Live Flesh (1997)
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
When Victor attempts to seduce Elena, all he gets for his trouble is a one-way, six-year ticket to prison, where he concentrates on strengthening his mind, his body... and his desire for vengeance on the man who put him there. After his release and still madly in love with her, Victor will stop at nothing to win her over even if means revenge, for Elena has married David, the cop who sent him to prison!
4 connections found
View:
4 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Live Flesh to
Much as he did with Ruth Rendell's "Live Flesh," Almodovar has taken an ice-cold psychological thriller, penned by a novelist of far less humanistic temperament, and performed some stylistic surgery of his own, adding broad comic relief, overripe melodrama, outrageous asides and zesty girl-power uplift.
That there’s something creepy at the heart of “Skin” should surprise no one who’s seen Almodóvar’s “Matador” or “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education” or “Live Flesh,” which is also based on a novel and which, I think, this new film most resembles.
Considering the fact that I've given five stars to every Pedro Almodóvar film since Live Flesh (1997), it will come as no great shock that his latest, The Skin I Live In, also comes in for the full five.
This is only the second Almodóvar films whose story he didn't dream up; the other was the 1997 Live Flesh, from a Ruth Rendell novel.
It is closest tonally to Almodovar films like Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Live Flesh, in that it is a thriller but the story is completely barking mad, etched with man’s twisted sensibilities.
Cruz and Bardem, who have a history together - the erotically charged 1992 Spanish import, Jamón, Jamón, and Pedro Almodovar's 1997 gem, Live Flesh - turn what could have been a cartoon rendering of hot-blooded Latin passion into a seriously unpredictable relationship.
The title Volver translates as Coming Backâthat is "back from the dead"â in Pedro Almodovar's ("Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!"/"Live Flesh"/"All About My Mother"/"Talk to Her") 16th feature, which proves to be one of his more mature but less impudent works.
Magical-realist stuff, but done with casual matter-of-factness, like Cruz giving birth in the back of a bus in Live Flesh.
Though the film has a fair share of camp humour, it's the formal and emotional sophistication that really impresses; like Live Flesh, it displays a depth and maturity lacking in Almodóvar's earlier work.
Manuela's journey of healing shows her as comfortable with transvestites (as in the Sandra Bernhard-esque Antonia San Juan) as with nuns (the beautiful Penelope Cruz from Mr. Almodóvar's "Live Flesh").
But since 1996's "The Flower of My Secret," and most alarmingly with "Live Flesh" from 1997, he's been experimenting with a formalism that felt conventional, like someone was standing over him saying, "Oh, behave!"
After fumbling a little in The Flower of My Secret , Almodovar came back strong in 1997 with Live Flesh .