Dark Habits

Pedro Almodóvar's fourth feature, Dark Habits, was also his first commercially produced film after a few independent works. The film has a campy, absurdist premise — a nightclub singer hides out from the police at a convent with a group of very strange nuns — that it never quite lives up to. Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascuel) flees when her boyfriend dies from heroin that had been laced with strychnine, and she remembers some nuns who run a refuge for prostitutes and drug addicts. She goes to stay with them but finds that the place is a rather unconventional convent, struggling and in danger of closing, with nuns who all have their personal vices and idiosyncrasies. The Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano) is a lesbian who adores Yolanda and shoots up heroin, plying her new charge with drugs as well. Another nun trips on acid (which Almodóvar represents through point-of-view shots with garish colors). Another secretly writes trashy romance novels, and another raises a full-grown tiger in the yard, playing bongo drums for it and feeding it chunks of raw meat.

With all this weirdness, gay desire and drugs in a convent, it's hard to imagine how Almodóvar managed to make a boring movie, but somehow he did. This is a dull and unevenly acted movie in which Almodóvar seems desperate to be wild and crazy, but the whole thing just plays out as flat. Most of the performances are sadly lacking in charisma, especially Pascuel, who seems to simply drift aimlessly through the film. There's not much of a plot to speak of, either: the convent is in danger of closing, and Yolanda has to hide out, but for most of the movie nothing much happens, and these conflicts are only developed sporadically and lazily. It's a weirdly inert and unsatisfying film that's lacking in the spirited, lively humor that always flows through Almodóvar's best work.

There are scattered enjoyable moments, though, especially centering on the relationship between the Mother Superior and Yolanda, which is hardly developed at all, unfortunately. In two separate scenes, Yolanda sings a song directly to the nun, and Almodóvar switches between closeups of them; the nun's beatific smile and tranquil expression is very moving in these scenes, a lovely expression of desire and contentment. Following the second of these scenes, after Yolanda has performed a song at a convent party, singing directly at the Mother Superior the whole time, the nun gushes to her that she was "so obscene." The nun then lingers in the room a moment while Yolanda, her back turned, strips off her dress, turning and revealing a single bare breast, a shocking moment of sexuality for the lovelorn nun. Even funnier is the blasphemous moment when the nun places a towel over the singer's face, taking an imprint of her like the Turin Shroud; when she pulls the towel away, it is coated with a delicate painting of the singer, a ludicrous secular, and sensual, miracle.


Indeed, the film's final act offers up a few sudden resolutions that are fairly satisfying even if the rest of the film doesn't build up to them in any real way. One of the nuns has been nursing an unspoken desire for the parish priest, and at the end of the film they decide to run away together and forsake their vows, adopting the tiger as their "son" to form a happy nuclear family. The nun compares her love for the priest to the tiger, growing unseen and unsuspected, but dangerous, within the supposedly safe walls of the convent. The final scene, in which the Mother Superior finds out that Yolanda has left and screams in anguish, is also affecting, perhaps because Serrano delivers the best performance in the whole cast. In the final shot, Almodóvar pulls away from the Mother Superior being embraced by another nun, the camera floating out the window to observe the scene from a distance, framed through a window.

Also compelling is a scene where Yolanda, going through drug withdrawal, spends a restless few days haunted by religious images, which Almodóvar superimposes over closeups of a haggard-looking Yolanda. At one point, a statue is being lowered into position with a rope around its neck, like a noose, and it twirls in the air, so that whenever it faces towards the camera its face is juxtaposed with Yolanda's, briefly superimposing the blank, at-peace expression of the religious figure with the tortured face of the drug addict.

Such moments hint at the visual imagination and feel for expressive, bold images that Almodóvar would develop much further in his later work. Even just a few years later he'd be making uneven but undeniably potent camp melodramas like Matador and Law of Desire, but here he still seems tentative. The nuns-doing-drugs-and-having-sex material is curiously restrained for a director who usually has no fear of pushing beyond the boundaries of good taste, and it hurts the film, making it seem as though it wants to hint at offensive content without actually doing much to offend anyone.

Matador

Pedro Almodóvar's Matador opens with a man masturbating while watching grisly, garish murders clipped out of trashy slasher movies. Almodóvar alternates between closeups on the face of former bullfighter Diego Montez (Nacho Martínez) and the grainy movie clips, in which one woman after another is killed in particularly gory and often sexualized ways. It's a bold opening scene that immediately establishes the film's central theme, the mysterious connection between sex and death, and especially the ways in which movies often display murder with a sensationalized, exploitative sexual component. In the following scene, Diego teaches a class about bullfighting — attentively watched by the naïve young student Ángel (Antonio Banderas) — and Almodóvar cuts between the class and a seduction scene in which the lawyer María Cardenal (Assumpta Serna) leads a man to his sexual death at her hands. Diego's words about killing a bull neatly parallel María's interactions with her victim, as she guides him into her arms like a matador leading the bull on, pulling him in by his belt, letting her clothes unfurl from off her body like the matador's cape, then mounting him and pulling a slender pin from her hair, stabbing the man in the back of the neck at precisely the spot where a matador stabs the bull at the end of a fight. The parallel editing unites Diego and María even before they've met, the former matador and the active matador, dancing and twirling gracefully around her victims before she brings them down.

Later, Diego and María will meet — pulled together by Ángel's Catholic guilt and urge to confess to crimes he hasn't even committed — and the parallels of the opening will become even more pronounced. Diego, it turns out, has been unable to give up the thrill of the kill even after a goring that ended his bullfighting career; "I didn't know you were still a matador," María coos, excited and aroused, when she learns that Diego has been killing young girls. The film is an amour fou romance, a love story about two death-obsessed killers who find their perfect match in one another, whose mutual worship of the art of killing makes it certain that they'll end up in one another's arms, knives held to each other's necks. At around the midpoint of the film, Diego follows María into a movie theater showing King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, and together they watch the climax in which the doomed lovers mortally wound each other, then embrace and kiss, declaring their love as they die. It's obvious then that this will also be the trajectory of Diego and María, that they are fated to follow the same path and end up in the same romantically morbid position.

Around this central romance, Almodóvar weaves a number of subplots and themes that deal with sexuality and gender. Ángel is a sexual innocent who says he has never been with a woman, which prompts Diego to wonder if his pupil is gay. Ángel, determined to prove that he's not, goes out that night and attempts to rape Diego's girlfriend, Eva (Eva Cobo), an act that only proves that he has little conception of sexuality at all. His sexuality is tied up with his admiration for his teacher, his simplistic worship of Diego's masculine bravado and ease with women. Ángel is a deeply confused character, raised by an overbearing, religious mother (Julieta Serrano) who watches his every move with suspicion and contempt. At one point, while Ángel sits naked on the edge of the tub, about to take a shower, his mother appears at the bathroom door, her face distorted by frosted glass, peering suspiciously in at him, telling him to stop looking at himself in the mirror and just take his shower already. The tiled glass breaks her face into abstracted mosaic cubes, a fragmented vision of motherly disapproval. Immediately after this scene, Almodóvar cuts to a closeup of her bare leg, propped up as she ties a garter around her thigh, while her son sits at the dinner table nearby, watching her. Everything becomes freighted with sexual import in this film, even the troubled relationship between mother and son.


Ángel's mother is a vicious caricature of insane piety, and she snipes incessantly at Ángel, perhaps influenced by her obviously negative feelings about her dead husband. Every time she mentions Ángel's father, she reflexively adds, "may he rest in peace," her voice dripping with bile and scorn, and there's even a subtle suggestion that she may have killed him — her son faints at the sight of blood, and in that, she says, he's not like her at all. Domineering mothers and absent fathers are the rule in this film. Eva's mother Pilar (Chus Lampreave) is similarly overbearing, always lurking by her daughter's side, leaning over her shoulder to dispense advice, constantly expressing her disapproval. Eva's father is nowhere to be found, either, and his absence — dead or simply gone, it hardly matters — has made Pilar bitter and distrustful, urging her daughter not to rely on love.

These are broadly stereotyped roles, drawing on familiar clichés about single mothers and asshole fathers. In fact, the film is very much concerned with gender roles and the pressure to conform to them. Ángel's desire to prove his masculinity to his teacher, to rebut the insinuation that he's gay, is what leads him to rape Eva — and when she tells the police that he didn't actually rape her, that he came before he could even penetrate her, he seems embarrassed and humiliated more than anything, his guilty feelings mingled with a shameful suspicion that he has only confirmed his lack of masculinity. In fact, Almodóvar shoots the scene where Ángel goes to the police to confess like it's gay cruising, with Ángel and the detective (Eusebio Poncela) exchanging charged glances from across the police station, separated from one another by a glass divider. Later, the detective watches one of Diego's bullfighting classes and Almodóvar inserts closeups on the crotches of the male students in the class as they twist and turn, practicing their killing moves. The detective, gathering evidence, is observing the bulges in their pants, as though they're half-excited as they twirl their capes and thrust with their swords.

Another subtext in the film is the question of proper roles for women. Rape is treated very curiously, almost cavalierly, by Eva and her mother. They seem resigned to it, and unwilling to do anything about it. They don't want to talk about it with the police, even after Ángel confesses, and when they're dragged down to the police station they refuse to press charges. Eva's mother says that the girl has been raped several times before — she can't even remember if it was three or four times — and neither of them seems especially surprised by it. It's as though they think it's just a part of life, something to be expected if you're young and attractive and walking around outside, attracting the attention of men. Later in the film, Eva, dressing up to go see Diego, tells her mother she's going out; "no wonder they're always raping you," her mother groans, as though the simple act of going out for a walk in a nice dress is an invitation for a sexual assault.


In many ways, this film is Almodóvar's darkly humorous satire of the treatment of women in a society obsessed with masculinity, violence, and death. When María takes on Ángel's case as his lawyer, a newscaster, breaking her objectivity, accuses María of "repugnant cynicism" for daring to defend a man accused of crimes against women. It's a strange conception of feminism that scolds her for not doing what's expected of her, for not keeping her distance as a show of solidarity. In a way, María defies expectations with her murders, too: the male slasher/female victim trope is so dominant, both in the cinema and in real life, that it's a shock to see a woman deploying the same template against male victims. That's why the revelation that María kills because she's obsessed with Diego is such a big disappointment, making her just another female stalker basing her life on a man's actions. She would have been a far more interesting figure if she had killed for her own mysterious reasons, driven by her own inner drives just as Diego is, rather than simply following his example. It's a disappointing twist that somewhat undercuts the much more complex and ambiguous psychosexual currents in the film.

Despite this bow to conventionality, Matador remains a provocative and fascinating film, a lurid examination of sex and death and the ways in which they're entangled with cultural expectations and engrained gender roles. It's over-the-top and melodramatic, as expected from Almodóvar, but that only makes its raw, violent emotions even more powerful. It's a conflicted film that never quite settles the question of how we should feel about these characters and their mad urges. It's a film about the loss of control, the inability to resist the desires and passions that bubble up from within, consuming these lovers in murder and sexual bliss.

Law of Desire

Pedro Almodóvar's Law of Desire is a very strange movie, perpetually stuck between genres and never quite settling into any one mode for long enough to make a real impact. It's often entertaining — and even more often so bizarre that it's at least hard to look away — but in the end only isolated moments linger beyond the ephemeral moment. It's a dark comedy that isn't actually very funny, a melodrama so ridiculous it challenges even daytime soap standards of believability, a half-hearted murder thriller whose villain is one of the film's goofiest characters. And so on... Through all this wackiness, Almodóvar never quite dismisses the possibility that he actually means for this to be a moving drama, but then he'll follow up a genuinely touching moment of emotional depth with something so silly that it becomes impossible to take anything here seriously. It's a confused (and confusing) pastiche, and admittedly a rather fun whirlwind ride despite its flaws.

Almodóvar changes the seeming story as often as the film shifts moods, but it's basically about the famous gay film and theater director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), who pines for his absent lover Juan (Miguel Molina) even as he starts up a fiery new relationship with the clingy, insistent Antonio (Antonio Banderas), who maintains that he's always been straight but who jumps wholeheartedly into this gay relationship anyway. The film sometimes seems to be about this romantic triangle, with Pablo still in love with Juan, angering the possessive Antonio. And sometimes the film is about Pablo's sister Tina (Carmen Maura), a transsexual who stars in his films and plays. Frankly, whenever the focus is on Tina, this suddenly becomes a much more interesting film. The young Banderas, still several years from his Hollywood breakthrough, brings a playful nuttiness to his part, and he's fun to watch, but Maura's tempestuous, flighty performance is a true wonder. Tina is a rich, unforgettable character, much more nuanced and memorable than Pablo, the film's ostensible protagonist, or anybody else in the film; she steals the film from everyone. Her backstory is complicated and absurdly melodramatic, and doesn't spill out until towards the end of the film, but what's obvious throughout is that she's a damaged woman who's given up on romantic, sexual love long ago. Instead, she pours herself into her love for her brother, and for the little girl she's adopted, the feisty Ada (Manuela Velasco).

Tina possesses surprising depths of religious feeling, even if she does practice a religion pretty much of her own making: she and Ada build a lavish shrine to the Virgin Mary in their living room and pray to the statue for very personal intercessions, all of which, from Ada's wide-eyed point of view, promptly come true. The film's sense of spirituality is as cock-eyed as everything else about it, but there's a certain profundity to the scene where Tina, entering a church where she sang as a young boy, abruptly bursts into operatic song, singing along soulfully with the priest at the organ. It's in Tina that the film's emotional core is located, in her poignant feelings about her tortured past and her distrust of men. Her history suggests that she's Almodóvar's version of Fassbinder's Elvira from In a Year With 13 Moons (she even gets her sex change in Morocco, like Elvira), but she's ultimately much more comfortable in her skin, and her chosen gender, than Fassbinder's character. She's a real woman in every way, and of course it helps that she's played by a real woman, too. Almodóvar even makes this into a subtle joke when he introduces Ada's biological mother, played by the very convincing real-life transsexual Bibiana Fernández, who is only given away by her deep bass voice, with its surprising resonances emitting from her distinctly feminine form. The "real" woman plays a transsexual and the real transsexual plays a mother, one of the many ways in which Almodóvar slyly pulls the rug out from under things.


If Tina's story is often moving and beautiful and funny, the rest of the film sometimes seems to be struggling to come up with something equally compelling whenever she's not on screen. Poncela is wanly effective as the reserved, egotistical Pablo, dealing with two men while trying to bring together his latest project. But his story just isn't that interesting, and it goes completely off the rails in the film's second half when Antonio's increasing obsessiveness introduces some low-key thriller elements, even as the melodrama begins spiraling out of control. By the time Pablo winds up in a hospital, a total amnesiac after a grief-stricken car accident, one can only laugh at the craven silliness of the plotting. Even less explicable is Pablo's late-blossoming love for the batty Antonio, which renders the over-the-top final scenes utterly laughable — and really, what other response is there when Pablo's emotional outburst seems to cause the spontaneous combustion of his typewriter and Tina's shrine to Mary? It's as though the film has suddenly and incongruously morphed into one of those action movies where something is required to burst into flames in every scene, whether it's plausible or not.

The film is undoubtedly a mess, but an entertaining mess at least, and Almodóvar's visual style is never less than striking. He crams the film with playful stylistic touches, like the fade from a closeup of Pablo's eyes to the spinning wheels of his car, the hubcaps aligning perfectly with his pupils. There's also the sensual beauty of a wonderful scene where Tina, Pablo and Ada walk beneath the glistening arc of a hose's spray, marveling at the ethereal beauty of the water's perfect arc until Tina demands that she be soaked by the spray. The trio are a rough surrogate family, decidedly non-traditional but more loving and stable than the supposedly more conventional family Tina and Pablo had as kids themselves. Even while trapping this makeshift family within an increasingly outrageous and silly narrative, Almodóvar shows great respect for their nobility, their strength, their emotional riches. The film often seems on the verge of falling apart, but Tina, funny and fierce and independent and one of the cinema's great characters, never does.