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*Live Flesh is part of our Who is Luis Buñuel? season, which throughout February explores Buñuel's legacy in modern and contemporary cinema. This legacy section of the season was curated with the help of The Garden Cinema's members.
Victor (Liberto Rabal) goes to meet Elena (Francesca Neri) for a date. Elena, uninterested, tells Victor to leave the apartment before her dealer gets there. Their ensuing argument and struggle draw the attention of policemen Sancho (José Sancho) and David (Javier Bardem). As Elena flees, her gun goes off, paralyzing David. Six years later, Victor gets out of jail and begins having an affair with Sancho's wife, as David and Elena's marriage falls apart.
Curator's note:
Tristana and Live Flesh are dense melodramas that explore shifting power dynamics, complex erotic psychology and transgression while deconstructing the rigid gender roles of Spanish Catholicism.
Each film features three characters engaged in a tense dance of lust, resentment, and pain. Both Tristana and Elena begin as passive and manipulated objects of male desire but by the end assert themselves as sovereign agents of their bodies and passions.
The films grapple with the sexual frustration of men like Don Lope and David who can only relate to women by dominating them. As lust blurs their moral vision, they are pushed to the brink of transgression and sexual dysfunction.
Tristana and Live Flesh also share a similar bold visual style and baroque aesthetics. Almodóvar regular Ángela Molina Molina appears in both films, highlighting the intertextuality between the directors.