Matador

Matador is an early Almodovar work that explores the relationship between sex and violence through the medium of bullfighting. It follows a love quadrangle between a retired matador, his repressed student, the matador's lover, and the student's lawyer, as a series of murders takes place in Madrid. Dark comedy ensues in the midst of murder investigations and extremely loud eighties fashions.

The performances make this decidedly odd film work. Assumpta Serna is great as the lawyer, while Antonio Banderas makes an early appearance as her client. Carmen Maura also has a small role, even though her character is somewhat lacking in development. The characters remain convincing even as the plot spins into the out right bizarre.

Some viewers might complain that the film's explicit sex and violence make it little different from an exploitation film, and indeed it opens with a character masturbating to a slasher movie. Furthermore, its commentary on sex and violence at times seems pretentious. However, the film is far more creative and well made than any exploitation film, and is well worth your time.

If you're a fan of Pedro Almodovar, you'll love this one from 1986.. filmed in Madrid, it has all the usual elements: offbeat characters who meet up and get even crazier, like atoms smashing together. when a young matador Angel (Antonio Banderas at 26) thinks his heroes have committed crimes, he confesses to them to take the fall. watch that opening scene.. .pretty rough stuff: (simulated) sex, nudity, and murder, all in one. his lawyer has her own kinky issues, and wants to defend Angel. Look for the usual Almodovar cast, with Carmen Maura and Chus Lampreave. Assumpta Serna is the sexy, flirty, over-sexed Maria. and the gory bullfights, which play a big part in the story. Secrets. everyone has their secret. which ones will come out? Liaisons... more secrets. will the police find the real killer(s)? it's very good. intrigue.

Matador is one of the strangest, darkest, (and yet compelling) early films from Spanish master filmmaker Pedro Amoldovar.

It is completely nuts.

Pour in equal measures of sadism, masochism, bullfighting, perverted sexuality, and sexual violence. Add in a splash of comedy and soupcon of star-crossed lovers (if, for a moment, you thought pairing Tybalt and Lady McBeth qualified as star-crossed) and you have what passes as characterisation. Mix dark nights with gaudy flamenco colours and you have some striking cinematography. I'll come to the plot in a minute…

Amoldovar was clearly enjoying Spanish cinema's new-found, post-Franco sexual and artistic liberalism. The prudish among his audience might suggest he was positively wallowing in it. Whatever the truth, Matador is a masterpiece of his style, if not, indeed, a whole style in of itself.

The plot – or possibly a better description, the tapestry over which the characters move – is a murder hunt. Very few prizes will be won, however, for guessing the culprit/s. Two people are quickly in the audience's frame because they are shown… er… murdering people on camera. A third person (Banderas, in to my mind his best Amoldovar role) confesses to the murders in a fit of insecurity and remorse over an attempted rape ("some girls get all the luck" comments a female duty officer dryly, proving that feminism wasn't that big in Spain back in the 1980s). Nevertheless, the net soon closes on the crushingly obvious culprits (who in the meantime have developed quite a crush on each other). As previously mentioned, completely nuts.

Matador's strengths are in its characterisation and its sheer bare-facedness. Amoldovar has, as usual, assembled a character list of freaks and proceeded to humanise all of them – to the point where there is a genuine whiff of tragedy in the final act. To mention the great performances is really to rehearse the cast list. Assumpta Serna, Nacho Martinez, Antonio Banderas and Eva Cobo are all excellent. And it really is worth seeing, just for the young Antonio.

There are some interesting points made in the film about outsiders, liberalism, sexual politics and gender politics (as always with Amoldovar). I'll let you pick through them. It is, though, not so much a film as a giant red rag to the raging bull of conservatism, deftly whisked aside to the ragged applause of an admiring, if somewhat perplexed, audience. A positive Jimi Hendrix of a film, unpolished, with some definite dud notes, but undeniably the work of a genius. 8½/ 10

It is very much worth watching this early film of Almodovar from 1986, with a painfully young Antonio Banderas also at one of his first major screen presences. As many of his latest great movies it's a film hard to put in a precise square, a combination of comedy and tragedy, of crime, love and corrida movie with a touch of absurd and a touch of passion taken directly from life.

Although many of the major themes of passion, sexual desire and ambiguity, relation between love and death are already present the movie is somehow simpler in action and easier to watch than some of the later films. The story of two sexual predators and murderers, united in life by the passion for bull fights and in death by their passion for each other is acted with accuracy by a good team of actors and directed with an already recognizable style by Almodovar. The hand of the young master is certainly already there, and the film ages well 20 years after is premiere.

The connection between sex and death is not a novel one. Elizabethan poetry would occasionally use the latter as a metaphor for the former. Pedro Almodóvar's sixth feature is about three people who have erased the line between the two: Nacho Martinez, a matador gored in the ring, who now teaches students on the art; Antonio Banderas, one of his pupils; and Assumpta Serna, a lawyer defending Banderas who is charged with raping and killing two girls.

In other words, it's one of Almodóvar's movies about the weird kinks of the world. This time, however, he is not concerned with the people at the edge of Spanish society, but at the center of the normal world... assuming there is such a thing. We are all weird, we all act outside the norms, and the people we respect can be the most bizarre.

It's rather slow-moving for one of his movies, probably because this is not one of his shock comedies - although there are comic elements. Visually, it is sumptuous, with a focus on colors, particularly bright reds that draw one's eyes. Miss Serna is a sharp dresser, and she wears a cape in several scenes, which she whirls like a bullfighter going in for the kill.

Is Almodóvar decrying bullfighting? Or in favor of consensual activity of whatever sort? Has he simply presented his bizarre story, and left his audience to draw the moral conclusions it chooses? Or is this simply the sort of story he likes to tell? I think the last is true, but there's nothing simple about it.