Live Flesh Review
by Jun Yan (jyan AT hsc DOT usc DOT edu)March 13th, 1998
LIVE FLESH (1998)
Directed by Pedro Almodovar, "Live Flesh" is a complicated melodrama with multiple angles of relationship, about the issue of love, desire, sex and all the other passions in life.
There are five players in this story and each becomes involved with another one way or the other. Victor Plaza is a hot-headed young man who falls in love with the girl with whom he had his first sexual experience in a public bathroom. This undeniably pretty girl, Elena, however, cannot even remember his name. She is the daughter of a rich Italian diplomat and a drug addict on the verge of a nervous breakdown when Victor comes to her door. They got into an argument and Elena's gun is misfired, an event that draws two policemen to the scene. The two men have their own problems though. The older, obviously drunk cop Sancho just beat up his wife Clara for her suspected extramarrital affair. It doesn't take a genius to realize that this somehow has to do with the younger, more rational cop David.
As a terrible misunderstanding and unexpected events go on in Elena's apartment, Sancho and Victor struggle for the gun when a bullet is fired to hit David and paralyzes him. Victor is jailed for 6 years for this crime that we later learn he does not commit. When he is released, Elena, the woman of his dreams, has straighten up and married David, who is now a wheelchair basketball player. Bitter for his misfortune, Victor dreams of taking revenge on both of them, while fate takes him promptly to her door. In the mean time, Victor meets this older woman who would sleep with him and fall in love with him with all her desperate tenderness of an abused wife. Who could that possibly be in a melodrama like this? Our Clara, Sancho's wife, of course.
All three men are head-strung and stubborn and jealous. None would easily back down from their love and desire. The women are no push-overs either. So the entangled relationships unfold... At one point I really wonder how this terrible mess would resolve itself, but the development and ending are not easily predictable and relatively sensible.
This is definitely a melodrama on the brink of soap opera. The filmmakers do not hesitate to use coincidence to carry the plot or push the plausibility of the story. However, these can be easily forgiven because the fascinating and colorful characters. None can be described with one word nor can be categorized as good or evil. David appears to be calm and strong mentally, but also sleeps with his partner's wife and just as jealous as Sancho. Elena accepts her responsibility and at least tries to correct her wrongs only to become the trigger of the tragedy once again 6 years later. She also has this really brutal honesty that is just a bit too... blatant. Clara does sleep with other men behind her husband's back, but she is also the victim of abuse and her pain and fear are tangible. Sancho is perhaps the least sympathetic character, at least to us female audience, but he clearly loves his wife deeply and almost just as desperate as she is, though for a different reason. Is Victor the only innocent soul? Far from it. He has no intention to back down from a plot to destroy two marriages (although he is somewhat "entitled" to do so to Sancho) and indirectely causes tragedy in the end. And he is obviously using Clara to teach him the techniques to please women while he does not love her at all. All characters are deadly passionate and seriously flawed but still believable and morally ambiguous. This is the ultimate strength of this film. Almodovar's relentless, uncompromising approach to the characters is the key to make the film refreshing. Not for once does he show the laziness to lessen the mixed quality of these characters. He does not hestitate to push the emotional conflicts and moral dilemma to their extremes and is willing to go all the way.
The film has quite a few bold love-making scenes as well as dialogues. Are they explicity? Definitely. Are they necessary? Absolutely. Without them, the audience will never be convinced why Elena should leave David to be with Victor, even though Elena and David really do love each other. These scenes are brutally honest about love, sex and relationship as much as Elena's confession. Sex scenes are often boring and mechanical on the big screen, more misused than not. This is one of the few occasions that they work appropriately as an essential factor in the whole story.
The style of this film is consistently passionate and intense as the emotional texture of the story and the characters. The colors are dazzling; the images fantastic; the music hot-blooded. The songs are so completely Spanish and over-the-top that they make my blood run faster and hotter. Surprisingly, the style works with the story, but never replaces the story and characters. That is why it is a successful piece of work.
Grade: B+.
jun
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