MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Heels’ Kicks Up Wild Kitsch

Pedro Almodovar’s new film, “High Heels” (selected theaters), makes murder pathetic and betrayal poignant. This story about an aging pop star and her tormented daughter--and how murder brings them together--is a wild mix. It’s a “bad girl” movie with a sneaky vein of lyrical compassion, a dark, nose-thumbing sense of humor and an obsession with style, both personal and pictorial.

In a way, Almodovar is like an old Hollywood mogul, obsessed with making “beautiful pictures of beautiful people,” and he fills this movie, like his others, with an impish delight in sexual tricks and body language. His characters are twisted as well as sexy; their lives are so tied up in their own allure that rejection or lack of love drive them crazy. They all seem to be living out archetypal roles borrowed from Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susann, even though the tone that enfolds them is wry.

They’re a kitsch gallery: the aging star (Marisa Paredes), who keeps singing for her adoring fans despite angina; her tormented daughter (the stunning Victoria Abril), obsessed by childhood abandonment and crime; the caddish TV news executive (Feodor Atkine) who has slept with one and married the other; the mysterious transvestite superstar (Miguel Bose, son of Spanish actress Lucia Bose and bullfighter Luis Dominguin) who befriends the daughter while impersonating the mother.

All these characters, and the plot around them, a melange of jealousy and murder, suggest tabloid stuff raised to the level of rotting poetics. In concocting this crazy story--absurd beyond the wildest dreams of any Hollywood hack--Almodovar almost seems to be throwing up stray things that stimulate him and using the hack forms of trash novels and old Bette Davis pictures to knit them together.

When a director is a moviemaking natural with carte blanche, like Almodovar, there is a danger he will get so intoxicated by the brilliant, isolated images he churns up, and so eager to translate them into film, that the final result won’t jell.

That may be what happened in “High Heels.”

It’s a sometimes witty movie--audacious, offbeat and full of intense scenes and striking characters--but there’s something about it that doesn’t jell.

Despite Almodovar’s smooth narrative flow, it seems fragmented. Part of it is a soap opera that suggests “Where Love Has Gone,” part is a women’s prison thriller turned into a musical comedy, part a murder mystery without clues, and part a camp Jekyll-and-Hyde tale grafted onto a Tennessee Williams playlet. Almodovar’s greatest talent is for mixing wildly incongruous styles--Hollywood and European art, melodrama and naturalistic comedy--and he’s at his best when he’s able to blend kitsch and psychology, when his characters are real and his plot is lurid, as in “Law of Desire” or “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” In “High Heels,” the sleazy, elegant pulp seems to be grabbed from way outside. The characters even act as if they’re living in a movie. The women prisoners, led by hefty blond transsexual Bibi Andersen, spontaneously break into pseudo-Bob Fosse dance routines and, when Abril’s Rebecca wants to reveal pain to Parades’ Becky, she recounts mother-daughter scenes from “Autumn Sonata.”

It’s probably crucial that the first scene Almodovar invented here is one where TV newscaster Rebecca reports the murder of her own husband. It’s an electrifying scene, the best in the movie--but the film around it rarely matches it.

The best thing about “High Heels” are the performances--Abril’s tense, voracious daughter, Parades’ star-turn mother, the sinister Bose, the arrogant Atkine--and the lucidity of Almodovar’s narrative style, which by now seems as natural as breathing. But the film’s poignancy seems borrowed, and it may be fitting that one key character does lip-sync acts. In “High Heels,” (MPAA rated R for a scene of strong sensuality and language), Almodovar is lip-syncing the kind of passion and irony that suffuses his best work. It’s a slick routine, but it doesn’t match the original or catch the heart.

‘High Heels’

Victoria Abril: Rebecca

Marisa Paredes: Becky Del Paramo

Miguel Bose: Femme Lethal

Feodor Atkine: Manuel

A Miramax Films presentation. Director/screenplay Pedro Almodovar. Executive producer Augustin Almodovar. Production director Esther Garcia. Cinematographer Albnerto Mayo. Editor Pepe Salcedo. Music Ryuichi Sakamoto. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (For a scene of strong sensuality and for language.)