Carne Tremula – Marubi brings Almadovar to the Albanian public

TIRANA, May. 3- The MARUBI Film and Multimedia School had its traditional weekly screening of the Thursday Film on 7pm, this time bringing a film of the well-known author Pedro Almadovar, “Live flesh” (Crane Tremula), in its original Spanish with English subtitles. Pizza delivery man Victor is having an argument with Elena, whom he met a few days ago, but she was high then and does not want to hear about him. Reacting to the noise, two cops, young David and old Sancho, arrive at the scene, the gun accidentally goes offƆour years later David is a wheelchair basketball star, he is married to Elena, Victor is released out of prison and their destinies begin to cross again. Starring a traditional Penelope Cruz, present frequently in Almadovar’s productions and other actors, the movie brought to Labnain audience a non-conventional movie director best known for his deep psychological probes in a unique artistic style.
One of Almodovar’s favorite conceits is the use of old TV and movie images as ironic commentary on our modern lives. He loves the sheer trashiness of those millions of hours of low-grade output and he likes to mimic 1950’s sitcom formats or to splice ‘quotes’ from old footage into his modern tales. It’s a device which he uses very effectively in this film. When the gun is fired in the apartment, a shot rings out from the TV set in the corner. The fake news item of the bus birth, in black and white to represent the drabness of Franco’s Spain, is a loving recreation of TV’s golden age. Women are mannequins in these old TV shows, used by men as objects of prurient displays, and of violence. Our mass media have drugged us, suggests Almodovar, into being passive recipients of authority’s handouts. We can no longer distinguish between entertainment and reality. David confronts Victor and wounds him, but the two enemies are immediately distracted by the soccer game on TV and become ‘guys together’, forgetting their hatred. Names are always important in Almodovar films, and in this one they hold the key to the story’s many meanings. Elena is Helen of Troy, the creature who radiates unconscious appeal and leads men into war and destruction. Victor Plaza’s name contains several layers of symbolic importance. He is the film’s real victor, overcoming the misfortune of the shooting and his own sexual imbecility to attain true happiness in America. Many Spanish towns have a ‘Plaza de la Victoria’, a municipal tribute to the great historical sea triumph of Lepanto. In this sense Victor’s name makes him the personification of ordinary Spanish life, a hispanic Everyman. Isabel Plaza Caballero, the prostitute whose wretched short life becomes a saintly image of suffering and continuity, has the name of Spain’s great Catholic queen and the title of a ‘gentlewoman’. For Almodovar there is no contradiction in a prostitute having nobility. Sancho is a kind of Sancho Panza to David’s Quixote, the latter idealistic but impotent, the former iconoclastic and comical. Almodovar’s trademark is the looping circular plot in which the characters both repeat and vary their patterns of behavior, crossing one another’s paths and inadvertently echoing the actions of others. Nowhere is this better illustrated than here. The plot is almost literally circular, beginning and ending with childbirth in a wheeled vehicle, and Victor’s life-defining moment hinging on the circular bus ride which brings him back to the identical spot where he started, a payphone on the Calle Eduardo Dato. The characters penetrate one another’s lives in ways that are totally convincing, and with a grounding in human psychology which few writers or directors can display.