Pedro Almodóvar | Matador / 1986

professional killers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesús Ferrero and Pedro Almodóvar (screenplay), Pedro Almodóvar (director) Matador / 1986

 

Perhaps it is best to begin talking about Pedro Almodóvar’s fascinating 1986 film Matador by describing what it is and isn’t. It is certainly not quite like anything seen in Hollywood movies, even if you strain to point to psychological criminal-horror films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, although they certainly share the same closet with Almodóvar’s work. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet of the same year, moreover, shares some of the film’s DNA.

      But Lynch lacks much of Almodóvar’s sense of camp and humor, and certainly does not share the Spanish director’s nostalgia for technicolor films of the 1950s, nor his colorful style. And no one is able to create such a psychosexual soap opera that includes obsessions with murder and sex involving an absolute crazy cast of secondary figures all equally obsessed with other issues.

     The film appears to be centered upon two individuals, the first of which is Diego (Nacho Martínez) a major bullfighter of national importance who was maimed by a bull and now walks with a limp. Since his mishap he has begun a school to each young would-be matador’s, including the beautiful young man Ángel (a young Antonio Banderas). The second central figure is María (Assumpta Serna), a lawyer who, unbeknownst to Diego, has been a long-time aficionado of his work, but presumed that he had retired after his accident from the art of “killing.”

 

     From almost the first moment of the film we realize that is precisely what these two figures, Diego and María, share. For Diego “the kill” has been transformed into a sexual obsession wherein he can enjoy sex only by watching films in which women are being strangled, stabbed, maimed, or destroyed in some other manner as in the slasher films he nightly watches such as Jesús Franco’s Bloody Moon (1981) to which we observe him masturbating early in the movie. To have sex with his girlfriend Eva (Eva Cobo), he requires her to play dead. As we discover later in the film, moreover, he has already killed off two of his female students, burying them in his own yard.

      María, as Almodóvar shows us in the earliest frames of the film, has intense sex with men whom she stabs with a sharply pointed hair pin in the back of their necks at the moment of orgasm, murdering them at the moment of their most intense pleasure, a bit like Latrodectus mactans (the Black Widow living in the Southern Hemisphere). The sex Almodóvar captures was apparently unsimulated, just as it looks to be.

     Although María has long been a fan of Diego’s, they meet only after a series of very strange events regarding Diego’s student Ángel.

     Ángel—the son of an absurdly cruel fanatically religious Roman Catholic mother Berta (Julieta Serrano), whose every move, it appears, is centered upon her bizarre view of religion— has remained a virgin despite the fact he is now in college studying agronomics. He takes classes with Diego without his mother’s knowledge, one day staying after to receive some advice from his mentor about how to seduce a woman, admitting that he has yet to have had sex.

 

     Diego also has vertigo, triggered when he looks up at clouds, but which is often accompanied by inexplainable psychic episodes. He has, indeed, seen María murder her last victim he what he describes as his dreams. While talking to Diego, Ángel experiences an episode, asking for water so that he might take his pill.

       Meanwhile, the two continue to discuss women, Diego using the metaphors of a bullfighter to describe how to approach women and manipulate them; it is pointless to describe Diego as a chauvinist since, as I have suggested, he prefers his women dead or dying. In the middle of their conversation, however, Diego asks Ángel, almost nonchalantly, whether or not he likes guys.

        The young man, clearly fearful of just such a possibility, immediately reacts that he is no fag, and becomes privately determined to prove it to Diego and to himself as he proceeds that very evening to attempt to rape Diego’s girlfriend, Eva, who happens to be a neighbor of Ángel and his mother. Ángel grabs Eva as she is walking home in the middle of a rain storm, clumsily pulls her up against a car, pulls out a knife, and quickly ejaculates—evidently, according to Eva’s later discussion with the police, on her legs, unable to even penetrate her before coming.

        Eventually, he apologizes as she pushes him away. When Eva turns to leave, she slips on the mud, falls, and cuts herself, blood oozing from the wound. We quickly discover that Ángel also cannot stand the sight of blood when he passes out.

        Later that evening at the dinner table Berta insists, as one of the rules of Ángel living at home, that he attend confession. Ángel agrees and even meets with the priest, but disappears before entering the confessional booth, hightailing it instead to the police to confess to his rape of Eva.

  

      Even the police detective (Eusebio Poncela) seems somewhat amused by the boy’s confession, the female police clerk, observing his beauty, snarling out a sexist comment, “some girls have all the luck.” When the police and his odd assistant visit Eva, her mother Pilar (Chus Lampreave) attempts to block not only their entry to the house but even their ability to speak with her, arguing perversely that her daughter often gets raped and can well take care of herself. Although the police pull the daughter, nonetheless, into the station, she refuses to press charges since Ángel did not truly penetrate her and if were to try again, she’d castrate him. Besides, she argues, she has her modeling auditions coming up and doesn’t have time to deal with this.

       In short, any shred of masculine power Ángel might have derived from the event, is completely erased. Watching the police chief pour over pictures of recent missing people, however, he adds to his confession by insisting that he has killed the two missing men—because they “came on to him”—and two women, fellow students of his, to whom, he observes, he was attracted.

       It is at this point that the police assign María as his lawyer, inevitably meeting up with the bullfighter with whom she has so very much in common.

       Much of the rest of the film consists of the various eccentric secondary figures, Eva and her mother; Ángel’s psychiatrist Julia (Carmen Maura), who quickly discovers that his vertigo has to do, in part, with deafness in one ear and who simultaneously falls in love with him; and the police chief himself, who, when he visits Diego reveals his homosexuality—as Almodóvar cinematically reveals—when he cannot take his eyes of their crotches and buttocks.

       Most of the rest of the film is taken up with the chase of the matador (in this case as much María as Diego) for the bull. Like the dance of the matador’s cape, it is a give-and-take, attack- and-run affair, as the two find themselves entwined with one another, unable to escape their fated meeting. Some of the most beautiful scenes in the film involve Diego on the chase, as María, very much like Madeline Elster in Hitchcock’s Vertigo—appears, disappears, and reappears while pretending to reject the man destined to destroy her just as she is destined to destroy him.

     Because of his psychic powers, Ángel does lead the police and his lawyer María to the buried women on Diego’s property. The detective is understandably doubtful that the boy could have buried them with in front of his window without Diego’s knowledge. And María now suddenly realizes that her beloved bullfighter is still active, the two finalizing the encounter they have been anticipating. Soon after, when Ángel’s mother rather angrily demeans her son for not being able to stand the sight of blood without fainting, angry because he’s never been able to participate in ritual flagellation, the detective becomes certain that the boy is truly innocent, and is merely protecting Diego because of his admiration of or even love for him.

 

      Eva, who has conveniently gone off for a while, returns to bollix up everything, returning to Diego’s house at the very moment María and he are speaking of their murderous cover-ups. She attempts to blackmail Diego with her knowledge, hoping—despite any logical explanation—to h  old onto him, despite the fact that she can surely see it would only end in her death. But like a woman believing she might convert a gay man to heterosexuality, Eva is convinced that she can “straighten up” an actual ladykiller, insisting she is still in love with him.

      When he rejects her again, he goes to the police at the very moment when Ángel admits to Julia that he is again having horrible visions about Diego and is terrified about his well-being. The septet, the detective and his trusty assistant in the front seat, and Eva, Ángel, and Julia in the back seat, speed in the direction the boy envisions they car to be traveling, Ángel simultaneously recounting Diego’s words to María, creating a scenario in which, for at least a few moments of his life, he plays out a romantic scene unlike any other between two women and a man:

 

eva: You hear them?

ángel:  Yes, she says [turning to Julia] “I’ve never been kissed like that.

             ’Til now, I’ve made love alone.” [turning toward Eva] “I love you more than my own

             death. Do you want to see me dead?”

eva: What does he answer?

ángel: “Yes, and for you to see me dead.”

     As the five reach their destination, an eclipse which had been promised for the day suddenly materializes, and they pause to observe it. Inside, María stabs Diego before pulling his head up to watch her take a gun, put into her mouth and pull the trigger. The five would-be saviors rush into the house too late, observing them sprawled out, naked, dead.

      The police detective comments: “It’s better this way. “I’ve never seen anyone look so happy.”

      What might be a tragedy in most films, in Almodóvar’s capable hands, becomes high camp comedy as beautifully presented as a full-color fashion spread.

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).