Matador Reviews

In a career abundant in provocations and skewering of provincial middlebrow aesthetics, Matador still announces itself as something punk rock and aggressive in Pedro Almodóvar’s oeuvre. Here is a film that opens with one of its main characters jerking off to Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace as if it were the most mundane and routine of weeknight activities. The threat and comingling of violence and sexuality pervades throughout Matador by drawing a direct correlation between bullfighting with the battle of the sexes.

The story concerns a retired matador (Nacho Martínez), his pupil (Antonio Banderas), and a black widow attorney (Assumpta Serna) and a string of perverse scenarios that alternate between bodily fluids and twisted romance. Not a lot of the narrative makes sense, but Matador poses an energy and aura that is hypnotic in its perversions and daring. Review blurbs throw around the word “lurid” a lot, and that does seem to emerge as a great de facto descriptor of this strange little movie from a cinematic genius.

I’m somewhere in-between Almodóvar’s self-assessment and Vincent Canby’s New York Times review. Almodóvar declared in Almodóvar on Almodóvar that Matador and Kika were his weakest films in his mind, and Matador at times can feel less like a coherent work and like a series of provocations. While Canby’s review looked at the film as “a film maker who, possibly, is in the process of refining a singular talent.” They’re both right at the same time as Matador is both a talent in process of refining itself and a little underwhelming in its formlessness.