Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
By this point in his career, Pedro Almodóvar’s moved on from his rough-edged, aggressive and exploratory first efforts, making movies distinct from his past work precisely because of their heightened degree of precision and the increasing austerity of his cinematic style. Kika marks another moment of beginning to slow down and take a more deliberate pace. There are moments in the film I would call downright meditative, and which coexist peacefully with Almodóvar’s trademark insanity. It’s also one of his most conceptually fluid works, which is to say that it’s somewhat inconclusive in its focus and execution. This lack of specificity is kept together by the tension between that craziness on one side and the stylistic authority on the other.
Kika flows in interesting, unpredictable directions, opening itself up and closing down again throughout. As usual, Almodóvar opens with an establishing image that sets the tonal and thematic thrust of the film, this time with a stylized image of a woman silhouetted in a keyhole. Quickly, we realize we’re looking through Ramón’s (Àlex Casanovas) camera viewfinder, looking at the image while participating in its creation. He’s shooting a fashion spread, which gets increasingly intimate even as he gets increasingly rape-y, wielding his camera almost threateningly towards the model. The film constantly calls the audience’s attention to its camera via imagined surveillance angles planted jarringly throughout the film. We observe the action through a porthole on a diner’s kitchen door, or through the bottom of a steering wheel – unnatural, voyeuristic angles, which constantly draw attention to the fact that we’re spying on these people, and make us a part of their world somehow. At one point, a video camera’s telephoto lens emerges phallically from a crazy woman’s helmet towards its subject and the audience.
Ramón arrives home from the shoot to find his mother shot dead, apparently of a suicide, and we flash to three years later, when we finally meet the titular character (Veronica Forqué), a goofy bombshell makeup artist, teaching a group of students about her technique, when she is interrupted with a request from an American writer, Nicholas (Peter Coyote), to dress his stepson Ramón’s corpse. Ramón comes back to life when she shocks his big toe with a lamp, and they wind up together. Nicholas is in need of financial assistance and maneuvering towards his dead wife’s old villa. He’s got a strange air about him, partially conveyed by his overwhelmingly soap opera-esque persona and partially, also, because he’s dubbed into Spanish in the film, removing him from its reality. Andrea (Victoria Abril) is a death obsessed reporter, she of the aforementioned bonercam, who makes a show called “The Worst of Today,” which is basically a collection of snuff videos followed up with related interviews, like talking to a murderer’s disbelieving mother. She hovers around this group all the time, monitoring them.
There are many more plot points, I won’t bother trying to sum them all up, because the plot is dense and ridiculous; it feels precisely structured so that someone is always hidden around a corner, ready to pop out at any moment. The only uniting thread, and this is despite the fact that the film feels like more of an insane roundelay than a single-character piece, is that your sympathies always remain with Kika, who is maybe the only person in the entire film who doesn’t try to impose her will on anyone, or to try to spy or pry, or do anything else against anyone. Beyond this, she doesn’t even seem annoyed when others impose on her, something which is made abundantly clear in what is the funniest rape scene I have ever seen.
Watching Almodóvar’s films, I consistently find myself asking “how does he get away with it?” And I don’t even mean in the public, but I mean with me. One of the things I always keep an eye out for when watching films is the degree to which I find them to be “responsible” works of art, i.e. not pollutant to humanity. This isn’t achieved through an antiquated sense of morality or ethics, but through a sense of humanity, in a way. Hate isn’t prohibited for me in a work of art, insofar as it’s as valid a subject as any other, but hatefulness, reflective of a contemptuous mind via the artist’s rendering, definitely is. Almodóvar stages rape after rape and I don’t find him hateful, but I can’t entirely tell you why.
Somewhere within the alchemical reactions between his stylization and narrative approach, the strange balance in seriousness and over-the-top gaudiness and camp, he’s found this world that is real and not at the same time. His most interesting creations, the ones he loves, like Kika, operate both inside and outside of them. Her obligations are to her fellow man and not to society; it’s what allows her to take everyone at face value, to have a job and do it well, to be happy all the time. Nicholas needs money, Ramón needs to control his wife, Andrea needs to confront death; all of them are obsessed with the finite and desperate, the sorts of things that can enclose you. Happiness isn’t found in not following the rules, it’s found in not being cognizant of them in the first place, and not allowing yourself to be enclosed – true liberation. In the end, freed of the people around her, there’s nothing left for Kika to do except drive away from the camera, towards a future we’ll never get to spy.
by Andrei Alupului
Other Almodóvar Oeuvre Features
What Have I Done to Deserve This?
