Live Flesh (1997) review

Typically wacky Almodóvar film that operates on different levels - humor, tragedy, camp and melodrama are all thrown into a giant vat and stirred around - even though it probably shouldn't. I'm a huge fan of his work though his most acclaimed film, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is strangely my least favorite, because it doesn't have the extreme edge of his later works (I'm thinking of Atame! and Matador in particular). The story of Live Flesh gets much better as it progresses, and the pieces really come together after a puzzling beginning (his films tend to end better than they begin, a genuine rarity) which starts off with Penelope Cruz giving birth on a bus, and then cuts abruptly (all too abruptly) to twenty years later, with that baby now a young man, and the trouble he runs into. It's not his best work by a long shot - some sequences are too clumsy, others are downright stupid - but it never ceases being fresh or flippant.