Search - Kika on DVD

Not perfect but not to be missed

Doug Anderson | Miami Beach, Florida United States | 05/18/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is not the easiest film to understand. I think it makes sense if you see it as a transition film for Almodovar. In his earlier films he was so visually audacious that his content seemed secondary to his style, and even though his men and women had very dark desires Almodovars absurdist sensibility kept his films in the comic category. In Kika I think he is leaving behind that comic sensibility and digging deeper beneath that visual audacity and presenting his characters as people not just with absurd desires but with real lives and experiences which are not so easily overcome. perhaps the best character in Kika is Victoria Abril(with dark hair) who plays a tabloid journalist always on the prowl for the next big sex scandal breaking on the horizon. She is both literally and figuratively scarred from a failed love and seems to have gone over the edge. The only way she can get turned on now is by relishing in others tragedies. So of course she is attracted to the dark American writer(Coyote)who seems to leave a trail of dead bodies in his wake. The title character Kika (Veronica Forque) is a make-up artist who meets Coyote becomes his lover first and then his sons lover but she never leaves Coyote. She is not really the central character in this film so its odd that the film is titled Kika. but then the whole film is a little uncertain as to just what direction it should take. Almodovars seems to be experincing some creative indirection and it shows. This film has some of Almodovars bold visual trademark antics like outrageouly costumed and hyper sexual women but as the film progresses it becomes less and less like one of the older kind of Almodovar films and more and more like a new kind of Almodovar film which is to say this is a step toward a new kind of Almodovar film-- a Spanish noir,perhaps--which he will later perfect with the classic LIVE FLESH. In Kika he has not perfected his new style yet but if you are a filmgoer who likes to follow a filmakers progress this is a key film. Many of Almovodar bests films deal with women relating with women ( I would not call these films "noirs") but when he deals with the relation between the sexes he is evolving a style which derives from noir. Far from being a limit the genre seems to have liberated Almodovar from other kinds of constraints. In Kika he is struggling to free himself of some of his own cliches and the noir genre seems to have been just the thing to give his talents a new kind of focus. Live Flesh is his noir masterpiece but Kika was a key step in getting there."