Carne tremula

Pedro Almodóvar strikes again. Carne tremula is a melodrama that is not as wild and crazy as many of his earlier films. The new style is refreshingly serious, and there is still plenty of juice and vigour in Almodóvar's universe. At the same time, the characters seem more rounded and less caricatured.

In Carne tremula the fates of a number of people are bound together by their sexuality. The reason the young lad Victor seeks out the upper-class junkie Elena is that Victor lost his virginity to Elena. She, however, remembers nothing. Two policemen, David and Sancho, turn up and misread the situation, which has suddenly developed into a hostage drama. David calmly tries to resolve the problem, but his older colleague, the alcoholic Sancho, instead sets off a shoot-out. David is shot, and at the moment of the shooting Elena and David fall in love. Victor goes to prison.

When Victor is released 7 years later, he wants revenge for his ruined life. In reality it was not he who pulled the trigger, but Sancho, who deliberately wanted to harm David. David, you see, was having an affair with Sancho's wife Clara, who was seeking comfort from her violent marriage. Now David is paralysed from the waist down, but Elena has married him all the same. Victor wants to become the world's greatest lover so that he can give Elena a shag she will never forget. So he begins 'an apprenticeship' with Clara. Once again these people's fates are tightly entwined. This has dramatic consequences: Sancho and Clara kill each other in a dramatic shoot-out, the only way the two of them could ever be parted. David and Elena separate amicably, as she and Victor have got together. Victor's heart has made it impossible for him to take his revenge. The film ends with both death and birth; it can hardly get more fleshly than that.