Live Flesh

Five characters, five different people of whom Almodovar tells the story matching them in this movie half road between a detective and melodrama. This is an enjoyable movie (as everything Almodovar does) tough not his best one.

Victor is a proletarian guy, born on bus by a mother working as a prostitute (shown in an overlong introduction and pointless to the rest of the movie) who falls for Elena, an upper class junkie. Actually, he just has casual sex with her once and becomes erotically obsessed with her. He stalks her to her apartment and stubbornly refuses to leave her alone. A fight ensues and Sancho and David, a couple of cops appear on the scene. David gets paralyzed by a gunshot and ends up married to Elena. Victor gets to jail, but he is still obsessed with Elena and continues stalking her once he gets out four years later. Already unconvincing, the story takes a turn for the absurd when Elena shows a growing interest for Victor, who continues to confuse obsession with love. In the meantime, Victor is also sexually involved with Clara, Sancho's wife (very believable plot twist). Clara is giving him lessons to become the best lover in the world, Victor's top ambition so as to astonish Elena with his performance. It sounds like a demented plot, but I am not making it up. Probably one of the weakest Almodovar's films, it contains the inevitable steamy sex scene, which are Almodovar trademark and it is disgraced even further by an absurd "happy ending", which sees stalker and prey happily together, while Elena is giving birth to their child on a car (back to the start, in a sort of circular move). P.S. to make the matter worse, throughout the whole movie Victor blames Elena, David and everybody else for his misfortunes, conveniently avoiding to notice that the whole drama arose from his obsession.