Filmes de Interés Gay

' SEX, VIOLENCE, PASSION AND
DEATH COME TO A RAGING
BOIL IN ALMODÓVAR'S PAEAN
TO ROMANTIC KITSCH '

Pedro Almodóvar is a salacious romantic who's both ironic and unabashedly emotional. At his best, he has a keen eye for how the conventions and clichés of movies color our expectations of the real world as well as our fantasies. Consciously going beyond the bounds of respectability, Almodóvar knows that movies are never more sensual or alive than when they defy those limits and venture into the forbidden.

He's never gone further than he did in 1986's "Matador." This voluptuous mixture of black humor and subterranean sexuality starts out at an extreme pitch and gets deeper into the characters' obsessions as the movie proceeds. Nevertheless, the larger-than-life passions of the killer/lovers Diego and Maria should be recognizable to anyone who loves the movies. It's a consistently audacious fantasy of sex and violence set in a modern-day Madrid where everyone is ready to surrender to his or her particular passions.

The opening is shockingly funny (or maybe shocking and then funny): A man sits in front of his TV masturbating to a montage of repulsive slasher-movie images playing on his VCR. The man is Diego (Nacho Martinez) a dashing former matador prematurely retired after a career-ending injury who rehearses the principal tenets of the art of the kill at a converted classroom on his estate to a group of aspiring bullfighters, including an unlikely, hypersensitive student named Angel Giménez (Antonio Banderas).

The training lecture then cuts to the image of a beautiful, enigmatic woman sitting on a park bench, María (Assumpta Serna) as she initiates contact with an anonymous man innocuously passing by, follows him back to an apartment, and, at the height of physical intimacy, stabs him with a long ornamental pin behind the nape of the neck - in the region between the shoulder blades defined in bullfighting as the cleft of the clods. The shot then cuts back to the training grounds as Angel, intrigued by (and undoubtedly, attracted to) his instructor, follows Diego back to the house for a drink of water, and soon grows anxious when the conversation exposes his inexperience with women. In retaliation, Angel attempts to prove his masculinity by stalking Diego's lover - a young model named Eva (Eva Cobo) - in an impulsive act that culminates in an equally humiliating failed sexual assault. However, unable to be taken seriously by the police, Angel decides to confess to a series of murders after viewing the crime scene photographs on the commissioner's (Eusebio Poncela) desk, and in the process, unwittingly unites the paths of the crippled, morbidly aroused Diego and the fatally seductive María.

Pedro Almodóvar creates a highly sensual, deliriously overripe, and stylistically audacious portrait of love, death, fate, and violence in Matador. From the opening shot of the iconic matador, Diego, deriving sexual gratification from watching a horror exploitation film, Almodóvar establishes the interrelation between sexuality and savagery: the parallel cutting of the bullfighting training with María's precise and ritualistic murder; Angel's validation of his masculinity through Eva's attempted violation; Diego's initial pursuit of María inside a movie theater as the tragic, final sequence from Duel in the Sun unfolds; Diego's repeated playback of the his fateful goring, spotting María on video among the spectators.

Almodóvar further uses environmental elements to underscore emotional state, from the idyllic clouds that precipitate Angel's consuming, morbid visions, to the portentous inclement weather that punctuates his encounter with Eva, to the total eclipse that materializes during the final encounter. By articulating profound connection through instinctual aggression, Matador serves as a bold and provocative allegory for the self-destructive cultural legacy of machismo, bravura, and ritualistic violence. ~ Salon & Acquarello