Mark Price
Staff Writer
Review
Pedro Almódovar has been blessed with a singular gift for creating and portraying beautiful, understated sensuality. His deft touch is on full display in Live Flesh.
Watching this film is like wandering down a mysterious garden path where the air is alive with rich, sweet life, and where flowers bloom and erupt in soul-searingly deep hues of blue and green and violet and red. There is the occasional exception, of course.
Every few feet, there is an equally arresting sample of lush undergrowth, only this particular ocular and olfactory delight is positively brimming with the most deadly of poisons. And although one is acutely aware of the undiluted deadliness this flower or plant or shrub contains, one still chooses to pass close by, the better to be near the garden's gloriously untainted populace. In fact, the hypnotizing mystique of the garden is somehow made more powerful by the presence of the few lethal plants among the beautiful harmless ones.
One imagines this is so because such a magnificent garden, complete with its smattering of brilliantly attractive poisons, most closely resembles real life.
Almódovar quite capably paints it so, stroking his canvas with a consistent sensuality seen seldom on the big screen. Notably impressive is his ability to sustain this sensuality without reverting to blatant sexuality to achieve this end. The distinction is important, and it is a big part of how Almódovar sets himself apart from other filmmakers.
There are exactly one and a half scenes in this film that are full-blown, see-this-film-with-somebody-you-love erotic. Those scenes are beautifully done and are as tastefully steamy as Almódovar intends.
The real cinematic magic trick, however, is that every frame of the film feels laced with a pervading sensuality that makes the characters that much more compelling, the words that much fuller, and the emotions that much richer. The film exudes this atmosphere even in its barest moments.
It is fitting that the film begins and ends with a birth. Almódovar, who wrote and directed Live Flesh, spends the body of his tale taking us through a powerful cycle of life involving three men and two women whose lives become torturously intertwined. The deliveries of new life that bookend the events of the film suggest a circular turn to life and the idea that all things do truly come around to their beginnings, sometimes changed for the better or the worse.
Within this neat framework, Almódovar takes us down many roads in the human experience, some harrowingly painful and even tragic, some paved with love and intimacy and discovery. But he manages to take us down each of these avenues with equal parts humor and that ever-present sensuality that feels something like the essence of life.
After a very funny opening sequence, the plot flashes quickly 20 years into the future. There is a violent confrontation involving the three men that ends with one of them being sent to jail and with drastic changes in lives for the others. Upon Victor's emergence from jail, he sets upon a path of destruction with an eye on revenge. When he catches up with David and Sancho, however, and the women in their respective lives, there is a tremendous twisting together of all five of the characters' fates.
In the end, the film is less about revenge and more about redemption. Almódovar draws the story from the marrow of the life experience, and illustrates vividly the true human threads of desire, passion, pain and unbearable loss.
All five principle actors do a good job of creating an intense and sustained ambiance. They play the roles with the necessary passions to dramatize their characters' full scopes.
Liberto Rabal as Victor Plaza, the young man wrongly sent to jail, is especially good. Angela Molina as Clara, Sancho's wife and Victor's post-prison sexual teacher, is excellent as well.
The film is set in Madrid, and this certainly does not hurt Almódovar's chances at creating the feel he is looking for. While parts of the film take place in a broken-down section of the city, there is still an allure about the Spanish vibe of the film that reinforces the sensual undercurrent throughout.
Live Flesh is a film you must be patient with and allow time to unfold its considerable charms. It has a likable style and fluid pace and, most importantly, will offer you a wonderfully distracting walk down a path lush with sensual offerings.