MOVIE REVIEW : Almodovar’s ‘Pepi’ Wears Heart on Its Sleaze

Perversity and Pedro Almodovar often seem to glide down cinematic aisles hand-in-hand; and “Pepi, Luci, Bom” (Laemmle’s Sunset 5), the unbuttoned young Spanish filmmaker’s 1980 directorial debut, fits him like a sequined, spatter-painted glove. If the movie suggests that critics were a little quick to canonize Almodovar as the new Bunuel, it also shows they shouldn’t abandon his sillier, trashier frolics.

Centering on a lesbian dilettante’s mad Madrid vendetta against the cop who raped her, the movie is a bouquet of cheerful sleaze, a parade of sex gags, scatology, attacks on authority, media and show-business satire, that pulses with the whole pre-AIDS orgiastic spirit of the late ‘70s.

“Pepi’s” core theme seems simple, even adolescent: Sex is (usually) good; cops are bad. A narc tries to bust footloose Pepi, who’s a kind of equivalent to the madcap heiresses of the old screwball comedies. He settles for sex, goes too far and inspires hellish revenges from his infuriated victim. But part of the movie’s theme is that Authority can be more perverted than its dissidents. The brutality of the sadomasochistic romance between the Cop and his Wife surpasses the kinks of Pepi and Bomitoni.

Deliberately tasteless, punky and glitzy, unabashedly homosexual in its viewpoint and characters, “Pepi, Luci, Bom” is a true underground movie: shot on 16 millimeter in a grab-it-while-you-can mood that suggests the late ‘70s movies of John Waters--which may well have influenced it.

It’s about an underground as well: a seamy Warholian Madrid that embraces shock-rock groups, advertising artists, stage and movie actors, transvestites and omni-sexual hookers. Almodovar’s journalistic sense seeps through the comic exaggerations; reality hums under the daffy, shock-the-bourgeosie surface. And the movie is notable not just for its throwaway spirit, and introduction of Maura--who seems here a camp Anna Magnani--but for the way it mirrors the frantic underbelly of a society just emerging from decades of fascism.

Repression creates grotesques: the brutal cop as much as the gay underground. That’s the underpinning of “Pepi, Luci, Bom.” This movie has been knocked for bad taste, but it is a midnight movie of the “Pink Flamingos” variety, and that’s how it should be seen: not as an early draft for “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” Almodovar would get cooler, sleeker, less “primitive”; his command of Hollywood stylistics would get more polish and pizazz. But I suspect, that, even in his best film, “Law of Desire,” he was never more himself and in his world than he is in “Pepi, Luci, Bom”--whose full title, “Pepi, Luci, Bom, and the Other Girls on the Heap,” more accurately conveys its special tawdry ferocity.

‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’

Carmen Maura: Pepi

Felix Rotaeta: Policeman

Olvido Gara “Alaska”: Bom

Eva Siva: Luci

A Cinevista presentation of a Pepon Corominas/Figaro Films production. Director/screenplay Pedro Almodovar. Producer Pepon Corominas. Executive producer Felix Rotaeta. Cinematographer Paco Femenia. Editor Pepe Salcedo. Costumes Manuela Camacho. Songs Hispavox. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (language, sensuality).