His early films characterised the sense of sexual and political freedom of the period. He directed Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! He collaborated with the vanguard theatrical group Los Goliardos, in which he played his first professional roles and met actress Carmen Maura. He remembers, "I showed them in bars, at parties I could not add a soundtrack because it was very difficult.
The magnetic strip was very poor, very thin. I remember that I became very famous in Madrid because, as the films had no sound, I took a cassette with music while I personally did the voices of all the characters, songs and dialogues". That's what I said joking around when I was promoting the film, but I believe that that was closer to the truth".
It toured the independent circuits before spending three years on the late night showing of the Alphaville Theater in Madrid. His second feature Labyrinth of Passion focuses on nymphomaniac pop star, Sexila Cecilia Roth , who falls in love with a gay middle-eastern prince, Riza Niro Imanol Arias. Their unlikely destiny is to find one another, overcome their sexual preferences and live happily ever after on a tropical island. The main problem is that the story of the two leads is much less interesting than the stories of all the secondary characters.
But precisely because there are so many secondary characters, there's a lot in the film I like". The film heralded a change in tone to somber melodrama with comic elements. Dark Habits premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was surrounded in controversy due its subject matter. The film premiered in and drew some controversy due to its subject matter.
And so do my films. If you see Matador through the perspective of traditional morality, it's a dangerous film because it's just a celebration of killing. Matador is like a legend. I don't try to be realistic; it's very abstract, so you don't feel identification with the things that are happening, but with the sensibility of this kind of romanticism". The Law of Desire [ 40 ] El Deseo's first major release was Law of Desire , a film about the complicated love triangle between a gay filmmaker Eusebio Poncela , his transsexual sister Carmen Maura , and a repressed murderously obsessive stalker Antonio Banderas.
