Pedro Almodóvar
1993
114 minutes
This early Pedro Almodóvar film made a huge impression on you, but no one else you know seems to know or care about it. The movie rarely played and rarely loved. Part of this is because some of the humor is massively offensive and controversial, which was true back in the day as well. And the attention it's gotten has mostly been negative, which is understandable because of the offensiveness but also because the general tone is bizarre as well. This film feels like someone made a "human centipede" starting with Hitchcock's Rear Window in the middle and then grafting on John Waters' Multiple Maniacs and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers onto either end, mouth to ass. And it teeters between ingenious and nearly unwatchable. But it certainly makes an impression in the process.
Early Almodóvar is sometimes as outrageous and tasteless as anything by John Waters, and this can be unexpected if your jaw isn't set for it. You're not going to make it very far into a John Waters film without immediately getting a good idea that he's going to play pretty rough with the humor and it may not be for you. By the time Divine is getting raped by a giant lobster, the easily offended have already stormed off. Almodóvar can be a lot smoother and sneak up on you a little more gradually if you don't know what to expect. In this film, the tabloid reporter wearing the Jean Paul Gaultier catsuit with the breasts cut out alone may not be enough to scare you off before one of the more notorious scenes happens.
The notorious scene in question is what you hate to describe as either the funniest or second-funniest rape scene in cinema history, depending on how you feel about Divine getting raped by a giant lobster. Or how you feel about whether a scene depicting non-consensual sex can be funny. And this particular one crosses the line so many times in so many ways that many people would reject it on general principle.
The setup: Kika, the protagonist, is a sweet but extremely promiscuous woman who is a makeup artist. Her maid, Juana, is a horny lesbian, played by one of your favorite character actresses, the very striking Rossy de Palma. Juana has a brother who is first introduced by reputation only. Two things are known about him. First, he has very subnormal intelligence. He is quite dim. Not in any realistic sense, but in a cartoon character sense. Second, he is even hornier than his sister, with whom he has an incestuous relationship. He is horny enough to fuck farm animals. His sister would engage in grudgingly reluctant incest with him just to keep him from raping animals and forcing himself on other women. This is played for laughs, but keep in mind that these are all essentially cartoon characters. You should quit watching if this isn't the kind of outrageous idiot universe you're comfortable experiencing. If the idea of Rossy de Palma fucking her brother to keep him from fucking farm animals is more sad than funny to you for the ninety minutes you spend watching this film, stop watching it now.
Oh, and he's also a porn star. A droolingly dim-witted sex maniac porn star. Or at least he was before he ended up in prison for...you guessed it, being a sex maniac who presumably committed multiple rapes. And of course he escapes from prison.
You can turn this off at any time, you know. Just skip ahead, make the choice to watch the next film. Turn to a random section if you don't even want to look down that far. What's about to happen is played for laughs, and it's up to you whether you think it should be. Or if it shouldn't generally, but a director like the very gay and trashy John Waters or the equally gay and nearly as trashy Pedro Almodóvar might pull this off. Divine getting raped by a lobster has the benefit of being in no way realistic, at least. But in this case, we're about to run into this very cartoonishly ridiculous and unpleasant character running into our lovely protagonist.
Juana's brother ends up breaking out of prison. He shows up at Kika's house because he knows Juana will be there and he has nowhere else to go and needs money. They scheme to rob Kika's place. Juana has him tie her to a chair and knock her out and then steal Kika's valuables. He does so, but while he's burgling her place he finds the very attractive Kika taking a nap in her bed. Being a dim-witted sex-maniac rapist, he can't resist. So he crawls on top of her and starts having sex with her at knife-point. This is a central plot point in the film. While he's doing this, an unseen voyeur across the street is peeping in the window watching this unfold, Rear Window style. That unknown person (who can it be?) calls the police, who are complete morons themselves. Meanwhile Juana's brother is still humping away. Kika, who as noted is extremely promiscuous, is unhappy with being mounted in this fashion while she's sleeping, but as time wears on she ends up going from her initial horror at the situation to simply being bored and tired and annoyed at how long it is taking him to finish. However, Juana's brother is a professional (recall he was a porn star), so every time she thinks he's done he keeps on going. And going. And going. And Kika is getting more and more comically irritated.
Eventually the police show up and shoot the lock off the door. Juana's brother keeps going even after they are in the room, and continues even while both cops are trying to physically pull him off Kika like someone trying to separate two humping dogs. Eventually they separate the two, and Juana's brother staggers over to the balcony to ejaculate (for the fourth time, apparently) over the edge. This happens to land on the gal with the Jean Paul Gaultier catsuit from earlier, who also has a camera strapped to her head. She had been tipped off by some other unknown party that the sex maniac escaped and was claiming another victim. And she was there to capture footage for the sex-crime hungry fans of her tabloid-TV show. Juana's brother manages to escape by stealing her fancy motorcycle.
This idiotic event drives the plot of the rest of the film, which has a more relatively serious tone and involves Peter Coyote as a serial killer. The more staid tone of the rest of the film is more jarring than this bizarrely portrayed central event, which has a quite grotesque effect. It is somewhat as though Hitchcock started filming Rear Window, but gave John Waters free range to film whatever he wanted for the actual crime. It feels like two different films, and the ridiculous parts are definitely the better part. And it's weird and uncomfortable when the worlds collide. Even in the serious part, Peter Coyote ends up confronted by the JPG catsuit dominatrix with the camera on her head. For better or worse it ends up in the freakshow, an unholy Hitchcock-Waters mash-up that nobody really asked for but our auteur director decided to give us.
Time to choose something different: