Live Flesh
Carne trémula
Pedro Almodóvar (1997)
Two shelves in the study where I’m writing this note are stacked with DVDs of films I’ve liked enough to buy, or have bought for me as birthday or Christmas presents, but which, since acquiring, I’ve not got round to watching again. One of these films is Live Flesh. It seemed slightly daft to go and see it as part of the BFI’s Pedro Almodóvar retrospective but I decided to anyway. I’d been taken with Live Flesh when I first saw it (I guess ten or twelve years ago). I’ve no confidence I’ll get round to another viewing as part of the lengthening project of working my way along the shelves of DVDs. I’m glad I bought the BFI ticket – partly because I enjoyed Live Flesh second time around, partly because the screening I went to was, coincidentally, on the day after I’d seen Julieta. Almodóvar’s latest is his twentieth feature but only the third film he’s made with an adapted rather than an original screenplay. Live Flesh, based on the novel by Ruth Rendell, was his first adaptation. The difference between the two, in terms of Almodóvar’s approach to source material, is revealing. (His other adapted work is The Skin I Live In (2011): I’ve not read the book that’s based on.)
While Almodóvar retains some key features of the original Live Flesh, Ruth Rendell’s novel is, to a greater extent, a means of enabling him to dramatise themes that were – as was clear from films he’d already made – of continuing importance to him. There are five main characters in the story, two female and three male. The relationships between them entail familiar Almodóvar elements – shifting sexual couplings, physical abuse of women by men, different attempts at revenge. José Arroyo, in his Sight & Sound (May 1998) review, which the BFI used for its programme note, gets the balance of the film’s components right:
‘Live Flesh has an attempted murder at its heart and is loosely structured as a who- and whydunit. However, the discovery of the would-be murderer is incidental to the film. What’s important is that Sancho loves Clara, who has loved David and is now in love with Victor; and that Victor and David are both in love with Elena who is married to David but is soon to love Victor.’
Serious crime-mystery aficionados may find the movie frustrating and self-indulgent but it animates strongly the obsessions both of its characters and of the man who made it. Almodóvar’s preoccupations give Live Flesh backbone, even when their expression involves a break in mood or action or both. The prelude to the pivotal shooting incident – which leaves a police detective paralysed from the waist downwards and catalyses the subsequent events of the story – is punctuated by clips from a black-and-white thriller film playing on a television in the room. A later set-to – between wheelchair-bound David and Víctor, recently released from prison where he served time for the shooting – is interrupted when a goal is scored in a TV football match: the two men pause hostilities for a few seconds, to react to the goal. There are sequences in a childcare facility, with play materials and kids’ artwork strongly in evidence – yet another location that allows Almodóvar to indulge his passion for colour combinations so vibrant they’re almost dumbfounding. The soundtrack includes a supple score by Alberto Iglesias and a medley of Spanish songs whose various registers – raw, harsh, humorous – reinforce what’s on the screen. Thanks to the physical and temperamental contrasts they supply, there are times too when the five main actors – Francesca Neri (Elena), Ángela Molina (Clara), Javier Bardem (David), Liberto Rabal (Víctor) and José Sancho (Sancho) – seem to function as complementary musical instruments, as well as a strong dramatic quintet.
If you put aside the aberrant I’m So Excited! in 2013 (which most critics were happy to do), it’s unarguable that Pedro Almodóvar has become an increasingly tidy and mature film-maker during the nearly twenty years between Live Flesh and Julieta. For me, he’s become a less engaging one too. In her S&S (September 2016) piece on Julieta, Maria Delgado – with evident encouragement from Almodóvar – makes strenuous but unconvincing efforts to interpret his new film as, among other things, a statement about the economic reverses and political disappointments of present-day Spain. In Live Flesh, by contrast, state-of-the-nation commentary is refreshingly explicit. A fifteen-minute prologue to the main action, set in Madrid at Christmas 1970, describes the arrival in the world, late at night, of the baby who will grow up to be Víctor. His mother is a young prostitute called Isabel (Penélope Cruz). At Víctor’s birth, on an otherwise empty municipal bus, the midwives are the madam of the brothel where Isabel works (Pilar Bardem) and the understandably surprised driver of the vehicle (Álex Angulo). This episode is a remarkable combination: broad, buoyant comedy and some gruelling physical detail, set against the nightmarish background of a state of emergency, declared by the Franco regime. In the film’s closing sequence, it’s Christmas in Madrid twenty-six years later. Elena and Víctor are in a taxi, on the way to hospital, with Elena about to give birth to the couple’s first child. The dark streets of the capital were deserted at Christmastime in 1970; now the taxi is stuck in a traffic jam. The voice of Víctor, who knows the circumstances of his own birth, tells the unborn baby not to worry: ‘Luckily for you, my son, we stopped being afraid in Spain a long time ago’. It’s a true happy ending – or it was at the time.
30 August 2016