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No bigger punishment than keeping quiet about burning desire, says García Lorca, Pedro Almodóvar makes sure to shout it artfully loud. The opening is a rich précis—the rent-boy doffs his undies for the camera, the commanding voice belongs to a pair of schlubs panting in the recording studio. (A scene from The Paradigms of the Mussel, it turns out, a close-up of lips moaning "fólleme" dissolves to the premiere afterparty.) The auteur (Eusebio Poncela) is a proud hedonist with a creeping melancholia: "It's not my fault if you don't love me and it's not my fault if I love you," he tells an aimless beau (Micky Molina). His next production is Cocteau's La Voix humaine starring his transgender sister (Carmen Maura), with a lip-syncing Greek chorus played by her surrogate daughter (Manuela Velasco). The off-stage drama is complicated by a new lover (Antonio Banderas), a politician's son with a murderously jealous streak. (He recommends "a healthier life," and does his part by offing the rival boyfriend while a lighthouse looms erect by the cliff.) A florid and fierce Almodóvar mélange, comedy into suspense into tragedy, an unholy gusto throughout. Rewritten letters and answered prayers, spinning signs in the mind of the author-protagonist no longer in control of his narrative. "Very vulnerable and very imperfect," Maura's ripe, voluptuous diva is a stormy comic force: Flaunting her identity at the church where she once sang, getting blissfully soaked by a street sweeper, slugging a bigoted cop, bristling at the word "overact," she carries off the film. Incest, amnesia and hostages pave the way to the ultimate romantic declaration. "Loving you this way is a crime, but I'll pay for it." The typewriter blasted in the coda returns in The Flower of My Secret. With Bibi Andersen, Fernando Guillén, Fernando Guillén Cuervo, Helga Liné, Nacho Martinez, and Rossy de Palma.
--- Fernando F. Croce |