Live Flesh: Flesh for fantasy

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar took a more restrained approach with his 1997 erotic thriller Live Flesh. “Restraint” is a relative term, however, for the director of kinky comedies such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Live Flesh begins with a madam helping a prostitute (Penélope Cruz) deliver a baby on a Madrid bus on Christmas Eve, and gradually weaves an ever-constricting web of lust, violence and obsession between five people.

In many of Almodóvar’s best films, including All About My Mother, the director shows a fascination with pushing a story’s melodramatic aspects as far as possible without leaving the realm of credibility. Live Flesh hinges on a fateful encounter in 1990, when Victor (Liberto Rabal), a young hustler, pursues a misguided attraction to a junkie named Elena (Francesca Neri), which ends in gunplay and an encounter with the police. A stray bullet puts one of the officers (Javier Bardem) in a wheelchair and sends Victor to jail. Despite his paralysis, Bardem’s David marries Elena, becomes a celebrity athlete in the Paralympics and the focus of Victor’s resentment.

The High Museum programmed Live Flesh as part of this month’s “Starring Javier Bardem” series. Although he spends most of the film in a wheelchair, Bardem reveals soft-spoken charisma comparable to George Clooney and intense physicality not unlike Russell Crowe. David at first comes across as the film’s most reasonable, sympathetic character, but Almodóvar subverts the audience’s expectations. David proves to be a more tarnished figure than we initially believe, while Victor reveals a kind of innocence despite his unstable, stalkerish behavior.

Almodóvar loosely adapted Live Flesh from a novel by British mystery writer Ruth Rendell, and the scenes when David keeps Victor under surveillance evoke Alfred Hitchcock, with the camera’s tracking shots keeping pace with David’s wheelchair. A thread of personal and sexual freedom also runs through the film: Victor was born during the oppressive Franco regime, but comes of age during the country’s more liberated 1990s. Live Flesh turns out to be the rare erotic thriller in which the eroticism is more important and lovingly presented than the violence.

Live Flesh 3 stars Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Stars Liberto Rabal, Javier Bardem. Rated R. $4-$5. Thurs., May 22, 8 p.m. High Museum, Rich Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. 404-733-4444. www.high.org.