LIVE FLESH (67)

Directed by: Pedro Almodovar

Starring: Javier Bardem, Francesca Neri, Liberto Rabal

The Pitch: Two men - an ex-cop paralysed by a bullet, and the young man who inadvertently fired that bullet - are in love with the same woman.

Theo Sez: Lush, satisfying images, full rich colours in every shot - even the post-boxes are conspicuously emblazoned with the deep red-and-yellow of the Spanish flag - orange lamplight and creamy skin-tones, plus a soundtrack of those haunting, plangent songs so beloved of the Spanish, a guitar throbbing while a lone male voice wails lyrics like "You can keep the rest, but give me back my mother's rosary". Almodovar fans from the WOMEN ON THE VERGE days may be disappointed, because it doesn't fizz and crackle in the same way - it moves with a kind of flamboyant rigour, the controlled passion of a "paso doble", its eroticism less frenzied and more voluptuous - yet it's not hard to connect this new Almodovar with the earlier model : like his "outrageous" late-80s films it takes a genre (melodrama here, sex comedy before) to a formal and stylistic pitch where it just begins to topple over into camp, yet retains its traditional pleasures. The duality is appropriate, for this is a film about the comedy of human passions, the way Life can suddenly go from intense to funny and back again - things get increasingly complicated till suddenly (and farcically) everybody's spying on each other ; a fist-fight suddenly evaporates as both fighters turn to watch a goal being scored in a football match. Like its visuals it's both rich and wholly artificial, both inside its main characters' passions - both of them living "a life on wheels", more alike than they know yet locked in hate - and outside looking in amusedly, like a latter-day Bunuel (and the film duly includes a lengthy clip from the 1955 ENSAYO DE UN CRIMEN). It's absorbing and emotionally complex, one of this director's finest films ; if it only moved in a slightly more linear, slightly less circular way - if it all built to a memorable climax, in other words - it might be a classic.