Filmes de Interés Gay

. . " to reach audiences
through their hearts,
their minds, and their
genitals." . . .

Almodovar has stated he wants to reach audiences through "their hearts, their minds, and their genitals." In 'Law of Desire', he more than fulfills this challenge,

Released in 1987, The Law of Desire primarily revolves around gay theatrical director Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) and his dangerous affair with obsessed stalker Antonio Benitez (Antonio Banderas). As the film opens, the 40-year-old director pines for young Juan Bermudez, but he realizes that his twenty-something bi-sexual partner can never fully reciprocate his love. Juan decides to sort things out and relocates to an isolated lighthouse. When Juan's first letter home doesn't satisfy, Pablo composes a more romantic letter that expresses melancholy longing and sends this back to Juan with instructions for him to sign and mail this back to him. This fake typewritten love memo provides a pivotal plot device.

Despite being lovesick for Juan, Pablo continues his sexually promiscuous lifestyle, and Antonio soon attaches himself to the filmmaker--far too clingy for Pablo's taste. This time the younger man lusts voraciously for the filmmaker, and is willing to do whatever he can to be with his man (reminiscent of Glenn Close's psychotic obsession in Fatal Attraction). When Antonio comes across Juan's sad, yearning love note, all Hell breaks loose. Neither Pablo's nor Juan's life will ever be the same as a result of this tragic three-way unrequited love triangle.

A subplot involves Pablo's transsexual sister Tina (Carmen Maura), who has a humorous moment with a lascivious priest that fondly remembers her pure voice when "she" served as an alter boy. Additional surprises are revealed, though these won't shock Almodovar devotees. A vivacious actress who is taking care of her ex-lover's daughter, Tina prepares for her brother's next play, The Human Voice (that forms the basis of Almodovar's next film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).

The Law of Desire contains plenty of Almodovar touches and is brightened considerably by the acting talents of Maura and Banderas, it's no puzzle to see why Almodovar employed these two in multiple films. American audiences more familiar with Banderas' low key supporting role to Tom Hanks in Philadelphia can revel in wide-eyed amazement over his full raging homoerotic lust in this 1987 film. Banderas' intensity transforms what could have been bizarre off the wall melodrama into a provocative psychological study about the potential devastating cost of wanton love. Law of Desire is among the most powerful of Almodovar's early works.

Almodovar clearly demonstrates that weighty subject matter need not be presented in a meditative manner. Light-hearted touches often deliver more effectively--just like life. In the finale Almodóvar cuts to the massed policeman and interested onlookers (including Tina) arrayed on the street below. All look up towards the window as Almodóvar undertakes a hugely elegant tracking shot that reveals the crowd to be as immaculately and artificially arranged as the cast of some Broadway musical (opera might be more to the point). Then, in an unexpected, brilliant move—he cuts to show the front of the building, as the assembled cast (including Tina) rushes to climb the scaffolding, Keystone Cops-style. Freeze-frame on the madness, and Fin. Viva Pedro, indeed.

' 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