FilmClub will be screening Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh at the Tatham Art Gallery in Chief Albert Luthuli Street, Pietermaritzburg at 7 pm tomorrow night (September 29).Slightly less well-known than subsequent films like All About My Mother, this film nevertheless bears many of the Spanish director’s trademark features, with striking visual imagery and an absorbing interwoven narrative deployed to explore contemporary ethical issues.

Released in 1997, this very free adaptation of a novel by British crime writer, Ruth Rendell, marked the start of what was to be the most fertile period of Almodóvar’s remarkable career, prefiguring the assured visual style and emotional gravitas of the great melodramas that followed.

A police raid which goes disastrously wrong links together the lives of five people, allowing Almodóvar to explore a complex set of relationships which, as one reviewer comments, “defy the facile conventions of what movies typically present as romances, friendships and rivalries.”

The film is a-typical in its relatively explicit engagement with recent Spanish history, and the legacy of Franco’s fascist regime, but exemplifies Almodóvar’s film-making in the way it uses colour, sound and camera-movement both to evoke the characters’ emotions and to elicit an emotional response from the viewer.

And as always the director confronts us with the singularity of human desire, the utterly unaccountable nature of love.

With powerful performances from both relatively little-known actors and iconic stars like Javier Bardem and Buñuel’s muse, Angela Molina, this is an absorbing, entertaining and quite beautiful film.

Entry is R35 per person and, as was the case last week, The Tatham Coffee shop will be offering a soup and bread supper from 6 pm onwards (at a very reasonable R30 per person). Safe parking will be available in the government parking lot next to the gallery.

Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ_OIzW95cA