Kika

When a film begins with a keyhole bordered image of a woman undressing, sufficient precautions should be taken. When Pedro Almodóvar begins a film in such a voyeuristic fashion, everything seems right in the world.

Such is the opening sequence of Almodóvar's 10th full-length feature, Kika. A twisted tale of murder, rape, incest and just about every other adjective describing a vulgar or sinful act, Kika is at times hard to watch but usually even harder to turn away from. But while its tangled web of intertwining characters and story lines is compelling enough not to lose interest, the manner through which it maintains that interest does not prove to be worth the entertainment.

You're probably wondering why I would be driving you away from a film that sounds so engaging. If you are familiar with Almodóvar's work, it will be much easier for you to both grasp and handle this film. If you are not familiar with Almodóvar's work, this is not the place to start. If you have heard of Almodóvar's reputation but have never seen his films, this is not the place to start. In any other remotely similar situation, this is not the place to start.

I am only so relentless because Almodóvar is one of the greatest Spanish filmmakers of our time. He has a stunning catalog of films and is somewhat of a hero of the art's counter-culture. With a reputation for pushing the limits, Almodóvar is usually successful in delivering even the most perverse films in a tasteful manner.

That is where Kika fails: It is full of content but lacking delivery. If the film took itself seriously there would be much more to work with. But with the direction it chose, trying to be a dark (pitch dark) comedy, the subject matter is too tasteless to work.

To prove my point, let's do a little role playing. I will be the enthusiastic screenwriter pitching my story to you, the money-hungry studio executive half-heartedly listening to my idea for the next screwball comedy:

OK, so Ramón is a young man whose mother commits suicide for reasons that may or may not point to her unhappy marriage with Ramón's stepfather, Nicholas. Three years later, the stepfather and son move in together. One day while Ramón is presumed dead, a young woman named Kika is sent to apply makeup to his corpse, only to witness his miraculous revival. Kika and Ramón soon begin dating and she moves in with him. Eventually, Kika decides to make it a family affair by secretly having sex with Nicholas, Ramón's womanizing stepfather.

This is when it gets good.

The witness to everything is Ramón's lesbian housemaid, Juana. She has an insane brother who, as an adolescent, had sex with all sorts of animals but then moved on to raping the neighborhood girls. Being the great sister that she is, she started having sex with him so that he could "let off some steam" instead of pursuing his new hobby. His destructive path soon leads him to jail.

This is when it really gets good.

Years later, Juana's brother escapes from prison and tracks her down to the apartment at which she works. The fugitive plans to pilfer a few cameras from the apartment until he discovers the sleeping Kika. Against his sister's pleas, he rapes Kika for what seems like hours. The rape is called in by a peeping-tom across the street and an investigation ensues to find out who was involved, or rather who wasn't involved.

Sound funny? I didn't think so. And with such despicable characters, it is nearly impossible to find anyone, or anything, to laugh at. The most frustrating part about the film is that Almodóvar could have made this into a powerful drama, as he did with Talk to Her and Bad Education. All the elements are there, it's just in the completely wrong genre. It's like trying to turn Schindler's List into a sitcom.

But turning Kika into a drama would involve a few changes, especially Verónica Forqué as Kika. She is completely over-the-top and not once convincing. She adds nothing to her part and is especially painful to watch during her emotionless and even smart alecky rape.

The rape scene itself is the film's biggest red flag. No matter how hard you try, even if you are Pedro Almodóvar, making comedy out of such an emotionally charged issue as rape will prove improbable if not impossible.

With that said, Kika is a blow to Almodóvar fans who find themselves defending his films as artistic not licentious. Instead of an earnest film by a standout director, we are given an indecent soap opera with questionable direction. But we'll forgive you Pedro, nobody's perfect.

More of an ensemble comedy than one would expect for a film titled after a single character, 'Kika' focuses on how the lives of several Spaniards intersect, including a widowed author, his jaded son, the son's reporter ex-girlfriend, a porn star, the porn star's lesbian sister and the makeup artist the sister fancies. It takes quite a while for the trajectories of the characters to overlap and 'Kika' seems a little all over the place at first with bizarre seemingly random incidents like a graveyard murder and placing makeup on a sleeping man thought dead. As the movie progresses though, everything fits into place surprisingly well with the highlight being arguably the funniest rape scene ever filmed. While a comical treatment of the subject might sound in bad taste, the media frenzy that the rape causes in the film makes for an excellent satirical target. The film is less about mocking rape and more about public nonchalance towards it. Almodóvar's satire would have, however, benefited from the rape occurring earlier with more focus on the aftermath and Victoria Abril who, dressed in full-body camera-suit (!), films and unthinkingly broadcast it. There is also a great twist with Peter Coyote's character that deserves more screen time rather than being thrown in at the end, but for all its unevenness and roundabout first half hour, 'Kika' is a reasonably involving motion picture at the end of the day.

What everyone in the press seemed to miss about this film was that it was a spoof on the media and especially the talk show mentality which has come to dominate our lives. The central figure of the film is not so much Kika as it is Caracortada (scarface) who runs a real life television program featuring live footage from video cameras. She chases down much of this footage herself, having a camera inserted into a helmet and flying around town on a motor scooter. We are drawn into this web -- during the middle of a rape sequence, the rapist actually says something funny -- and in the audience with whom I saw the film when it premiered, many laughed (and then somehow gasped that they were laughing in the middle of a rape scene). That is as nearly perfect as black comedy gets. Following the rape, Caracortada interviews the victim and asks "How big was he?" Isn't this indicative of the intrusiveness of media in our lives? How did the press and so many commentators miss it?

Although the film is ostensibly about "Kika," she is actually only one character featured in this raunchy, ensemble comedy.

The plot here is all over the place! This is not necessarily bad--one character ties into another character's life and the focus of the movie moves in a circular manner which eventually returns to our heroine, the naive but lovable Kika (well-portrayed by Verónica Forqué).

This film is funny! It's a combination of "There's Something About Mary," Woody Allen at his zaniest, and "Sex and the City." Good for a laugh, especially for the poor dubbing of Peter Coyote's Spanish.

Maybe this isn't as good as the bulk of Almodóvar's output: not having seen the bulk of his output, I'm in no position to tell. I do remember that there was general disappointment in 1993. As I recall - obviously, one could find out by checking primary documents whether or not my recollection is correct - every critic and his dog took the opportunity to say "This time Almodóvar has gone too far", which meant, depending on the critic, either "Almodóvar is being too silly", "Almodóvar is trying too hard to get our attention", or "Almodóvar has finally lapsed into morally reprehensible sexism".

I find all of these reactions hard to understand. "Kika" is such a sweet, such an INNOCENT film! Maybe you didn't have fun, as I did; but how could anyone OBJECT to it? Far from being hard to like, the characters were such that I found myself warming to the worst of them: Kika herself is completely adorable, the outrageous Andrea turned out to have a heart, of sorts - certainly she had an ethos -, and even Nicholas and Ramón revealed some human traits. If I have a complaint about anyone's characterisation it would be Ramón's. When we first meet him he's just a cold fish; not a bad man, but we can't like him. By the end of the film I found myself wondering if the mild warmth Almodóvar discovered had really been there all along, or if he it had been smuggled in when we weren't looking. No matter: the film isn't about him, anyway.

There's nothing gruesome about "Kika", nothing cruel, nothing hard to watch. (Well, maybe a touch of blood in one final scene, but I can forgive that.) There's a lot of sex, no doubt, but none of that terribly EARNEST stuff one finds in American movies...

[I'm about to reveal something. Stop reading now if you haven't seen the film.] ...One of the things I'm sure many critics objected to was the rape scene. Almodóvar played it as a comedy, in the way that so many directors will play an armed robbery - and it was a kind of armed robbery - as comedy. At first we wonder if Kika is so clueless that she doesn't realise she's being raped. But in fact she's just postponing her shock, in a way that is - well, ludicrous, but also commonplace. The entire extended sequence of which the rape is part is so delightfully ridiculous BECAUSE, not in spite of, all the characters' perfect clarity of purpose.

If this IS one of Almodóvar's lesser works I shouldn't hesitate to see the rest.