examination of love obsessions. Even for a more restrained Almodóvar, there is still space for some more spectacular sequences, such as the use of a popular song over an erotic scene. Also notable are a sequence in which Bardem has to dismantle his wheelchair to get in the car and a recreation of the first shootout, this time with a plastic pistol. Despite everything, Almodóvar is more optimistic (or less cynical) than Buñuel and, for this reason, he still allows himself to end with something hopeful, underscoring that very circle of life, through a double ending: first, the tragic death of the couple representing old Spain, and then, the blossoming of the couple who represent the new Spain, and a birth born of love, a symbol of the loss of fear.