Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
By the time of Matador, Pedro Almodóvar’s fifth feature-length film from 1986, all of his signature idiosyncratic quirks and obsessions were firmly in place. You’ve got your strong female characters entangled in a lurid, bordering-on-absurdly-melodramatic plot; you’ve got your dark sexuality, treated in a breezy, off-handed way; you’ve got your supernatural powers, head-on confrontations with Catholicism, childhood traumas, shocking violence and satiric humor, all wrapped-up in a big, bright, candy-colored, movie-loving, homosexual bow.
I knew right from the start that this movie would be for me. It was rated NC-17 for “aberrant sexuality, including violence.” Sounds great! But little did I know what I was in for in the first sequence. We begin right in the wet, bloody thick of it, as a number of women, frequently naked, are chopped, drowned, stabbed, hung, decapitated and generally abused before our eyes. We pull back to reveal the scene: this is some sort of compilation video and it’s being watched by a furiously masturbating man. Meet the hero of our story, Diego (Nacho Martínez): former matador, current instructor and part-time serial killer. Diego was forced to retire from the ring after a goring incident and he’s none too happy about it. All that pent-up, sexualized violence has to go somewhere, after all. Hence the jerk-off sessions to scenes of misogynistic splatter. Hence, too, the pair of dead girls buried in the backyard of his large villa-cum-bullfighting school.
One of his other students is Ángel, played with simpering sweetness by Antonio Banderas. A 20-year-old virgin, Ángel doesn’t fit into the typical matador mold. There is absolutely nothing macho about him, people continually ask him if he’s gay and he faints at the first sight of blood. He’s obsessed with dying, though, and dying in the ring seems like a great idea. At least it would get him away from his insane bitch of a mother (a pitch-perfect Julieta Serrano), a religious zealot who wears a metal cilice (a belt with inward-pointing spikes) around her thigh. To prove his manliness to his teacher, he decides to rape Diego’s girlfriend Eva (Eva Cobo), a model who also happens to be Ángel’s next door neighbor (the film, like most of Almdóvar’s, is filled with coincidences of this sort). But he can’t even do this right. He has trouble getting the blade of his boy scout knife open and he winds up ejaculating all over her thigh in about three seconds. Eva doesn’t seem to mind, though – these things happen after all, and the scene of her and her mother at the police station dismissing even the thought of pressing charges is hilarious. This is typical of Almodóvar’s attitude towards these matters: the darker the material, the more dire the real-world implications, the lighter and more ironic his tone. But whereas for any other director who deals in the macabre (Todd Solondz, let’s say) this would indicate a contempt for his characters and for humanity in general, for Almodóvar it is quite the opposite. He clearly loves and understands his characters, no matter how much they sin. Even serial killers and rapists deserve love.
This includes María (Assumpta Serna), an insane murderess and lawyer, the matching pair to Diego’s suave lady killer. Their star-crossed love is at the center of the plot. By some wild coincidence, she is assigned to defend Ángel after he falsely confesses to the four murders committed by Diego and María. Seems he’s got a wicked guilt-complex: the Catholic church sure did a number on this kid. When we first see María, she’s brought a man back to her apartment and starts aggressively seducing him. Soon she’s mounted him, and at the moment of climax stabs him in the back of the neck with a hair pin. (Of course she keeps grinding him after he’s dead.) This is cross cut with a scene of Diego teaching his students the proper way to kill a bull.
Nobody ever said Almodóvar was the subtlest director, and his themes here are obvious: Spain’s national sport is a violent, sexualized ritual that echoes the dark, religiously-repressed, sado-masochistic inclinations of its populace. But fuck subtlety, Almodóvar is after something more here. He goes way past subtlety, far beyond good taste, to something approaching a kind of sublime, melodramatic, polysexual, pop-art orgy.
by Shannon Gramas
Other Almodóvar Oeuvre Features
What Have I Done to Deserve This?
