Matador (1986)

Matador (Pedro Almodovar, 1986)

Pedro Almodovar's Matador opens with a montage of scenes from movies where women die violent and bloody deaths. The audience of the gruesome montage is Diego (Nacho Martinez), a prominent bullfighter who is reduced to teaching young hopefuls his former craft after he got gored at one match. At first glance, we are aware that Diego is a deranged man --- we welcome the character masturbating to a montage of women suffering and dying. Then, we see him at work; he explains to his students the art of making a kill. As he teaches, Almodovar inserts a thematically related sequence of Maria (Assumpta Serna) inviting a man to her room, undressing him, and finally, stabbing him at the back of his neck with a hairpin, killing the erstwhile lover almost instantly.

Angel (Antonio Banderas) is one of Diego's student. Angel, who badly wants to become a bullfighter but faints at the sight of blood, has lived under the wing of his ultra-religious mother. Virgin at the age of twenty two, Diego asks him if he's homosexual, and Angel denies such and is determined to prove to his maestro his masculinity. That night, Angel attempts to rape Eva (Eva Cobo), his neighbor and Diego's girlfriend, but only succeeds in prematurely ejaculating; and suddenly faints when Eva accidentally slips to reveal a bloody head wound. Probably sick and tired of his mother's ultra-conservative prodding, Angel admits to the rape and the other murders that has recently happened.

Almodovar, with Matador, concocts a black comedy wrapped in trappings of absurd romanticism and fantabulous machinations. Despite the numerous jumps from logic and grandiose U-turns from reality, Matador works very well. Almodovar paints the film with a stylistic hue that makes each and every fantastic plot twist and revelation, both surprising and expected. For example, there will be scenes wherein Almodovar will whisk away your attention from the absurd sexual fetishes of the astrologically-crossed lovers by focusing his attention to the ex-matador's student's crotches while they practice their dangerous craft. It's as if Almodovar makes you aware that bullfighting is not merely an entertainingly dangerous sport, but is also a bastion of Spanish masculinity verging on the homoerotic. Almodovar cuts the montage with the image of the police inspector glancing at those young student's crotches; and with that Almodovar surprises by not only poking fun at the macho sport, but poking fun at the uniformed detective, who after that scene rejects an offer by the psychiatrist (Carmen Maura) to sleep with him that night.

Almodovar maintains that volatility throughout the film. There is no telling what might happen next, and that creates a wildly-imaginative goose chase of something that might or might not happen. Almodovar's visuals is delightfully inventive, especially for the final fifteen minutes, wherein everything breaks loose turning the film into an implosion of almost everything that should not have happened if the film was a conventional one. Almodovar betrays his murder mystery, his romanticism, his satire, his commentaries on Spanish machismo, to conclude Matador in a fashion that is so outrageously absurd, yet in a strangely compelling way, lovely. There's nothing more romantic than a highly romantic urge being completed when the sun and the moon meet in the sky --- and with that, you can't help agree with the police officer saying that he's never seen anybody happier.

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980)

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pedro Almodovar, 1980)
Spanish Title: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón

We are first introduced to Pepi (Carmen Maura) dandily placing Superman stickers in her sticker book. She grows marijuana plants on her apartment, attracting stern policeman (Felix Rotaeta) to conduct an investigation through his parallel apartment, and later on an arrest. Pepi resists arrest and instead invites the policeman to just have sex with her. Again, she resists her offer and in turn, loses her virginity through rape. She plots revenge and hires the punk band of Bom (Olvido Gara), a liberated lesbian singer, to beat up the policeman. They do beat up someone, but it turns out to be the policeman's twin brother, who due to the amount of harassment befalling him because of his resemblance to the unlikeable policeman, moves to the Canary Island. Undaunted, Pepi befriends Luci (Eva Siva), unsatisfied wife of the policeman, and turns her into a masochistic sex-crazed woman.

At first glance, much of Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap doesn't make sense. The city of Madrid is turned into a punk paradise with transsexuals, weirdos, and freaks roaming around in liberated abandon. Bom's band, while walking towards the victim of their cruel beating, insists that they sing so as to not arouse suspicion. In a normal world, a crew of weirdly-dressed individuals belting out opera choruses would instantly arouse suspicion but in Almodovar's world, such is completely normal. Almodovar's world doesn't require notions of common sense or societal norms. There is nothing permanent. Gender preferences, fetishes, religion, logic change in a wink of an eye.

Almodovar will continue this style of filmmaking throughout his career. Absurdist scenarios and characters deriving decisions based on their Freudian impulses would inhabit Almodovar's films, even his later, more tamer ones. In Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, Almodovar is nursing the world in its infantile stage, which is probably the reason why much of it looks amateurish, crude, and in a way, unrestrained. The film comes off as merely a film that is delighted in eliciting shock reactions based on its irreverence to popular notions of propriety, instead of being something deeper or more thought-out. Pepe, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap feels more like a John Waters film instead of a Pedro Almodovar one. Sure, it's Almodovar's first legitimate feature film, and it features Almodovar actor Maura (who would later feature in many of the director's films), but despite its auteur theorist-satisfying themes, it falls short in depth and even freedom and control, which is what primarily differentiates Almodovar's vision from Water's experimentations to the limitations of bad taste.

Pepe, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap would interest primarily those who are curious as to how Almodovar enriched his vision. It's a very brave first feature and it's actually very hilarious. Almodovar throws in a lot of surprises which includes a penis-measuring contest, a love-at-first-urination scene, a humorous dialogue between a bearded wife and her closet homosexual husband, and many more features that seem to come out of thin air --- especially since the plot seems to steer into so many directions, it's almost impossible to follow what Almodovar is really trying to say.