General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Laberinto de Pasiones

Laberinto de Pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions) is a 1982 Spanish comedy film directed and written by Pedro Almodóvar, his second feature after Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980). Produced by Alphaville S.A. in Madrid, it stars Cecilia Roth as Sexilia, a nymphomaniac pop singer, and Imanol Arias as Riza Niro, the gay son of the deposed emperor of the fictional Middle Eastern country of Tirán, and it is regarded as a cult emblem of the Madrid counterculture known as the movida madrileña.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Pedro Almodóvar; screenplay by Almodóvar and Terry Lennox (story by Almodóvar)²
Production	Alphaville S.A., Spain, 1982; first production of the Alphaville-Musidora distribution and exhibition complex¹^•⁴
Financing	70 percent paid by a credit from the Banco de Crédito Industrial, 30 percent from private contributions⁴
Certification and release	Rated for audiences over 18 on 28 September 1982; ICAA lists a Spanish release date of 10 February 1989⁵
Spanish box office	597,738.55 euros gross and 358,252 admissions⁶
Cast	Cecilia Roth, Imanol Arias, Helga Liné, Antonio Banderas (film debut), Marta Fernández Muro, Fabio McNamara, Agustín Almodóvar, and Pedro Almodóvar in a cameo¹^•⁷
Festival	Official Section of the 30th San Sebastián Festival, 17–26 September 1982, a non-competitive edition⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Riza Niro, son of the deposed emperor of Tirán, arrives in Madrid, where he meets the former empress Toraya and a group of Islamic students who plan to kidnap him. He joins a musical group and falls in love with Sexilia, a nymphomaniac singer in the rival band; the relationship redeems him from his passion for men and her from her nymphomania.² The San Sebastián synopsis adds that in the labyrinth of passions he crosses paths with his father's first wife.⁸ A gang led by Sadec, played by Antonio Banderas, hunts Riza in Spain, and when the young man learns of the threat he passes himself off as a punk to join Sexilia's group.⁹

The supporting cast supplies a parade of eccentric figures: a gynecologist father who hates sex yet specializes in artificial insemination while his daughter is a nymphomaniac, a dyer who abuses his daughter, homosexual Islamic terrorists, and ex-empresses dealing with sterility.¹⁰

Production

Shooting finished in Madrid in April 1982. Almodóvar described the film as "alta comedia de ficción histórica" (high comedy of historical fiction), and the trade press positioned it as the confirmation of a cinematic heterodoxy close to the young Madrid generations.⁴ Executive producer Javier de Garcillán assembled a technically ambitious crew: cinematographer Ángel Luis Fernández, known for Ópera prima and Arrebato, and the German sound recordist Martin Müller, who arrived with costly equipment that transmitted sound from small microphones hidden in the actors' clothing to receiving antennas. The larger budget, financed by the Banco de Crédito Industrial credit and private contributions, allowed more complex scenes and a more elaborate script than Pepi, Luci, Bom, although the film still relies on wide, static shots, a limitation of Almodóvar's early directing.¹¹

Almodóvar offered the role of Princess Toraya to the singer Lola Flores, who declined it because it was not written to her measure.¹² For Antonio Banderas, then a stage actor whom Almodóvar had seen in the theater, the film marked his screen debut and the start of a long collaboration with the director.⁷

Music and the director on screen

The songs include "Suck It to Me", credited to Bernardo Bonezzi, Pedro Almodóvar, and Fany McNamara, and "Gran Ganga", by Bonezzi and Almodóvar, both performed by Almodóvar himself.¹ In the film Almodóvar appears in a cameo as a transvested pop singer in leather singing "Suck It to Me", a number critics noted for its camp quality alongside the multiple characters played by Fabio McNamara.¹³^•¹⁴

Reception and afterlife

The film was shown in the Official Section of the 1982 San Sebastián Festival, a non-competitive edition that year.⁸ Spanish critics received it badly; one review in El País found that the film interested more through the originality of individual moments than as a whole, and another complained that "the narration escapes him".¹⁵ Despite this, it was a modest success and quickly reached cult status, running for ten years on a midnight program at Madrid's Alphaville cinema. It was released in the United States, England, France, and Italy only after the international success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988).³ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 92 percent Tomatometer score from 12 reviews.³

Later scholarship has treated the film as a document of post-Francoist Madrid. One account describes it as a melodrama of the film noir type, with a femme fatale who is a pop star, transformed into a musical melodrama whose genre mixture made it a cult film.¹⁶ A 2021 academic study argues that the film, together with José Luis Cuerda's Amanece, que no es poco (1989), subverts the Spanish identity stereotypes of late-Francoist cinema by inverting their confrontation with the foreigner, helping dissolve the Francoist notion of identity as something fixed and inherited.¹⁷ The film's opening sequence, in which the camera dwells on the crotches of passersby as if through the protagonist's eyes, inspired a 2025 exhibition of work by the artist Ángela de la Cruz.¹⁸

Versions and runtime

The recorded runtimes differ by source. The ICAA certification file records 110 minutes for the theatrical rating of 28 September 1982 and 100 minutes for later video ratings, while the San Sebastián catalog lists 100 minutes and the UC3M and Filmin databases list 94 minutes.¹^•⁸^•² The film was shot on 35 mm in Eastmancolor with a widescreen ratio.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Satirical, black, and parody comedies of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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