Lovers of death Look at them, look. On a knife that cuts through the ripe darkness of night, raping meek, docile flesh; on severed heads with obscene mouths; on vulgar, excessive waterfalls of blood and morsels of empty veins; on hanged, drowned, wrapped in plastic like garbage. Their sheep’s eyes are white with fear, but when they die, they groan like mistresses, causing a base desire to be saturated with the sweet convulsions of agonizing bodies, to flood their dead nature with a pulsating stream of hot life. This passion is not satisfied, but you can stick your eyes to the TV screen, frantically masturbating in the dirty half-darkness of the living room at the footage of breeding faceless corpses. I am denied your love, but death, how I want you.
The film is denied the love of the creator. Thick, gloomy "Matador" with its viscous atmosphere and viscous taste of mysticism Almodovar considers the weak link of his filmography. Perhaps the life-loving Don Pedro prefers his other paintings: optimistic, a little absurd, with unpredictable plot twists and the background feeling of an endless carnival. Here the colors are suddenly dull, gloomy eyes are surrounded by darkness, and in the air, thickening with every minute, a thunderstorm cloud of agonizing fatality grows. Instead of a spicy holiday of life, there is an oppressive triumph of death, imbued with the painful spirit of late decadence. Somewhere in the background, rum splashes, cocaine powders thin nostrils, and the vomit on the dress painted under the death mask of the model becomes a fresh touch to the actual image. Some die of boredom, selflessly indulge in personal sins and murderous entertainment, others maniacally pray or dig into the remains of other people's amusements. The color codes, black and white, mark the two extremes of being, the youthful naive simplicity and cynicism of saturated maturity; but from time to time in this semi-Gothic reality flash red spots of burning sensuality and golden flares of noble affiliation with the true art, the art of killing.
The road to the School of Tauromachy is paved not with good intentions, but with a propensity to take risks or, as here, a painful dependence on the emotional fusion of combat excitement with the painful horror of the unknown. They say that bullfighting is the only art that threatens the artist with death. And the matador is the personification of power and talent, honed to deadly sharpness; the king and god of the arena, granting that deafening glory, then the shame of forgetting. Diego is a victim of his bloody profession, unable to kill or exist without an exhilarating sense of danger, without this delightful power over death, without playing with his own fate - the only thing that allowed him to rise above the defeated but worthy rival bull, and over the unworthy and fearful human herd. Having lost his strength, Diego lost not even meaning, but the love of his life. Until I met Maria, a woman with the same murderous craving for crimson tones, fine daggers and passionate intercourse with cooling bodies. Two restless predators, doomed to make love alone, found each other in the hopeless desert of monotonous days in order not to part anymore. And the logic of animal passion gives way to high - above morality, above laws, above the instinct of self-preservation - incomprehensible, absolute love.
And they would be condemned to eternal torment in hell, or at least to prosaic imprisonment. But according to the strange rules of magical realism, both the director and the rest of the characters actually justify the characters, as if the beauty of feeling can atone for the sinful abomination of murder. The aesthetics of the embodied idea are so perfect that the abandoned bride sobs, asking back to the cold bed, where night after night she portrayed the dead for the lover-thanatoman, and the investigator left with a nose philosophically drops, that he never saw a happier couple. But the true admirer of the master is his disciple Angel: either an angel or a sacrificial lamb, ready to take on the crimes of a teacher whom he admires, whom he almost idolizes. Angel, who to the Lord, almighty, demanding, persistently driving into the grip of rituals and fetters of commandments, preferred the colorful image of a matador endowed with the will to dispose of fates in an honest pagan duel. In this image – a person who is internally free from the bounds imposed by society – there is the salt not only of the film, but also of the entire Spanish culture, mixed with blood, arrogant pride and heroism, on a constant flight from death to the sultry poetry of music and dance, in the Lorca tragedy and passionate beauty of cinema. So, at the junction of mysticism and drama, bypassing the surrealism so beloved by Almodovar, a core romanticism is born, a hymn to the ideal feeling, behind which nothing is possible but eternity.
Marriages are not made in heaven. And here, on the damp sheets, the bed is muffled red as the sunset, soft as his greedy mouth, hot as this unbearable heat inside, spilling around to a deaf moan, to the pain of bitten lips. He enters her, wounding her eyes with knives, closing the steel traps of hugs, tearing the beast roar from her mouth, causing her hips to rush like caught trout, and her heart to tremble in deadly sweet, deadly beautiful, deadly happy longing. Look at me, look at me.