Pedro Almodovar is one of the greatest living film directors, the rightful heir to Hitchcock’s throne with his mix of psychosexual driven dramas and an innovative storyteller who delivers uniquely crafted narratives. When Hulu notified me that his films were going to expire and be removed on June 20, 2017, I decided to watch all his films, including the ones that I already saw. This review is the eleventh in a summer series that reflect on his films and contains spoilers.
I never saw or knew about Matador until after my Hulu marathon and decided that it was time to watch all of Almodovar films. I have seen it two times since then. I initially found it more confusing than any of his other films, but the film benefits from repeat viewings. Matador should be Almodovar’s most controversial movie, but because it is not well known, it is not. Perhaps it is overlooked because it was made before Almodovar made his own film production company, El Deseo S.A., with his brother, Agustin, so it is not considered a pure product of his genius, but diluted by studio involvement. Almodovar considers it one of his weaker films. I would respectfully disagree, but also hesitate to recommend it to most viewers because of the graphic, explicit simultaneous images of violence and sex.
Matador contains the seeds of many of Almodovar’s subsequent films. It previews the toxic mother and son relationship from Law of Desire. It integrates the themes of falling in love and bullfighting from Talk To Her. It features the “play within a play” device as explained to an interviewer, long-term stalking culminating in a real relationship, a character’s casual knowledge of the natural world as an important plot point and inappropriate therapist patient relationships from Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! It sets the abhorrent, secretive action on a luxurious, open estate during an eclipse like The Skin I Live In. It uses a psychic and other characters to comment on what ills Spanish society and references suicides on bridges as in I’m So Excited. It also has a treacherous woman lawyer and a crazy mother like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
Matador is Almodovar’s spin on the slasher horror film meets love story. If everyone wants to be known and loved for whom one truly is, can a serial killer ever find real love? If love drives a person mad, what if you were mad before you fell in love? He takes la petite mort and vagina dentata to its logical, extreme conclusion. Almodovar uses this film to simultaneously create a happy ending and justice for two villains. Almodovar may be sympathetic to his madmen, but he never excuses their behavior.
Most of Almodovar’s films begin in confusion and make the viewer ask if it is real or not. There is no question that the compilation of slasher scenes is not real, but a performance. The confusion lies in the identity of the man watching and masturbating to them. There is a constant shift throughout the film of people’s relationship and importance to others and how they observe things. Who is the matador, and who is the bull? Who is the killer, and who is the victim? The consumption of images signals what we desire and provide knowledge about the people around us if we can discern what we are compulsively watching. What we are compelled to watch betrays who we are.
Even though Antonio Banderas usually plays the madman in Almodovar films, he isn’t the nuttiest person in Matador, but the most confused as Angel, the masturbating man’s student at a bullfighting school. The viewer unwittingly identifies with him and is just as confused by the depiction of what unfolds on screen: is it something that is unfolding in real time around the same time as other juxtaposed events that we are seeing on a screen, a character’s memory or something else. We do not discover until later that either through supernatural causes or because he suffers from an inner ear injury, he has visions of all the violent crimes that happen in Madrid and is sensitive to heavenly portents. The film’s narrative structure is quite linear, but Angel’s visions blur the timeline. Because he feels culpable for what he sees and inadequate in the eyes of other characters, he attempts to rape his next door neighbor, who is a model and girlfriend of his teacher, a former matador whom Angel calls maestro. Like in Talk To Her, sexual violence causes a fated couple to finally cross paths.
Sexual violence is depicted as isolating, lonely, grotesque and pitiful though depicted in differing degrees of severity in Matador. Angel’s attack is our stereotypical image of the rapist grabbing and dragging a woman into an alley except he fumbles with his weapon, a Swiss army knife, and is actually impotent and incapable of violence because of his aversion to blood. Maria, the attorney, is a femme fatale, a dominatrix seductress who dons the trappings of a bullfighter who lures men to their death in her free time when she is not practicing law. Because her prey is male, the danger is unexpected for them, but usually fatal. Even though she is depicted as devastatingly beautiful and powerful in her destructive glory, she is still alone as she finishes with one of her now deceased victims. Diego, the maestro, is deviant and prefers that his girlfriend acts dead in bed, but it is not confirmed until later in the story that he too kills women, students who tried to seduce him. He misses killing in the ring and is frustrated by his injury. He is doomed to hide and never experience complete gratification. When he masturbates to slasher films or sleeps with his girlfriend, he is trying to suppress his desire to kill, which he considers unleashing when he accidentally sees Maria, who decides to defend Angel against murder charges because she knows that Angel confessed to murders that she committed.
Almodovar invokes Hitchcock during all the sequences when one character pursues the other, usually Diego chasing Maria or Eva chasing Maria, or Angel has visions. There are elements of Vertigo or Rear Window throughout Matador. As long as there is a victim, there can be no sexual gratification. Diego initially pursues Maria and only becomes gradually aware that she has been stalking him for a long time. Unlike Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and other Almodovar films, Maria and Diego do not pull back when they realize that their love-induced madness threatens to consume them. They happily embrace oblivion: to simultaneously be victims and murderers at climax. They are no longer alone. It is Romeo and Juliet with death as a happy ending.
Like in Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, law enforcement is unwanted, inconvenient, incompetent and ineffective, but is simply chronicling the explosive nature of love and how it intersects with official transgressions. There is one hilarious and inexplicably random scene when the detective grabs a poisonous mushroom from a possible crime scene then puts it on display at a poison mushroom exhibit (is that a thing?), which he attends with Angel’s psychiatrist. He witnesses a random woman who pilfers a poison mushroom. He is shocked, but does nothing. The law is more competent than the church in Matador. When Angel wants to confess, he goes to the cops rather than his priest. The priest is transfixed and distracted by Maria. The church is only a distraction from the real story and condemning with fewer possibilities for redemption than the authorities. In contrast, nature mirrors the actions of the characters: a thunderstorm follows the attempted rape, poison mushrooms grow from an unmarked grave and an eclipse signals the climax and death of the two main characters.
There is little drug use or alcohol consumption in Matador. There is a brief scene backstage before a fashion show when a pair of models shoots up in a closeted area. Almodovar makes a cameo appearance, chastises them then tells them to use the bathroom. Almodovar as a fashion designer character and director exaggerates and highlights the grotesque aspects of life-the scars and aftermath of violence and drug use—to create a subversive yet defiantly beautiful spectacle in the show and the film. He is the only gay character in the film, but Angel’s actions are founded in his desire to reject other character’s perception of his sexuality. There are no transpeople in the film, but Maria teases Diego when they use the men’s bathroom at a theater that everything is not as it appears.
I am not from Spain or a country that celebrates bullfighting so I have no insight as to whether or not the structure of the film mirrors the stages of a bullfight. There is an obvious bullfighting aesthetic throughout the film and the characters’ interaction and movement occasionally imitate the bull or the matador. If the emblematic dance of The Flower of My Secret is flamenco, then Matador’s dance is the paso doble. The denouement is life and death as a performance and bull fighting is characterized as an art form. The turbulent love life of a performer culminates in Almodovar’s most dramatic conclusion.
I would not recommend Matador to sensitive viewers or to viewers who hate magical realism. If you can suspend disbelief and believe that people can supernaturally perceive things that others can’t, it will aid you in understanding the story otherwise it may take you awhile to figure out what is going on. Almodovar does not clearly layout his story as he does in his other films, but I found the story told through mysterious imagery more rewarding and less confounding during the second viewing.
Side note: I spotted two black people, a man and woman, who is called Algeria. Both are models.