Matador Movie Review: Pedro Almodóvar with a Light Touch

When Ángel (a very young, pre-Hollywood Antonio Banderas) grabs his beautiful neighbor, Eva, on the street in an attempt to rape her it’s the kind of scene that should be brutal and horrifying. In fact it is at first. That is until his attempted rape turns out to be feeble: he fumbles with a pocket knife with which to threaten the girl; reaches orgasm before penetration; and after seeing Eva bleeding from a small cut after falling to the pavement, he passes out. In the end it’s a comical scene, a boldly staged experiment in Matador, an early Pedro Almodóvar film released in Spain in 1986 and two years later in the United States.

This event only exacerbates the emasculation Ángel was attempting to deny after having his sexuality questioned by his bullfighting instructor, Diego, himself a famous torero. To be a bullfighter in Spain is one of the greatest professions and demonstrations of masculinity. Few professionals are more revered historically than the great toreros. If you believe Ernest Hemingway’s take on the sport in Death in the Afternoon, it is the ultimate test of bravery, masculinity, artistry and skill. So for Angel, a young man who, despite having reached the age of about 21 and having impossibly good looks has never been with a woman, sees bullfighting as his entrance into Spanish manhood.

Incidentally, Eva is Diego’s girlfriend, although Ángel was unaware of this at the time of the assault. Diego himself is a somewhat emasculated figure as well. A formerly great bullfighter now retired after a devastating goring, he can only achieve sexual climax through images and representations of death. And, we learn quite early, through actual death. The film opens with Diego masturbating to a Mario Bava film of pornographic violence against women – one of Bava’s specialties as the antecedent to the American slasher films of the late 70s and 80s.

In an early and somewhat disconnected scene we see María take a man to bed only to stick a hat pin into the back of his neck, killing him, during her own climax. This, not incidentally, is the manner in which a torero kills the bull in the ring – with a single clean motion of the sword between the shoulder blades to pierce the lungs and heart. This murder, in addition to being an obvious inspiration for Basic Instinct, is a mirror of Diego’s own sexual perversion and it’s only a matter of time before these two individuals discover each other as soul mates.

Ángel was raised in an Opus Dei family, a very strict sect of Catholicism, and his tremendous guilt forces him to the police to make a full confession. As Eva refuses to press charges, Ángel then confesses to the unsolved murders of two men committed by María and to those of two young women murdered by Diego and buried on the grounds of his estate. Ángel knows of the dead men because they were well-publicized, but the source of his knowledge of the women and their burial location reveals itself as a plot device as the film (along with Diego and María) reaches its climax – he’s got second sight and is able to follow Diego’s actions. María, an attorney, presents herself to defend Ángel and through this connection meets Diego.

Almodóvar is being ever so playful in this film. He’s channeling Hitchcock (as he is wont to do) via Brian De Palma, but with much lighter tones including the ubiquitous bright red and blue color palette. More than that Almodóvar is also playing with Spanish archetypes through the previously mentioned bullfighter, but also in the investigating police officer. Here is another quintessential masculine figure, but here he is depicted as possibly homosexual, or at least enamored with the nether regions of young men training as bullfighters. He also walks with an unexplained limp quite similar to Diego’s.

Probably the most outwardly comic moment in the film, and one of its best scenes, takes place at a fashion show (Eva works as a model) where the director (played by Almodóvar himself) gets upset with two models shooting heroin in the dressing room rather than the bathroom.

Part of what makes the film work is that the actors allow themselves performances that take the ludicrous plot developments seriously. This undercuts the tongue-in-cheek nature of the story, which itself feels very much like a stunted artist finally breaking free from the clutches of a fascist regime (the film was released in Spain only 11 years after the death of Franco and 8 years after the adoption of the Constitution). Keeping the historical perspective in mind, this is a remarkable effort of a developing artist who would later become one of the world’s most important film makers.