'Live Flesh' will leave you tied to your chair

By Ian Blecher

COURTESY GOLDWYN FILMS Cuidado, Sancho, tiene un arma!

Karl Marx once said, "All great facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Although it's unclear whether visionary Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is a Marxist, he seems to have grasped dialectical historicism in his latest venture, Live Flesh. He's made a movie that doubles on itself voraciously, spinning into hilarity even as it slips deeper into tragedy.

Victor (Liberto Rabal) comes into the world on a city bus in Madrid circa 1970. His mother is a successful prostitute except, apparently, when it comes to birth control, and his father is an anonymous client. After a genuinely touching delivery, it's 20 years later, and we see Victor again as a post-juvenile delinquent, riding a moped on the same street on which he was born. He's recently scored with a hot young junkie named Elena (Francesca Neri), who has given him her number and made an appointment to meet that night. To his dismay, she wants nothing from him, not even the pizza he's graciously stolen for her.

Downtrodden and empty-handed, he hops on a city bus and sulks through the entire route. Then, he spies his love in the window of an apartment, hops off the bus, and gives her a buzz. Mistaking him for her dealer, she lets him into her building. She realizes soon enough that he doesn't have any drugs, however, and pulls a gun on him that reports after a brief struggle. As a neighbor calls the police, Almodóvar cuts to a similar debacle on the television screen. An impassioned hero has accidentally shot someone, only to find she is a mannequin.

Two cops, David (Javier Bardem) and Sancho (Pepe Sancho) arrive. Victor becomes distraught and takes Elena hostage, thinking they have come for the pizza. When David has almost convinced Victor to put the gun away, Sancho rushes him, and again the gun reports. This time, though, it hits David, rendering him a paraplegic.

Victor goes to jail for six years; David becomes a paralympic basketball champ and marries Elena, who has cleaned herself up and become a caretaker for orphans. Thus, the film begins. By and by, a series of Dickensian coincidences and Nabokovian obsessions finds Victor working for Elena and carrying on a love affair with Clara (Angela Molina), Sancho's estranged wife. Although dreamy and mysterious, Victor doesn't amount to much in bed (according to Clara, he treats her "like a hen's ass"). Though initially discouraged, he determines to become the greatest lover in the world with Clara as his teacher--all part of a perverse scheme to take revenge on Elena.

Although the premise seems improbable, we get the sense that Almodóvar wants it that way. Through special effects of a sort not found even in Titanic, he creates a world in which random meetings and strange doublings fit perfectly. As characters think, the soundtrack sings their thoughts. As they act, the television screen depicts their actions. The film itself slips in and out of realism as it becomes the cinematic analogue of the events it portrays. First, the mannequin on the television loses her legs, then David loses his, and finally, David's marriage to Elena loses its figurative legs. The movie has, in some sense, become the television show. Unlike the show, however, we continue to care about the characters through the end, when Victor's son is born in a minivan on the same street as his father (irony of ironies). Despite the absurdity of the relationships and the wack-iness of the plot, the characters feel three-dimensional. They stand agape as their world becomes more like a work of art, and so do we. Sancho goes insane with rage, Clara with passion, David with jealousy, and Elena with love. The lone survivor seems to be Victor, as his name prefigures, the only genuine artist in the bunch.

That Victor's art happens to be love-making is not incidental. It's a delicious, though by now, somewhat clichéd, reversal: the most intimate act becomes a source of study, obsession, and even vengeance. As the film doubles back on itself, sex, the ultimate doubling, is elevated from the everyday to the intensely erotic. It's a typical theme in Almodóvar's work: Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down explored a tortured relationship between an ex-con and a soft-porn star. But Live Flesh is more mature than previous efforts, and the slightly more restrained love scenes fit into the plot more smoothly without losing any of their allure. It's the sort of movie that makes film school students sweat.

Live Flesh has achieved perhaps the rarest of successes: a plot in which anything is possible and the surprises don't stop, with characters whom the audience can love and hate at the same time.

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