“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1990)
In many ways, “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” is the closest precursor in Almodóvar‘s career to newbie “The Skin I Live In.” Both films have elements of the horror film, both deal with issues of captivity and obsession, and both feature Antonio Banderas, who went to Hollywood after the release of “Átame!” (its original Spanish title), and hadn’t worked with the man who discovered him again until this year. The film also marked a new chapter for Almodóvar; he fell out with his other muse, Carmen Maura, in pre-production, after telling her she was too old for the female lead, and the two had frosty relations until she returned to the fold for “Volver.” As for ‘Tie Me Up!,’ it’s a difficult beast; essentially a rather sweet romantic comedy, but one where the obsessive behavior sometimes seen in the genre is taken to new extremes, with Banderas’ mental patient kidnapping a porn-actress-turned-horror-starlet (Victoria Abril), with whom he once slept with. There are troubling aspects — the film was derided by feminists on release — but the film’s sweetness, provided by vulnerable, big-hearted turns by Banderas, Abril and Loles Léon, makes it work. It’s also genuinely sexy — a couple of eye-opening scenes earned it an X-rating from the MPAA, leading to a lawsuit from Miramax that while it failed, paved the way for the creation of the NC-17 (even if, let’s face it, it didn’t really improve things). Ennio Morricone provided the score, but it’s not his finest hour — even Almodovar didn’t think much of it, and only used half of what was provided. [B]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFUXyI0aO7c
“High Heels” (1991)
Almodóvar describes “High Heels,” or in its more literal — and appropriate — English translation “Distant Heels,” as a “big melodrama with a parallel film noir story,” made by a man “less neurotic than Lynch, with a more Catholic education.” It’s not a bad estimation of this overlooked 1991 work, which combines the beyond-convoluted plot turns of a James M. Cain adaptation with the maternal yearning of the best Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder melodramas. That said, for a film about the daughter of an aging singer who may or may not have murdered her estranged mother’s former lover (and her now husband) in cold blood, shortly after being impregnated by a drag queen who imitates Mommy on-stage; it’s surprisingly well-behaved. Like much of his work, it’s explicitly cineliterate (lead character Rebeca is sure to mark the parallels between her own travails and Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata”) and the narrative is effectively a kaleidoscope of the thematic concerns that will come to dominate his more ‘mature’ works in later years. Certainly it’s a great leap forward from the thin conceit at the heart of “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” and the guilt-ridden mother in this film (Marisa Paredes) would re-work a similar role a decade later in “All About My Mother.” Sometimes certain elements of the story, like a sudden bout of heretofore unannounced angina, threaten to tip over the wrong side of “Stella Dallas” and end up in overcooked “Dynasty” territory, while keeping the murder at the heart an act committed off-screen dictates the final judgement is essentially anti-climactic, and the strained mother/daughter dynamic less than thrilling. But it’s otherwise stuffed full of gorgeous imagery and thrums with the throbbing undercurrent of inescapably failed, or failing, romance. [B+]
“Kika” (1993)
After the drama of “High Heels”, “Kika” sees Almodóvar return to more familiar territory of oddball sex and death, mostly ditching the melodrama for a screwier-than-most comedy, with a dose of heavier social commentary that doesn’t really wash under it all. The somewhat absurdist storyline of the well-meaning Kika (Veronica Forque), a make-up artist, and her involvement with the possible wife-murdering expat writer Nicholas (Peter Coyote) and his thought-to-be dead son Ramon (Alex Casanovas) (who comes back to life under Kika’s blush brush) is just the beginning of cluttered narrative. There’s also the lesbian housekeeper Juana (Rossy De Palma), and her maniacally perverse brother Paul, as well as Andrea “Scarface” (Victoria Abril) who hosts a reality-type show called “Today’s Worst,” who used to date Ramon, and is after them all in a bid to air their dirty laundry on set. Voyeurism and incest, are both given a turn in the kinky plotline — there’s even a seemingly comical yet graphic rape scene, the ever irreverent Almodóvar doing his best to turn the serious into slapstick — which caused massive public outcry in the USA and the usual NC-17 rating threats. The casualness of the rape perhaps is what caused the greatest offence – Kika complains she needs to pee and blow her nose, and all but slaps her forehead as her rapist heads into his 3rd orgasm, his record being 4. “Kika” looks fantastically vibrant and whimsical, with not shortage of kitschy colourful sets and campy costumes — the best of which (dominatrix spycam onesies) are provided by Jean-Paul Gaultier. So it all works until it doesn’t, and that happens in the final third of the film, where it suddenly turns from offbeat sex and death laughs, into a cynical crime thriller, and winds up feeling flat and nasty. [C+]
“The Flower of My Secret” (1995)
Perhaps best remembered by long-time Almodóvar disciples as the film that begat the storyline in “Volver” — it’s the plot from the protagonist author’s new book — “The Flower of My Secret” centers on Leo (mainstay Marisa Paredes, who’s appeared in five of his films), a successful, but unhappy writer who masquerades under the pseudonym Amanda Gris, a very popular trashy romance novelist (an element off the top of the film is also appropriated for “All About My Mother”). Facing a personal and spiritual crisis, Leo can no longer stomach what she believe is the shallow sentimentality she writes and instead of delivering another tawdry Amanda Gris novel, she pens the gritty and sordid story that eventually became the aforementioned Almodóvar film. So discontented, she pitches herself as a book critic – to an editor named Angel who has eyes for her — and then tears her own Amanda Gris novels to shreds. But Leo has myriad problems as well, including the dissolution of her marriage to a military officer husband stationed in Brussels, Angel’s growing affections, a dissatisfied book agent suing her for writing an anti-Gris novel, and eventually the theft of that unpublished book, which she discovers is being turned into a screenplay that will soon go into production. While this is a pre noir-Hitchcock affinity for Almodóvar, as you can tell by its title ‘Flower’ has many secrets and plenty of unveiling twist and turns. A diverting film with melodramatic flourishes (the family stuff with Leo’s mother is hilarious), ‘Flower’ is also subdued and mature and often looked at as the gap between Almodovar’s earlier NC-17 heavy work and campy comedies and his richer, elegant dramas that would blossom in the late 90s and early aughts. Because of its position as a transition film, it wasn’t beloved at the time, but it still holds up well as an exploration of denial, loss and personal growth. [B]
“Live Flesh” (1997)
The director’s 12th film, and superficially his most “male” effort by some distance, “Live Flesh” strips away the frankly wackadoo plotting of the Ruth Rendell source novel and retools it to fit the director’s idiosyncratic concerns, mimicking his treatment of Thierry Jonquet’s “Tarantula” for “The Skin I Live In” over 10 years later. Maintaining only the dramatic nub of the story, and not nearly as salacious as its risqué poster and title would suggest, it concerns Victor Plaza (Liberto Rabal), a man inadvertently responsible for paralyzing one of the police officers who mistook his harassing of a would-be paramour, Elena (Francesca Neri), for a criminal act. Imprisoned for a spell of several years, Victor adds insult to injury by shacking up with the wife of the other arresting officer upon his release and tracking Elena down, throwing the lives of everyone involved into disarray. The film’s preface is notable for Penélope Cruz’s first performance for the director as Victor’s mother, who gives birth to her son on a bus, whilst Javier Bardem, who spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair, is gifted with a complicated leading role. Bookended by some on-the-nose political statements, at times it feels self-consciously like a film straining desperately to be “about Spain” — a feat the director would accomplish better later in his career, with less of the ham-handedness — it’s nonetheless alarmingly self-confident picture, and an indication of the overwhelming international acclaim that was shortly to follow. [B+]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qTN9nFT7r4
