Story Movie
A former bullfighter who left the ring after being injured and a successful female lawyer are both serial killers. For both of them, the ultimate pleasure is inextricably linked to the death of their partner. When their paths cross, each sees the other as a potential victim.
Review 4K Movie
Look at them, look. At the knife slicing through the ripe darkness of the night, raping the meek, compliant flesh; at the severed heads with their obscenely gaping mouths; at the vulgar, excessive waterfalls of blood and shreds of empty veins; at those hanged, drowned, wrapped in plastic, like trash. Their sheep-like eyes are white with fear, but as they die, they moan like lovers, arousing a base desire to feast on the sweet convulsions of agonizing bodies, to flood their dead nature with a pulsating stream of hot life. This passion cannot be quenched, but one can fix one’s gaze on the TV screen, frantically masturbating in the dirty semi-darkness of the living room to the images of proliferating faceless corpses. I am denied your love, but, death, how I want you…
And the film has been denied the creator’s love. Almodóvar considers the languid, gloomy *Matador*, with its viscous atmosphere and cloying hint of mysticism, to be the weak link in his own filmography. Perhaps the life-loving Don Pedro prefers his other films: optimistic, slightly absurd, with unpredictable plot twists and an underlying sense of an endless carnival. Here, however, the colors are unexpectedly dull, the gloomy eyes are rimmed with darkness, and in the air, thickening with every passing minute, a storm cloud of agonizing fatality is gathering. Instead of a spicy celebration of life—a suffocating triumph of death, steeped in the morbid spirit of late decadence. Somewhere in the background, rum splashes, cocaine dusts slender nostrils, and vomit on the dress of a model painted to resemble a death mask becomes a fresh touch to the contemporary image. Some die of boredom, selflessly indulging in personal sins and deadly entertainments; others pray maniacally or rummage through the remains of others’ amusements. The color codes—black and white—mark the two extremes of existence: the youthfully naive simplicity and the cynicism of jaded maturity; but from time to time, in this semi-Gothic reality, flashes of red, burning sensuality and golden glimmers of noble belonging to true art—the art of killing—flit by.
The road to the School of Bullfighting is paved not with good intentions, but with a penchant for risk or, as here, a tormenting addiction to the emotional fusion of combat fervor with the agonizing horror of the unknown. They say bullfighting is the only art that threatens the artist with death. And the matador—the embodiment of power and talent honed to a deadly edge; the king and god of the arena, bestowing at times deafening glory, at others the shame of oblivion. Diego is a victim of his bloody profession; due to an injury, he is unable to kill or to exist without the exhilarating sense of danger, without that intoxicating power over death, without playing with his own fate—the only thing that allowed him to rise above both the defeated but worthy rival bull and the unworthy and timid human herd. Having lost his strength, Diego lost not merely his purpose, but the love of his life. Until he met Maria, a woman with the same deadly craving for crimson hues, slender daggers, and passionate unions with cooling bodies. Two restless predators, doomed to make love alone, found each other in the bleak desolation of monotonous days, never to part again. And the logic of animal passion gives way to a higher love—higher than morality, higher than laws, higher than the instinct of self-preservation—an incomprehensible, absolute love.
One might condemn them to eternal torment in hell or at least to a prosaic prison sentence. But by the strange rules of magical realism, both the director and the other characters effectively exonerate the protagonists, as if the beauty of their feelings could atone for the sinful abomination of murder. The aesthetics of the embodied idea are so perfect that the jilted bride weeps, begging to return to the cold bed where, night after night, she pretended to be dead for her thanatomaniac lover, while the investigator, left high and dry, muses with philosophical detachment that he has never seen a happier couple. But the true devotee of the master is his disciple Ángel: whether an angel or a sacrificial lamb, ready to take upon himself the crimes of the teacher he admires, whom he almost deifies. Ángel, who preferred the colorful image of a matador—endowed with the will to determine destinies in an honest pagan duel—to the Lord, almighty, demanding, and relentlessly driving people into the vise of rituals and the shackles of commandments. In this image—of a man inwardly free from the shackles imposed by society—lies the essence not only of the film but of all Spanish culture, steeped in blood, haughty pride, and heroism, in a constant flight from death into the sultry poetry of music and dance, into Lorca’s tragedy and the passionate beauty of cinema. Thus, at the intersection of mysticism and drama, bypassing the surrealism so beloved by Almodóvar, a robust romanticism is born, a hymn to an ideal feeling beyond which there is nothing but eternity.
Marriages are not made in heaven. But here, on the damp sheets of the bed, muted-red like the sunset, soft like his greedy mouth, hot like that unbearable heat inside, spreading around until a muffled groan, until the pain of bitten lips. He enters her, wounding her with the knives of his gaze, closing the steel traps of his embrace, tearing a bestial roar from her lips, forcing her hips to thrash like caught trout, and her heart to tremble in a deadly sweet, deadly beautiful, deadly happy longing. Look at me, look…
