La Ley del Deseo

La ley del deseo (English: Law of Desire) is a 1987 Spanish melodrama-thriller written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, starring Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, and Antonio Banderas. It was the first film produced by El Deseo, the production company Almodóvar founded with his brother Agustín, and it marked a turning point in his career as his first film premiered outside Spain and his first with male leads.^{1 • 2}

Production and El Deseo

A self-produced film. On 14 June 1985, Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar founded El Deseo, having just finished Matador and deciding to produce Pedro's next screenplay themselves.¹ Agustín, who had worked as assistant director on Matador, left his teaching career to produce the film, recalling that they had no personal or family resources and were starting from zero.¹⁰ He later described the project as, from a production standpoint, suicidal: a love story between two men that would be controversial for the freewheeling way it handled its subject.¹⁰

Self-production gave Pedro full creative control, extending the dominion he already exercised over scripts, casting, and costume design to the supervision of production itself; Pedro held the largest share of El Deseo S.A., with Agustín as associate producer.¹¹ The film was made under the then-new Miró Law, which gave Spanish filmmakers greater autonomy, and received support from the Ministry of Culture and the I.M.A.D.E. of the Community of Madrid.^{12 • 4} The crew included cinematographer Ángel Luis Fernández, editor José Salcedo, and composer Bernardo Bonezzi.^{3 • 13}

Reception and significance

The film premiered in Spain on 7 February 1987 and opened internationally through 1987 and 1988 in Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, and later markets.³ It was presented in the Panorama section of the 1987 Berlin Film Festival, where specialized press praised it and international distributors showed strong interest; it won the Teddy Award for LGBT-themed cinema.^{1 • 5} In the United States it received an NC-17 rating, and Antonio Banderas's gay kiss prompted front-page headlines in the Brazilian press.^{6 • 8} On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer score from 13 critics.⁹

A turning point in Almodóvar's career. Scholars identify the film as the first Almodóvar premiered outside Spain, the first with male leads, and the first part of a self-fiction trilogy completed by La mala educación (2004) and Dolor y gloria (2019).² The critic Carlos Losilla, writing in the Instituto Cervantes's dictionary of Spanish cinema, calls it the eighth Almodóvar feature and a perfect summary of his first period, mixing melodrama and thriller in the manner of Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, and describes it as his most committed film to a queer ideary close to filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman.¹⁴ A Cambridge University Press chapter argues that the film explores LGBTQ+ issues in the context of the AIDS panic, before queer and trans theory emerged in the 1990s, at a time when homosexuality was criminalised in Spain; it makes stereotypes about gay men and trans women central to the mistakes the police make while investigating a murder.¹⁵

In Spanish film history the film is seen as initiating a mode of representation in which homosexuality is important to the characters but not the sole thematic center, a mode with an important precedent in Laberinto de pasiones (1982) that was followed by films such as Las cosas del querer (1989) and Alegre ma non troppo (1994).¹⁶ Almodóvar himself later drew on Maura's performance of Cocteau's La Voix humaine within the film when adapting Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios.¹⁷ In a 2025 Babelia poll on the best Spanish cinema of the last 50 years, the film ranked 25th, one of seven Almodóvar titles on the list.¹⁸

References

1. Nosotros, El Deseo
2. Bernal-Salgado, D. (2024). La Ley del Deseo; masculinidades posfranquistas, homosexualidades liberadas. Estudios LGBTIQ+ Comunicación y Cultura, 4(2), 63-73
3. Law of Desire (La ley del deseo), Cineuropa
4. ICAA Film Database, file 7186
5. La ley del deseo (1987), Amo
6. La ley del deseo, Prime Video
7. La ley del deseo, RTVE Play
8. Law of Desire, Sony Pictures Entertainment
9. Law of Desire, Rotten Tomatoes
10. Agustín Almodóvar: Hemos perdido el derecho moral sobre nuestras películas, RTVE.es
11. Produciendo deseos, Encadenados
12. 'La ley del deseo', la película con la que Almodóvar rompió las fronteras de género, RTVE.es
13. La ley del deseo (1987), FilmAffinity
14. Losilla, C. Diccionario del cine español, 1950-1990 (16): La ley del deseo, Instituto Cervantes
15. Sánchez-Arce, A. M. Other voices, other stories: La ley del deseo, in The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, Manchester University Press
16. La representación de la cuestión gay en el cine español, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
17. Narcissism and Bad Faith in Pedro Almodóvar's La ley del deseo (1987), Taylor & Francis
18. Almodóvar, una película para cada espectador, El País

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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