La ley del deseo

Outrageous, extremely enjoyable, over-the-top melodrama about a straight psychopath (Antonio Banderas) prepared to go gay to further his career with a homosexual film director (Eusebio Poncela). A feast of familiar faces for anyone familiar with Almodovar's career. Carmen Maura as the director's transsexual sister, happily dispensing cocaine to hospital patients, knocking out policemen and engaging in the in-scene to end all in-scenes with the beautiful Bibiana Fernandez, the mother of her adopted daughter, when anyone in the know would recognize Fernandez as Spain's most famous transsexual in real life! About halfway through, Almodovar's loopiness slips into high gear and the laughs come thick and fast. Just don't expect too much believability towards the end. Interesting to see so many faces from Almodovar's pitch-black comedy Matador, made the previous year and in this viewer's opinion far superior. Still, Law of Desire is too way over the top not to be enjoyable. Just don't throw your popcorn at the screen.

This film is centred on two siblings; Pablo, a gay film director who makes homo-erotic films; and his sister Tina, who is a transsexual lesbian who dreams of being an actress and is raising a ten year old girl named Ada who is the daughter of her former girlfriend. After Pablo's lover, Jaun, goes away for the summer he begins a relationship with Antonio, not suspecting that the latter will get dangerously jealous of his love for Juan.

As with most films by director Pedro Almodóvar the plot is secondary to the characters; it is there to put the characters in an interesting, and fairly melodramatic positions. This of course requires interesting central characters and here we get those. As is often the case they are a fairly unconventional group. There are things that may disturb some viewers such as Tina talking about her incestuous relationship with her father who persuaded her to get a sex change before leaving her... particularly shocking is that she doesn't feel abused. Pablo's relationships with Juan and Antonio are surprisingly frank for a film made in the eighties. The cast is solid with Eusebio Poncela and Carmen Maura really impressing as Pablo and Tina; Antonio Banderas is great as Antonio and young Manuela Velasco impresses as Ada. Things do get melodramatic towards the end but that doesn't feel out of place; in fact it is relatively mild compared to some of Almodóvar's other films. Overall I'd say this won't be for everybody but it is a must see for fans of Almodóvar's work.

These comments are based on watching the film in Spanish with English subtitles.

THE LAW OF DESIRE opened the 1987 Miami Int'l Film Festival. Almodovar and Carmen Maura had already broken through to the American market at this event with WHAT HAVE I DONE TO... a few years earlier. So it was surprising to find them pacing nervously up and down the lobby of the C.Grove Playhouse at THE LAW's North American premiere. They were also in and out of its rest rooms, as the sold out audience roared in laughter and applauded the film, and I was making an early dash to the post-premiere party at the Viscaya Palace. They were acting just like the neurotic characters they bring to life in this and their other films. They were still insecure and frustrated that their huge popularity and celebrity status in Europe was reduced to a recent, almost cult, following in the U.S. They needn't have worried. The film confirmed both of these artists along with Antonio Banderas as stars among North American art movie lovers. (This achievement would be crowned the following year with the triumph of their next collaboration: the Oscar-nominated WOMEN ON THE VERGE...) But THE LAW OF DESIRE will be remembered as Almodovar's self-confessed most personal work, and the masterpiece of his earlier career. This film is pure Almodovar, before he toned down to more mainstream fare. LAW... resumes the Almodovarian style, in all its excesses. It features most of his muses, beyond Maura and Banderas: Rossy dePalma, Bibi Anderssen, Eusebio Poncela, and the rest. His style as a writer/director of women goes over the top here, as does his predilection with telephones, the police, drug use (cocaine in particular), the media, dysfunctional families, sexual ambiguity, the Catholic Church, and the city of Madrid. Almodovar fans will note that all the above themes permeate his work. But nowhere are they so well linked and exposed as in this landmark film.

I saw this film after having seen Bad Education, and there are many plot lines similar in both. I loved this film, not only am I a huge fan of Almodóvar, but in this film, the easy and simple beauty of the shots stood out. The acting was good, not amazing but good, particularly from Pablo and Tina. As well as directing beautifully, Almodóvar knows how to infuse a scene with sex, even if no sex is actually taking place-for example, when Antonio lights his cigarette of Pablo's. The film does become melodramatic towards the end, but I don't see this as a failing, melodrama, if done well, as it is here, need not be ridiculous

In what has now customarily become known as the New Queer Cinema, Almodovar's "Law of Desire" must be seen as a landmark film. Opening with a naked man masturbating and being guided through the motions by the disembodied voice of 'the director', this turns out to be something of a red-herring, though it does establish that the film's central character is a director, (Almodovar?), and that he is gay. What follows is a teasing Hitchcockain menage-a-trois murder yarn, (not mystery), in which the homosexuality of the protagonists is very much to the fore and is hardly seen as 'an issue', (a major breakthrough in what was a mainstream Spanish movie of its day). Indeed "Law of Desire" was the film which really established Almodovar internationally and while gay-themed movies were finally making their mark in 1987 few were quite as explicitly erotic or as pleasurably in-your-face as this.

Its cast was largely made up of what only be described as players from Almodovar's stock company and in a fine cast Antonio Banderas and Carmen Maura are the stand-outs; he as a pathologically disturbed 'fan' whose obsession with Eusebio Puncela's director leads to murder and she as the director's transsexual 'sister', a deliriously giddy performance and yet played mostly 'straight' by Maura.

If not quite as deep as Almodovar's later movies there is nevertheless much to enjoy here, (and although dealing with tragic issues Almodovar teases out the black comedy for all its worth). Now, of course, a great deal of the fun is in slotting the film into the Almodovar canon and seeing exactly where it fits in relation to the movies that followed it.