937 (78). La Ley del deseo / Law of Desire (1987, Pedro Almodovar)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Or more accurately, “Law of Submission.” Pedro Almodovar’s international breakthrough is not so much about the destructive power of love and lust as our willingness to be controlled—and devastated—by such emotions; in other words, not desire but the desire to be desired. Almodovar’s fantastical screenplay is a super-trashy soap centered on a director (Eusebio Poncela) of both lowbrow porn and highbrow theater, whose life, as well as those of his ex-lover (Miguel Molina), his transvestite sister (Carmen Maura) and her daughter (Manuela Velasco) are steamrolled following the director’s initiation of an emotionally disturbed young man (Antonio Banderas) to gay sex. The plot is stretched to the limits of credibility, no doubt with hysterical, gleeful intention by Almodovar, who nonetheless holds things together by investing outrageous incidents with a dignified deadpan, allowing his ensemble to give their loving all to their characters, without a single smirk of camp knowing. (Most impressive is Carmen Maura as the transvestite, whose scenes brim with fierce sense of both selfhood and sacrifice, a central paradox to Almodovar’s characters.)

Almodovar’s steady pacing, playful sense of composition and eye-popping ‘80s color clashes keep the proceedings lively. But his true gift is in making his cartoonishly colorful creations as real as life, endowing even the most destructive or smug among them with a core of aching melancholy and a disarming willingness to be subsumed by the tides of emotion. Practically every other scene involves one figure being drawn in—at times at their own behest—by the narratives or imperatives of another: a profound sense of community as a web spun by stories. Almodovar’s vision of society showcases some of the most flamboyantly self-defined characters of cinema, and yet their independence is belied by a primal impulse that invokes the moment the first homo sapiens uttered its first memory—or first falsehood—to another, casting the spell of another dimension to the human experience.
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