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Plot synopsis
On a passenger seat of an off-duty city bus in the latter days of
Franco-era Madrid, Victor makes his arrival into the world. His mother
is young, single, and poor; what living she makes comes from turning
tricks. So happily ever after doesn't really seem like it's part of
young Victor's destiny. He loses his virginity to a beautiful drug
addict named Elena at a nightclub one night, and promptly fancies
himself in love; when she blows him off on the evening they've arranged
to get together next, he can't seem to understand why. Heartbroken and
pissed-off, he shows up at her door, demanding an explanation. Elena,
infinitely more experienced than Victor and impatiently waiting for her
dealer to show up so she can get her fix, tells him flat-out that the
sex was lousy, and that he should get his loser self away from her
before she makes him. To prove her point, she gets out her gun. In the
struggle that ensues the gun accidentally goes off, prompting Elena's
neighbor to call in the police. Meanwhile, two cops are in the midst of
a deep heart-to-heart over older partner Sancho's worries that his wife
Clara is having an affair. When the cops field the call, Sancho's been
drinking his problems away and his emotions are high. What should be a
simple matter of getting Victor to vacate the premises gets a little
messier thanks to Sancho's irrational behavior; David gets shot and ends
up paralyzed, and Victor's carted away to jail. Six years later and
Victor finally finishes serving his time. While he's been wasting his
life away behind bars, David's married a now-respectable Elena and
gained a fair bit of fame as a star wheelchair basketball player for
Spain's national team. Still hurt by Elena's rejection and seething with
envy at David's success, Victor has just one thing on his mind: revenge.
Review
For all that Almodovar's movies are so wonderfully, garishly, surreally
colorful, and his characters over-the-top crazy, there's really
something incredibly elegant about the way in which he weaves together
the complicated relationships that define his films. He's just such an
assured storyteller that he can make the messiest of stories unfold in a
way that seems effortlessly graceful. In the hands of your average hack,
the headache-inducingly complex ties that bind Victor, Elena, David,
Clara, and Sancho would be soap-opera unbelievable. The various
intersecting love triangles and requisite coincidences propelling the
storylines would feel contrived and hopelessly difficult to follow;
you'd be conscious the whole time of what an utter fantasy world this
was. But the thing about the world that Almodovar creates, here in Live
Flesh and in so many of his other films as well, is that despite the
fact that the people that inhabit them don't much resemble the ones in
my own rather pedestrian, middle-class American reality, the fundamental
emotions that motivate them ring absolutely true. Love, hate, anger,
jealousy, lust: these are the feelings at the core of Victor, Elena,
David, Sancho, and Clara's actions. Even when the characters are acting
in a way that you can't ever imagine acting yourself, you eventually get
the why behind their behaviors, and empathize with them even when
they're waving guns at each other and breaking out into hysterics and
being emotionally manipulative bastards. By film's end, Almodovar
manages to make you care about characters you kinda sorta hated two
hours earlier. And you find yourself rooting for that improbable -- but
not impossible -- fairy-tale ending. Because heck, if these screwed-up,
psychologically damaged folks can manage to find something resembling
happily-ever-after, then hey: there's hope for us all.
—reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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