Law of Desire
1987, NR, 100 min.
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Miguel Molina, Bibi Andersson.

The festival is showing this great film from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s early career in honor of this week’s opening of his latest and highly acclaimed film, All About My Mother, which many reviewers have compared with Law of Desire. It co-stars a pre-Hollywood Antonio Banderas as part of a circle of wacky lovers and friends. Banderas plays a character named Antonio, who’s in love with Pablo, who’s in love with Juan. Pablo’s sister Tina (the brilliant Carmen Maura) is a transsexual. These four characters are put through typical Almodovarian comic paces, in this spectacle of flamboyant melodrama, murder, and amnesia. In many ways, the widely hailed All About My Mother is a more polished version of the rough-and-tumble Law of Desire.

This article appears in 1999.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.