Spain in the 1980's is the Spain of the post Franco period, where the constraints of the long years of fascist rule have been thrown off and where the exurberance of a newly-found freedom is especially evident in the arts.

In 1987, Madrid hosted the premier of Federico Garcia Lorca's only openly homosexual play, The Public, which opened last week at the Theatre Royal in London.

The self-exiled novelist, Augustin Gomez Arcos, author of the powerful allegory o n Franco's Spain, The Carnivorous Lamb, is only now receiving deserved recognition for his haunting masterpiece. And in cinema, Pedro Almodovar's Law of Desire seems determined to top other gay movies in its sexual explicitness. It is one of the handful of gay movies on show in the forthcoming Third Dublin Film Festival, and basically concerns the allconsuming, D.H. Lawrence-style possession of a lover's body, soul and mind. Pablo (Esebio Poncela), is a prolific young writer/director whose lover Juan has left him and who is seduced by Antonio into a demanding and threatening relationship. Pablo's sister Tina had a disastrous affair with her father when she was a boy and subsequently had a sex-change operation. Since then, no man has been good enough for her, so she embarks on a comparatively fruitful relationship with a female model (played by famous Madrid transvestite Bibi Anderson). The film is a frenetic and irreverent social satire, whose characters consume sex and drugs like "wide-eyed children finally allowed to pillage a forbidden sweet shop" and who exude, and laguish in, the melodrama of those possessed rather than distressed by life. It is an original and stylish analysis of the politics of desire, a desire which, according to Almodovar, "is the need for someone to work his or her way down to your bones, that all the possible delights of your body be their favourite dish, that the mere fact of holding you in their arms makes you forget all those metaphysical, social, political and economic problems ... which threaten today's world. But desire is not only that. In absolute terms, one wishes to possess the very soul of another."

Stephen Kirby, writing for Australia's Out Rage, sums up the prevailing attitude of the world-wide gay community regarding the Law of Desire when he says, "The joyous sleaze and giddy romanticism of their lives reminds us of the way things used to be before the sexual and economic "Big Chills" hit the West. If you see this movie for no other reason, see it to remember the way we used to be."

Peter Hussey