Kika (1993) - film review

Returning to his family home, Ramón, a talented young photographer, is shocked to learn that his mother has just committed suicide.  When he collapses, his stepfather, Nicolas, an American writer, believes he too has died and immediately calls a beautician, Kika, to make up his face.  Kika is moved by Ramón’s beauty and the fact that he died so young.  She is even more moved when he suddenly regains consciousness.   Some months later, Kika and Ramón are in a relationship, although Kika’s needs are barely satisfied by Ramón and so she begins an affair with his womanising stepfather.  At this point, Ramón’s ex-girlfriend, Andrea, makes an unwelcome return into Ramón’s life.  She hosts a TV crime show in which she hunts down killers and other social deviants so that she can extort a confession from them, in front of a primetime audience.  Meanwhile, ex-porn star Pablo escapes from prison and calls on his sister, Juana, who happens to be Ramón’s housemaid.  Pablo, a sex maniac with an insatiable libido, cannot resist Kika when he sees her lying on her bed and immediately sets about raping her.  All this is seen by a peeping Tom neighbour, who alerts the police.  Although all ends well, footage of the rape somehow ends up in Andrea’s exploitative little hands and makes it onto her next show.  Unbeknown to Ramón, Nicolas is writing material for Andrea, which prompts the latter to suspect Nicolas has a darker side.  Nicholas’ accounts of the exploits of a serial killer appear less like fiction and more like a confession...

Anyone who hasn’t quite worked out yet why Pedro Almodóvar is referred to as the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema should watch this film.   Kika is a film that shocks and entertains in roughly equal measure, and even scenes that are hilariously funny – notably the seemingly interminable rape sequence – leave an unpleasant aftertaste.  Viewed in the right frame of mind, Kika is an insightful, albeit highly provocative, satire on society’s double standards when it comes to sex and violence.  As every TV executive knows, the things that shock us most – rape, murder and people who think they can sing but can’t – are what also fascinate us most.  These abominations are what draw massive television audiences, nurturing the hypocritical little voyeur (or masochist) that sits inside each one of us.

Kika has a serious subtext and some important social messages, but its narrative and visual excesses, to say nothing of the in-your-face (ahem) sex jokes, obscure these somewhat.  The film lacks focus and is structurally something of a mess, feeling more like a series of cobbled together sketches rather than a coherent whole.  None of this prevents it from being an entertaining romp, the usual Almodóvar concoction of kitsch melodrama and near-the-knuckle black comedy.  The only other thing the film has to offer is Victoria Abril in the campest costume ever.  Clad from head-to-foot in tight-fitting leather, with a camera mounted on her head and spotlights in her beasts, Abril looks like a cross between a dominatrix robocop and a human speed trap.  You’ll never look at a CCTV camera in quite the same way again.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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