Pepi, Luci, Bom

Plot

Pepi, a young independent woman living in Madrid, is filling up her Superman sticker album when she receives an unexpected visit from a policeman who has spotted her marijuana plants from the street. Pepi tries to buy his silence with an offer of oral sex, but the policeman rapes her. This ruins her hopes of selling her virginity for a good amount of money. Thirsty for revenge, Pepi arranges for her friend Bom, a teenage punk singer, and her band, Los Bomitonis, to beat up the policeman. Wearing Madrilenian costumes and singing a zarzuela, Pepis friends give the man a merciless beating one night. However, the next day Pepi realizes that they had attacked the policeman’s innocent twin brother by mistake.

Undaunted, Pepi decides on a more complex form of revenge. She befriends the policeman’s docile wife, Luci, with the excuse of receiving knitting lessons. Pepis idea is to corrupt Luci and take her away from the wife-beating policeman. During the first knitting class, Pepis friend, Bom, arrives at the apartment heading for the restroom in order to pee. This leads to the suggestion that, since Luci feels hot, Bom should stand on a chair and urinate over Lucis face. Boms aggressive behavior satisfies Lucis masochism and the two women become lovers. Back home, Luci has an argument with her husband in which she complains about what he had done to Pepi. With a sense of liberation Luci leaves her husband and her home, moving in with Bom.

The three friends, Pepi, Luci and Bom are immersed in Madrid’s youth scene, attending parties, clubs, concerts and meeting outrageous characters. In one of the concerts, Bom sings with her band, the Bomitonis, a song called "Murciana la marrana" (the Girl from Murcia; the sow). Luci becomes a proud groupie. The highlight of one of the parties is a penis size contest called General Erections, a competition looking for the biggest, most svelte, most inordinate penis. The winner receives the opportunity to do what he wants, how he wants, with whomever he wants. He selects Luci to give him oral sex, which makes her the most envied woman at the party.

Eventually Pepi is forced to find work as her father decides to stop her income. She becomes a creative writer for advertising spots designing ads for sweating, menstruating dolls and multipurpose panties that absorb urine and can double as a dildo. Pepi also begins to write a script which will be the story of lesbian lovers Luci and Bom. The chauvinist policeman is desperately looking for his wife. Meanwhile he takes advantage of naive neighbor Charo, who is in love with Juan, his twin brother. Pretending to be Juan, the policeman sexually assaults Charo.

Finally, the policeman finds Luci coming out of a disco and kidnaps her from her two friends. He gives Luci a terrible beating that sends her to the hospital, where Pepi and Bom visit her. They quickly realize that they have lost Luci. She has decided to return to the person who mistreats her best – her sadistic and tyrannical husband. His brutality is what Luci has always wanted. Bruised and bandaged in her hospital bed, Luci tells Bom she is returning to him for a life of abuse. Bom is lost without Luci and laments that pop is also out of fashion. Pepi has the solution to both problems. Bom should move in with Pepi as her bodyguard and start singing boleros.

Cast

Maura took the leading role of Pepi and Felix Rotaeta played the abusive policeman. Both were instrumental in having the film made. Maura was already an established actress, having found film success with Fernando Colomos Tigres de Papel. She became Almodovars reference actress in the first half of his career. Bom is played by Olvido Gara, then a teenage punk singer, who inspired the character she plays. Gara went on to take the artistic name of Alaska. She has enjoyed a successful artistic career as a singer, first in Alaska and Dinarama and later with Fangoria.

Many actors that appear in minor roles went on to play more important ones in Almodovar’s subsequent films: Kiti Manver (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) plays a hot-tempered, Andalusian rock singer; Julieta Serrano (Dark Habits); Cecilia Roth (All About My Mother); Fabio MacNamara (Labyrinth of Passion), a singer and painter, plays a transvestite Avon lady;

Cristina Sanchez Pascual (Dark Habits) appears as a high-pitch bearded woman frustrated in a marriage to a homosexual, in a parody of Tennessee Williamss Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Assumpta Serna (Matador) has a non speaking cameo, while Almodovar himself appears as the host in the general erection contest.

Production

Pepi, Luci, Bom is Almodovars first feature film. He had previously made only short films in Super 8, Salome a short in 16mm and a feature length film in super 8 Folle, folle, folleme, Tim (1978) (Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Tim), none of which had a soundtrack.

The genesis of Pepi, Luci, Bom was a story written by Almodovar called "General Erections" published in 1978 in the magazine El Vibora (The Viper). "General Erections" was a comic parody of the 1977 general elections in Spain. The idea to take that story and develop it into a film was born out of his collaboration with the theatrical group Los Goliardos. Performing with them in a small role in Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre, Almodovar met Carmen Maura and Felix Rotaeta, who encouraged him to make a film out of General Erections. Almodovar rewrote the story and changed the title to "Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del monton" ("Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap").

The initial budget was only 500,000 pesetas that Carmen Maura and Felix Rotaeta helped to collect. At the time, Almodovar was working for Telefonica, Spain’s national telephone company, as an administrative employee therefore the shooting took place on weekends with a group of volunteers. Without the backing of a studio, Almodovar was forced to make extensive use of location shooting. The real life residence of gay pop artist painters Costus (Juan Carrero and Enrique Naya), who also appear in the film, served as the place where Luci and Bom set up their home.

The shooting was chaotic; it began in 1978 and lasted a year and a half. Due to the lack of financial means, it took an entire year to produce a film of only fifty minutes. This was insufficient for commercial distribution length. More money was needed and backing from Pepon Coromina, a Catalan producer, allowed Almodovar to add thirty more minutes of film, shot over the following six months of 1980. The film was blown from 16 mm to a 35 mm format to allow its theatrical release. The crew lacked experience and the cameraman cut off some heads, particularly during the general erections contest scene. The long and chaotic shooting created problems in continuity. When filming started Olvido Gara was fifteen and by the time the filming wrapped she was seventeen. The first scene when Pepi goes to answer the door to the policeman was shot in June 1979, she opened it in December 1979 and they sat together in June 1980.

Reception

The film premiered on 19 September 1980 at the San Sebastian Film Festival in the section devoted to new directors. It later toured the independent circuits and then spent four years on the late night showing of the Alphaville Theater in Madrid.

Reviews in Spain were mostly negative, objecting to the films frivolity and vulgar humor. Pedro Crespo, in the conservative newspaper ABC, described the film a “merely a variation on the age old tradition of vulgar comedy transformed into a contemporary language”. Diego Galan, in El Pais, praised the film concluding that “We are in the presence of an astonishing and up to now, unique work. Almodovar has made his first professional full length film and in so doing has undermined with the most respected taboos of our foolish society”. The Spanish newspaper El Periodico, described Almodovar as "a stubbornly passionate defender of substandard movies".

Pepi, Luci, Bom was released in the United States in 1992, only after Almodovar became a famous art house film director. The reaction of American critics to the film was, on the whole, hostile. It was generally rebuked for its thematic and formal inconsistency. Janet Maslin in The New York Times considered the film a “rough unfunny comedy notable for its bathroom jokes, humorous rape scene and abysmal home movie cinematography’. She found “its humor of a very adolescent variety… and plot turns that are better described than seen”. Critic Rita Kempley from The Washington Post called it an “amateurish directorial debut, a smutty sexual sideshow most safely viewed in a full body condom”.

The film cost 6 million pesetas and made 43 million pesetas in its initial release in Madrid. With its many kitsch elements, campy style, outrageous humor, and open sexuality, the film became emblematic of a cultural movement of its time, La Movida Madrilena. It amassed a cult following and established Almodovar as an agent provocateur.

Theme

The central theme of the film – female resilience, independence, and solidarity – would be a constant throughout Almodovar’s career, albeit better depicted in his later and more accomplished films. Like the female characters in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, and Volver, Pepi and Bom are self-sufficient, independent and their friendship is shown as more important that any sexual or love attachment. By contrast, men are either non-existent or presented unsympathetically like the policeman in Pepi, Luci, Bom; Raimunda’s abusive husband in Volver or Pepas unfaithful lover in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Although Bom and Luci form a lesbian couple, their story is ultimately less important than Pepi and Bom’s friendship. While the friendship of these two remains strong Boms and Luci affair ends when the latter returns to a heterosexual life of abuse with her husband.

Two scenes put Pepi and Boms closeness in the foreground. Contrasting Lucis troubled household, Pepi is presented cooking Boms favorite dish: Bacalao al pil pil. The film aptly closes with the two friends looking ahead to a new life shared together as roommates, helping to support each other. The film also takes on other themes frequent in Almodovar’s filmography: sexual heterodoxy, drug addiction and a love of pop culture.

Genre

Among Almodovar’s films Pepi, Luci, Bom, his first, is the one who takes more explicitly comedy as a genre. All the others (with the possible exception of Los Amantes pasajeros) incorporate elements of melodrama. The characters are shown as comic archetypes. Pepi is the independent witty modern woman. There is the nasty radical policeman. Bom is shown as a perverse rebellious teenager and Luci as the abused housewife.

The amateurish presentation of the film and its crude humor also sets the film apart from the rest of Almodovars filmography. Even in Labyrinth of Passion, Almodovars subsequent film, comic elements are not presented so bluntly. By then, there was also a huge improvement in plot structure and filmography over his first film.

Analysis

The comic book origins of the film are evident in its loose structure, provocative vulgarity and the intertitles made by famous Spanish illustrator, Ceespe, then an unknown member of La Movida Madrilena. The film was plagued by financial and technical problems: Almodovar claimed humorously that "when a film has only one or two, it is considered an imperfect film, while when there is a profusion of technical flaws, it is called style. Thats what I said joking around when I was promoting the film, but I believe that that was closer to the truth."

Stylistically the film owes a debt to Paul Morrisseys first films and above all to John Waters Pink Flamingos. Almodovar confronts the spectator with unexpected outrageous situations, including a lesbian golden shower scene in the middle of a knitting lesson.

The technical and plot defects of the films are apparent, particularly when compared with Almodovars subsequent polished and complex works. However the film captured the spirit of its time, La Movida Madrilena, presenting Madrid as an exciting city where anything goes.

The film centers on youth culture, showing it as wild, frivolous, adventurous and free from taboos. There is political symbolism in the right wing, old macho attitudes of the policeman, who represent the disappearing Francoist society and is presented unsympathetically. Pepi and Bom stand for Spains modern woman, the wild new face of a liberated democratic Spain. Luci is the self-sacrificing Spanish housewife, trapped between the old and new Spain. She is a masochist who yearns for the brutality of the past.

Blurring the limits of sexual identity, transsexual characters appear in many Almodovar’s films. Here there is a drag queen called Roxy, played by Fabio McNamara, Almodovars singing partner in a glam rock parody duo. The comic elements of the film defy good taste and are bluntly presented. Almodovar does not linger in the oddness of the sexual relationship between a traditional housewife in her forties and a rebellious punk teenager, which is presented without judgment as nothing out of the ordinary. Pepi, Luci, Bom is clearly an amateurish film; a first-time director, Almodovar learned his craft as he made it.

Soundtrack

The film opens with the song Do the Swim by Little Nell, singing co-star of Jim Sharmans cult 1975 film the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The counterculture song Murciana, written by Fabio McNamara, is prominently featured in the film, performed by Alaska and Los Pegamoides with a mixture of vulgarity and absurdity. The film closes with a Latin-American song Estaba escrito by Monna Bell, a Chilean singer.

DVD release

Pepi, Luci, Bom is available in Region 2 DVD in Spanish with English subtitles. It was released in The U.K as part of The Almodovar Collection (Vol.1). The film has not been released on DVD in the United States.

Bibliography