Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón
Pedro Almodóvar (1980)
When Pepi (Carmen Maura) receives a visit from a menacing policeman (Félix Rotaeta), she offers him oral sex in the hope that’ll keep him quiet about the marijuana plants he spotted on the balcony of her Madrid apartment. He declines the offer and rapes her instead. This annoys Pepi, who was hoping to sell her virginity for a decent price when the right opportunity arose. She decides to get her revenge with the help of her friend Bom (Olvido Gara, aka Alaska), who’s a punk singer, and the two boys in Bom’s band. Late one evening, wearing operetta-ish costumes and singing a zarzuela, they confront and beat up a man. He turns out to be not the policeman but his innocuous, identical twin brother. Pepi then plans a different, more complex way of getting her own back. She befriends the policeman’s submissive homebody wife, Luci (Eva Siva), on the pretext of wanting knitting lessons from her but actually with a view to corrupting Luci. During the first knitting lesson, Bom turns up, needing a pee. Pepi suggests that, since Luci is feeling hot, Bom should urinate on her. The masochistic Luci finds the golden shower not just refreshing but exciting. She and Bom become lesbian lovers.
This is the start of Pepi, Luci, Bom … It’s a foreshadowing not just of the rest of Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature but also of motifs and preoccupations in other films he’s made: businesslike carnality; sexual abuse and ambiguity; song and dance; disguises and doppelgängers; the comedy of excretion. That sequence in which Bom et al set upon the hapless twin brother in particular epitomises the surreally casual, one-thing-leads-to-another quality of early Almodóvar. As the story continues, Pepi embarks on a screenplay called ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’; this gives the ‘outer’ film a light-hearted post-modernist flavour. It’s clear from an interview with Almodóvar used for the BFI programme note[1] that this self-referential element and the spirit of improvisation had a very real meaning in the creation of Pepi, Luci, Bom …:
‘The first script was shorter than the film turned out to be. I didn’t know at that time how to measure what was needed for a feature film. So, seeing that it wouldn’t work in the marketplace, I converted it into a feature film. To get to that point was a very tortuous, very long way because the money ran out before I’d even finished the first script. People were giving us small contributions like 50,000 pesetas. So from June 1979 until December 1979, we continued shooting whenever we had money – never straight through but over a weekend, two or three days consecutively. During those months I was adapting the story to the people with whom I could continue filming. …’
Almodóvar’s debut feature obviously introduces too his abiding preference for women principals (and for certain actresses, not least Carmen Maura). It was sometimes said of dramatists like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan that, as homosexual men writing at a time when it was hard to be gay, they used female protagonists as a form of coded self-expression. Perhaps there’s an element of that in Almodóvar too (he was born in 1949) but he conveys a more vigorous sympathy with women. It’s the thwarted, suffering heroines in Coward and Rattigan – Laura in Brief Encounter, Hester in The Deep Blue Sea, and so on – who are usually mentioned as their gay proxies, whereas Pepi is the first in a line of strong, comic female avengers in Almodóvar. He has, of course, been making art in a different place and time: Pepi, Luci, Bom … is very definitely a product and an expression of the various, overlapping kinds of freedom – musical, sartorial, social, sexual – that were becoming available to Almodóvar’s generation in post-Franco Spain. The exultant vivid colouring and eccentric combinations of clothes and décor, the dynamic pop and punk on the soundtrack, the bold, funny opening titles by the illustrator Cespe (the film is worth seeing just for these) – all combine to give euphoric texture to the slender movie, which is now recognised as part of ‘La Movida Madrileña’[2]. The strength of countercultural momentum in late 1970s Spain was such that Pepi, Luci, Bom … was already making fun of the conservative backlash against it.
Much of the movie comes across as a succession of sketches – some work better than others. Its structure is simple, not to say flimsy. Yet these qualities and the happy, sophomoric vulgarity overlay insights that are often sharp and occasionally shocking. A penis-measuring contest in a club – Almodóvar himself has a cameo as, appropriately, the master of ceremonies – is entitled ‘General Erections’: the name is a neat fusion of Spain’s new-found political and sexual freedoms. The vile policeman pretends to be his twin in order to sexually assault a woman (Concha Grégori) who is the brother’s admiring neighbour. (The fumbling aggression in this episode anticipates the odd, upsetting scene in the showers at the start of What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Almodóvar’s fourth feature.) By the end of the film, Luci is liberated to such an extent that she eventually returns to married life with the policeman. Having spread her wings as a sexual masochist, she realises that Bom can never satisfy her gluttony for punishment in the way her physically abusive and tyrannical husband can. The conclusion is all the more startling because Almodóvar maintains his light, antic tone.
3 August 2016
[1] The interview forms part of My First Movie (Faber and Faber, 2000), edited by Stephen Lowenstein.
[2] Wikipedia defines this as the ‘countercultural movement that took place mainly in Madrid during the Spanish transition after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975’.
