Lust For Life

By RICHARD CORLISS

Victor (Liberto Rabal) has a lofty ambition: to become "the best lover in the world." And Clara (Angela Molina) is eager to coach him. The first lesson, she sagely informs him, is that "making love involves two people." He smiles, then asks, "And the second...?" Victor is a quick learner.

People in Pedro Almodovar films, though, never learn quite fast enough to cope with the wild, melodramatic twists the Spanish writer-director hurls their way like grenades. That's one of the lovely things about Almodovar epics like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!: they give you three movies' worth of plot in a fast 100 minutes or so. His sensuous, delirious new film, Live Flesh, has plenty. Victor is involved with two women, Clara and Elena (the sorcerous Francesca Neri), both of whom are married to jealous policemen. The story (based on a Ruth Rendell novel) begins in 1970 with a prostitute giving birth to Victor on a Madrid bus and, within half an hour, doles out drugs, sex, a triangular gun battle and a paraplegic policeman (Javier Bardem) who plays basketball in the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona.

Obsession has seldom looked as gaudy or thrilling as here. One of the cops (Jose Sancho), who is as doting as he is abusive, tells his wife, "As long as I love you, you're not leaving me." After a quickie with her lover, a woman rapturously smells her body--it still has his musk all over it. Few films these days are about sex, let alone love. Almodovar is that rare moviemaker who still thinks they are as important as a space invasion or a sinking ship.

--By Richard Corliss