Kika

Ehh, another sort of lame one. Somehow he just loses me between Women on the Verge and Flower of My Secret. Anyway, I usually adore his shifting genre play, but the dramatic and permanent 180 at the halfway mark from outrageous sex farce to dead-serious murder mystery didn’t work. By sex farce I suppose I really mean an hour-long fuck-fest, leaving little room for story development or humor (I think the intention was to leave the viewer saying ‘He can even make rape funny!,’ which he may have done in Pepi et al, but not here; I don’t think I laughed once in the whole film). I mean, rape, incest, murder… I expect these things in Almodovar (and love them: in Almodovar). But I also expect them to be more entertainingly and cunningly constructed.

Aha, one IMDb reviewer put it perfectly, and more succinctly: “That is where Kika fails: It is full of content but lacking delivery.” Yep. And that’s usually what he does so well, fusing the two!