Live Flesh is based on the novel by Ruth Rendell, the British crime writer whose work has in recent years formed the basis for many (British) TV films as well as Claude Chabrol’s thriller La Cérémonie. Almodóvar moved the location to Spain in its entirety and gave the story a Spanish political and historical context. The result is a thriller that is primarily amusing. The serious subjects (fate, guilt, atonement and revenge) are told with humour but never mockingly – and that is unusual for Almodóvar.The complex plot develops at high speed. A prostitute has a baby in a bus and that entitles the baby, Victor, to a life-long free bus pass. Twenty years later, when the Franco era is a dim and distant past, Victor falls in love with the rich girl Helena. When he rings her doorbell, the junkie girl is expecting her dealer. So she lets Victor inside. Meanwhile the cop David and his suspicious elder colleague Sancho are out on the beat. They hear a shot in Helena’s apartment and storm in with guns drawn. In the chaos, another shot resounds. Four years later David is a renowned wheelchair basketball player and married to Helena… Victor has been studying Bulgarian and the Bible in jail. And this is just the start of an apposite film full of ironic coincidences that are never unlikely.
