LIVE FLESH

With solid success, Pedro Almodovar leaves his taste for camp behind to direct a richly detailed tale of passion, perfidy and revenge adapted from a typically tricky Ruth Rendell novel. “Live Flesh” (or in Spanish, even better, “Carne Tremula”) is Almodovar’s stylish, sexy film noir, although in his case film rouge is more like it. Bold, sunny colors saturate this sleek and vibrant-looking film, even in settings like a graveyard and a child care center.

Some of the action involves sports, and it’s hard to imagine any basketball court looking brighter than the green one here. Only in its prologue is “Live Flesh” the least bit murky, as an overlong sequence set on a Madrid bus supplies all the gory details of a prostitute’s giving birth to a son. That occurs at Christmastime in 1970, with Spain still in the grip of the Franco years and Madrid’s citizens afraid to be on the streets. The film isn’t about politics, but it does supply the nice bookend of a present-day closing scene in which freedom reigns. 

Almodovar, whose work here has newly sophisticated polish, appreciates the dark twists of this story along with the eroticism that bring heat to all the scheming. In “Live Flesh,” he finds steamy, imaginative ways to show why the film’s characters love one another to death. -New York Times

Runtime: 99 min