Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls like Mom - Pedro Almodovar

1980 Available on Mubi

Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls like Mom - Pedro Almodovar

Sometimes it’s interesting to go back to an esteemed director’s first feature to see how far they’ve progressed. Back in 1980, Pedro Almodovar directed his first feature film on 16mm film. It’s only later when it was blown up to 35mm that this raucous, exuberant, but occasionally insensitive to the point of offensive feature was released.

Almodovar’s 1980s muse, Carmen Maura, plays an heiress, Pepi, whose obnoxious policeman neighbour arrives to arrest her because of her windowsill cannabis plants. Pepi flirts and cajoles, tempting him with her sexuality, and the brute rapes her.

My first alarm bell went off here - rape victims have not usually offered their rapist their vagina on a plate. It minimises the rape. In any case, it’s not plausible that a young woman who is a virgin - and planning to sell her virginity to the highest bidder (unlikely for an heiress, and again serving to trivialise the rape in a ‘ well, she was going to sell it anyway’ sort of way) - would show and offer her private parts to a stranger.

Pepi has friends who are in a punk band. They attempt vengeance on her behalf but fail (and there is a comical mini plot here involving an identical twin of the policeman, but after this part of the film, he more or less disappears, making his presence seem like a cheap device).

So instead, Pepi introduces her lesbian friend from the punk band, Bom, to the policeman’s gentle wife, Luci, who - again, unfeasibly - seems all too eager to be drawn away from her husband, despite him - bizarrely - treating her with respect.

And here the second red flag appears. Luci is a masochist. She loves nothing more than being beaten up. There is a somewhat gratuitous scene where Bom wees on her, much to her delight. Her alleged masochism really becomes a problem for the viewer near the end, where she is beaten up horrifically by her husband - and adores it. I don’t think any woman would think to portray a domestic violence victim in a hospital bed as being turned on by her vile husband, who put her there, hurting her further. It’s dodgy in the extreme.

Another unfortunate scene is where a different woman is raped by the hideous policeman. To have the rape victim say ‘you won’t respect me’ is pretty tone deaf since this is not a frequent concern of rape victims, who are usually traumatised by this violating act of violence.