Live Flesh (1997)

Pedro Almodóvar's twelfth feature arrives from 1997, adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel and relocated to Madrid, where the plot concerns a young man's six-year prison sentence, a paraplegic policeman turned Paralympic basketball star, an orphanage, and a good deal of gunplay conducted in the name of love. It is an erotic thriller with melodramatic bones, and it moves with a restraint that will surprise anyone who associates this director with louder, campier pleasures. The camera observes. It does not sermonize.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is close to a blank slate. The cast is Spanish because the story is Spanish, and no diversity-conscious assembly is on display. Despite the director's own biography, the narrative is entirely heterosexual, its passions aimed at adultery, obsession, and revenge. Elena and Clara are willful women with appetites of their own, though the film employs them as engines of an erotic plot, not as theses. David's paralysis is handled with dignity, his athletic career presented without comment, which is not the same as an argument about bodies.

The Franco-era opening supplies atmosphere, a state of emergency and a birth on a bus, and the closing voiceover notes that the Spanish people no longer live in fear. That is historical texture, not a historical project. Almodóvar keeps his ideas in the flesh and the bullets. The result is a well-made, well-acted melodrama with no interest in the preoccupations of a later decade. It wants to watch people ruin themselves beautifully, and it does.