Critics reviews

Live Flesh, Almodóvar's best movie since Women On The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown, puts a dazzling end to nine years of helpless noodling between the split ends of his sensibility: the taboo-busting sex romps of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and the appalling Kika, and the Sirk-inspired melodrama of High Heels and the underrated Flower Of My Secret. Rather than choosing one side or the other, Almodóvar's solution this time is a reckless, kitchen-sink approach, and his desperate energy pays off.

It's arguably Almodóvar's best film since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The films in between have all had brilliant moments or sections, but Live Flesh is a fully realized work, a sustained examination of how betrayal, guilt, revenge, desire and loss relate to love. It is a complex and moving film that is beautiful to look at.

If Live Flesh is predictable in its sumptuous visual style and extravagant emotionality, it strikes new ground in its restrained approach to plot and character, its use of untested actors and its appeal to social and historical issues untouched by the director's previous films.

It isn't terrible. It's accomplished and watchable (though even at 95 minutes it feels draggy). Almodóvar has lost the need to shock that seemed the only motivating force in pictures like "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" and "Kika." But he's lost his emotional center as well. This is a movie that would have fared better under the direction of a filmmaker with far less style.

The characters in this 1997 story often explain their motives to one another with shocking honesty, appearing intriguingly autonomous and self-aware. But writer-director Pedro Almodovar exposes them mainly so we can watch them play a game of sexual musical chairs. It's all very clever but not really provocative—though a layer of political subtext may make the scenario seem funnier and more meaningful.

With Live Flesh, Almodóvar bids to continue an ever controversial line of stylistic irony and dark humor that one can trace from Douglas Sirk in his delirious Ross Hunter and Rock Hudson period, through Rainer Werner Fassbinder's shallow-field pathological masterpieces.

The movie is well constructed but weightless. Much of it is instantly forgettable and yet, there are daring bits of business you will never see in a Hollywood movie—a prisoner reading a letter about his mother's cancer while his cellmate jerks off, or a woman in the shower, passionately sniffing her body after a night of sex.

While this is the first time Almodóvar has adapted another writer's material, it's pretty clear that what he saw in Rendell's novel was a variation on the theme of obsessive love to which he himself has returned, well, obsessively. The result is undeniably gorgeous, but it's all busy surface, beautiful bodies and ironically absurd plot contrivance, occasionally awkward references to political events in '70s Spain notwithstanding.