Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar established his international reputation with ‘raucous farces’ such as What Have I Done to Deserve This? And Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, writes Robert Chalmers in the Observer Magazine on 5 June 1994. His new film, Kika, features a porn star, a lesbian maid, a serial killer and a rape scene played as ‘knockabout comedy’, begging the question: has the clown prince of Europe lost his sense of humour, both in his life and in his art?
