KIKA Movie Review

The problem with being a director who traffics in risky material is that when you fail, your failure will be that much more noticeable. This is the case with Pedro Almodóvar's 1993 Kika, a fog bound “satire” that sinks beneath the waves early on—and takes quite a while to actually hit bottom. The Kika of the title is a wacky makeup artist (Veronica Forque) who falls for the stepson of an up-to-no-good American writer (Peter Coyote). Into the mix comes Andrea Scarface (Victoria Abril), the host of a notorious tabloid TV show who wears S/M outfits and is never without her video camera. We know from all the signs that she's supposed to be a riot, but the comedy's stalled. With the next subplot, it stops dead. The retarded brother of Kika's maid Juana (the equine visaged Rossy de Palma of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) knocks Juana out and proceeds to rape the sleeping Kika. This is intended as the movie's big comic centerpiece; Kika thoroughly enjoys what's happening to her, and as the scene goes on and on, we can see that this mutually pleasurable rape is supposed to be disarming us and winning us over. The scene is extremely long because Almodóvar's trying to build an elaborate gag—making us laugh in a liberated way at what is the ultimate non-PC comic situation. The problem is, the scene isn't funny, it isn't liberating, and it is endless. It's a big, fat, miscalculation, and it stops cold what wasn't a funny film to begin with. The scene seems to have been filmed by Almodóvar's critics, as if to publicly reveal a deep misogynistic streak in the director. Yet Almodóvar's best movies show that his gay sensibility and an empathy with women are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, Women on the Verge, The Flower of My Secret, and the recent Live Flesh feature some of the richest female characters in years. It's tempting but pointless to speculate on how that awful rape scene would—or wouldn't—play had Kika been a rousing comedy to that point. Better to move on to the director's more successful works and chalk this one up to the ever-lurking down side that comes with risk.

NEXT STOP … What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Matador, The Flower of My Secret

1994 115m/C SP Veronica Forque, Peter Coyote, Victoria Abril, Alex Casanovas, Rossy de Palma; D: Pedro Almodovar; W: Pedro Almodovar; C: Alfredo Mayo; M: Enrique Granados. VHS THV