Sunday, October 23, 2011
Love is never a joke.
About midway through Law of Desire, the movie by Pedro Almodovar (1987), Antonio, played by a young and beautiful Antonio Banderas, asks Pablo, a movie director who is very self-centered and seems always to be doing lines of coke, “Who is the boy in the letter, that Juan?”
It is a moment in the movie when Antonio, who says, “I’m what I should be,” is trying to manipulate himself into Pablo’s bed.
Antonio continues. “He seems very much in love with you.”
Pablo answers. “He isn’t.” Then he says, “That letter is a joke.”
Antonio has been stalking Pablo since the beginning of the movie. He says, “Love is never a joke.”
In a culture in which Pablo finds it impossible to treat seriously what Antonio is offering and in which the love between two men is often treated exactly as a joke, the work of this movie is to show how very serious love between two men can be. This movie moves toward tragedy, and its method is operatic.
Eventually Antonio kills Juan, the boy that Pablo has been toying with—throws him off a cliff in the moonlight—and then, after an hour with Pablo, Antonio kills himself—sacrifices himself to Pablo’s learning what love means.
The concluding image of the story is of Pablo, kneeling on the floor in front of a May Cross, cradling the naked body of Antonio and sobbing.
And now, Pedro Almodovar’s new movie, The Skin I Live In, opened in the US October 14, 2011, but has not come to Boston, so I haven’t seen it yet.
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