Review of Matador (1986) by Tim H — 09 Jun 2008

The theme in this one: sex and death.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this one. This is the one that came highly recommended to me out of the bunch. Now, I had seen Antonio Banderas play a psycho stakler in Law of Desire only days before watching this one. Also, the homosexuality running through most of the movies put me in a weird place at the beginning of the movie. Within the first five or ten minutes, the matador character asks Banderas if he was a homosexual. Banderas goes out and rapes a girl to prove he is not. But does that make him straight. Does the matador have insight to all that is happening that he can read people very well? Is Banderas's character gay? All of these ideas are running through my head so I miss the main story. It turns out that homosexuality had nothing to do with this story. Like normal, Almodovar adds this subplot that really doesn't come into play and distracts you from the main story.

What's really odd is that this movie is that it is a supernatural thriller, but you don't really find that out until the last ten minutes of the movie. I'm really not giving anything away, but the film is treated like a traditional murder with a twist. We know that Banderas's character didn't do it, but all the evidence points that he did. It creates a weird dilemma where you try to solve the story logically, but that is just impossible in this situation. I had problems when it came ot Identity and the same issue, but this is a far better film.

Again, Almodovar uses sex to drive the film. While the normal deviant nature comes from transvestite sex in his other films, in this case, the deviancy can be found in the necrophelia found in the matador's nature. He is obsessed with the instance when he was gored by a bull (a theme that will be repeated in Talk to Her) and wants his women obsessed with death. He finds another woman whose obsession with death leads them on a killing spree. I'm not used to seeing Almodovar take his movie so seriously. Yes, there's a bit of oddity in this movie, but there's this really serious edge that I wasn't really comfortable with. While characters in his other movies may laugh at themselves and their quirks, this movie is comprised of deviant characters living in a normally deviant world. There's even a mother who isn't bothered by the fact that his daughter was raped. Apparently, rape is a common thing that happens in Madrid. So these distant characters are thrown into a story that somehow makes me want to care about them. I recognize the fact that it is a paradox. Doesn't make the movie non-fantastic.

I feel like the general theme of these Almodovar reviews is that I like the movie in spite of things I normally don't care for in film.