OVER THE past three decades, Pedro Almodóvar has established himself as one of the most artistically ambitious and commercially successful filmmakers, not just in Spain or in Europe but also all over the world. Highly prolific, he has made nineteen features in thirty-four years. There is a pattern to his method. He spends a whole year writing and shooting a film and then, upon release, another year traveling and promoting it at film festivals and in various countries, with the United States a major destination on his tour.
Almodóvar has been described, at various points in his career, as a Mediterranean Rainer Werner Fassbinder (or Fassbinder with a sense of humor), a more naïve and less morbid David Lynch, an urban Woody Allen without the neurotic Jewish angst, and a stylish Martin Scorsese without the Catholic guilt.1 But none of these labels does justice to his rich oeuvre or idiosyncratic vision. For starters, in almost every interview I have conducted with him, he goes out of his way to stress that his work is dark but not sick, that there is angst in it but no guilt, that it is serious but also humorous. He claims that he is very Spanish because his value system is defined by intuition, spontaneity, and chaos, but that his work has universal meaning.
Almodóvar has evolved from an entertaining “bad boy” in the 1980s to a respected world-class filmmaker in the late 1990s, a status he has been able to maintain. He began his career as a provocateur and sensationalist, making erotically charged films about sexually transgressive themes. But he gradually developed into one of the world’s finest filmmakers, whose works are multi-nuanced, meticulously made, and elegantly shot. Blessed with inspired verve and bold audacity, he has challenged social stereotypes in Spanish culture as well as sexual taboos in world cinema. In his best work, the seductive visual style and acute social conscience converge into features that are dramatically compelling and commercially appealing.
Early on, Almodóvar’s work was dismissed as too zany, too kitschy, or too campy by critics who failed to notice that the jokes and the triviality are just the surface of explorations of more serious concerns. Indeed, the comedic and farcical touches make his darker dramas about sexual politics and various abuses more tolerable to watch. Nonetheless, some critics have continued to apply the labels of “cinema of surfaces” and “cinema of excess” to his work.
Almodóvar’s films have evoked diverse, even contradictory, reactions because they display divergent tonality and ambiguous morality, offering spectators different kinds of pleasures, from the visceral and voyeuristic to the more emotionally grave and radically transformative. In most of his films, the director has relied on a wide range of characters and on a large ensemble of actors, a strategy that enriches his films and reflects his belief that ensembles are more democratic than single-star texts. Having a large group of characters as his basic narrative unit and carrier of meanings also functions as a safety valve, because it allows the viewers—male and female, straight and gay—to empathize and/or to sympathize with at least some of them. In contrast, in most of Gus Van Sant’s and Todd Haynes’s films the narrative centers on one or a few individuals.
Despite the dark tone and noirish sensibility of many of his films, Almodóvar is at heart an optimistic director. He is, in fact, the most upbeat and the least cynical of this book’s five filmmakers. This derives from the particular circumstances in which he grew up: “The characters in my films utterly break with the past, which is to say, most of them are apolitical. We are constructing a new past for ourselves, because we don’t like the one we had.”2 Despite his increasing age and growing experience, his future-oriented credo has not wavered: “Individuals must always improve or strive to improve on their reality, no matter what that reality is.”3 (Terence Davies has expressed the same philosophy; see chapter 2.)
Almodóvar’s work goes beyond well-constructed narratives, showing multilayered meaning and skillful mise-en-scène, even when the texts rely on excessive design and lurid costumes. His oeuvre defies the theory that old narratives and classic genres—screwball comedy, noir crime, woman’s melodrama—are no longer functional (that is, useful) in our postmodern world. In fact, his films are very much revisionist genre pictures to which he applies a novel, postmodern strategy. He likes to destabilize codes of traditional genres by combining their elements: “I mix all the genres. You can say my films are melodramas, comedies, tragicomedies, because I put everything together, and even change genres within the same sequence, and very quickly.”4
For Almodóvar, every element of life, including biological and human anatomy, is subject to change. Bodies, minds, hearts, and souls are not as fixed or stable as they might appear on the surface. His narratives permit boundary confusions of sex, gender, and identity. In his deliriously complicated plots, the characters are able to—and often do—change their bodies and identities with incredible speed, fluidity, and elasticity.
The key concepts in Almodóvar’s work are passion, desire, sexuality (or rather sexualities), pleasure, and happiness. When his film Bad Education came out in 2004—the same year that Mel Gibson’s controversial religious epic The Passion of the Christ was released—he explained: “I am the anti–Mel Gibson director. My movie is about the power of faith, and so is his film, but I am in the opposite place from him. My goal as a writer is to have empathy for all characters. In all my films, I have a tendency to redeem my characters. It is very Catholic—redemption is one of the most appealing parts of the religion. Sadly, I am not a believer in Catholicism, but the priest is probably my favorite character in Bad Education.”5
Almodóvar’s output is richly dense with references to other films, TV soap operas and ads, pop culture, music, and literature. Intertextual connections and allusions are crucial to his work, as Marsha Kinder pointed out, because “they counteract the potentially dehumanizing effects of his grotesque humor.”6 He uses self-consciousness and artifice effectively to undermine Hollywood’s seemingly “naturalistic” or “realistic” cinema, as do Haynes and John Waters (albeit in different ways). Almodóvar’s work is self-reflexive: “I use cinema in a very active way, never as a pastiche or homage, because for me, a film is something that once I have seen it, it has become part of my experience. I put these movies in the middle of my films, and they become part of the story, but never in the sense of being a cinephile like Tarantino or Spielberg or De Palma.”7 He elaborated: “All the influences on me and all the references in my films are spontaneous and visual. I don’t make any tributes. I’m a very naïve spectator. I can’t learn from the movies that I love—they become part of my life and my movies without quotation marks.”8
Steeped in pop culture lore of the past, particularly Hollywood of the studio system, Almodóvar, like Fassbinder, could not have evolved into the major and particular artist he has become without his knowledge of American filmmakers, from A-grade directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and Vincente Minnelli to B-level directors like Frank Tashlin, Hamer, and even Waters. His seemingly absurd narratives blend kitsch, fantasy, and humor, resulting in explorations of human feelings of the deepest kind. As he told me: “I find the clichés of popular culture both very funny and very alive. I like to play with them, to create a narrative angle that makes them part of my movies as they are part of my life.”9
Although Almodóvar’s films show consistent concern with social issues (domination, oppression, rape, homophobia, transgendering, physical disability, and mental illness), there is a remarkable lack of political agendas. The outrageous, the perverse, the deviant, and the incongruous are displayed in his oeuvre as normal and existing states of being. Refusing to take a moral stance against any issue, he is a nonjudgmental director. His mise-en-scène is stylized and theatrical, but it is firmly grounded in his visual energy and impressive ability to change tone from scene to scene—and often within the same scene. Significantly, unlike Waters, Almodóvar has never celebrated bad taste or gross tackiness for its own sake. Nor has he made camp movies just for the sake of being camp. With the exception of one or two films, there is no deliberate violation of taste or crass vulgarity in his features.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER BEGINNING
When compared to the other filmmakers in this book, Almodóvar is, like Davies, a product of the working class—and a rural one at that—whereas Van Sant and Haynes are the products of upper-middle-class parents. Lacking formal education, Almodóvar is an autodidact, whereas Van Sant and Haynes are graduates of film and art schools.
Almodóvar was born on September 25, 1949, in the sleepy little village of Calzada de Calatraya in La Mancha. He has used his regional background in only a few films—most notably, The Flower of My Secret (1995) and especially Volver (2006). Most of his films are set in Madrid and, to a lesser extent, in Barcelona. The young Almodóvar was not suited to provincial life, as he later recalled: “I felt at home as an astronaut in King Arthur’s court.”10 His grandfather was a winemaker, and his father worked as a bookkeeper at a gas station. He said: “My family, like that of Sole and Raimunda in Volver, is a migrant family which came from the village to La Mancha in search of prosperity. My sisters have continued to cultivate the culture of our mother. I moved away from home very young and became an inveterate urbanite. When I returned to the habits and customs of La Mancha in Volver, I had to ask my sisters to be my guides.”11
The lay sister of the village, whom Almodóvar met through his older sister, thought that he would make a “good priest” and so helped place him in the Salesian Fathers Catholic School. A victim of sexual abuse in various Catholic schools, Almodóvar avoided discussing the issue, first confronting it in his movies Dark Habits and Bad Education. Years later he elaborated: “It was a shame because sex should be discovered naturally, and not brutally, suddenly. For two or three years, I could not be alone, out of pure fear.”12
Almodóvar has explained the main value of living in La Mancha: “It allowed me to discover what I did not want to be. Everything I do is the opposite of the upbringing I received, and yet I am from there and belong there, and in The Flower of My Secret, I became conscious of that for the first time.”13 In his boyhood, he read much more than his classmates, which, to use his own words, “was odd and inspired the same rejection that I now inspire in some critics. I wasn’t a normal child, because during recess I’d rather talk about Ava Gardner than play ball.”14 (A photo of Gardner in Matador serves as a cultural reference as well as an indication of the hero’s superiority over his ignorant student, who doesn’t know who she is.) He also painted and watched movies, such as Peyton Place and melodramas starring Elizabeth Taylor (Giant) and Natalie Wood (Splendor in the Grass). He loved movies based on the plays of Tennessee Williams, particularly Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly, Last Summer (both, incidentally, starring Taylor).
The sexual segregation that prevailed in his own family had long-lasting effects on Almodóvar’s value system. For one thing, he always felt closer to his mother, Francisca, than his father, Antonio, a typical Spanish patriarch who could barely read or write and worked hard in various manual jobs to support his children—Pedro, his two sisters, and Agustín, his younger brother. Almodóvar recalls an image of unalloyed power: his father, home after a long day’s work, sitting in an armchair, “like a god,” expecting his wife and daughters to wait on him “like slaves.”15 He was not a bad man, just uneducated and set in his ways. (He died of lung cancer in September 1980, the very week that Almodóvar premiered his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom.)
The river was always a place for familial and communal celebrations, as he later observed nostalgically:
Undoubtedly, the river is what I miss most from my childhood. My mother used to take me with her when she went to wash clothes there, because I was very little and she had no one with whom to leave me. I would sit near my mother and put my hand in the water, trying to stroke the fish that answered the call of the fortuitously ecological soap the women used back then, which they made themselves. The women would sing while they were washing, which is why I’ve always liked female choirs. My mother used to sing a song about gleaners who would greet the dawn working in the fields and singing like joyful little birds.16
Years later Almodóvar would sing fragments of these songs to the composer of Volver, Alberto Iglesias, only to be told that it was actually a song from the operetta La rosa del azafrán. It was also by the river where, a few years later, he discovered his own sexuality and lost his virginity, though he has never disclosed details about those circumstances.
At the age of sixteen, upon completing his bachillerao, Almodóvar moved to Madrid, defying his father’s wish that he get an office job in the region. “I came to a small apartment that my parents had bought, so at least I was assured of having a roof over my head, but I couldn’t afford formal schooling.”17 Instead, he worked as a clerk at the National Telephone Company between 1970 and 1980. He didn’t hate his day job as much as Davies did his before becoming a full-time director. This job enabled Almodóvar to save some of his salary to buy a Super 8 camera.
Almodóvar took an active part in the city’s emerging artistic underground—manifest in La Comedia Madrileña and La Movida Madrileña (Madrid Upsurge)—and specifically in the localized comedy and rock ’n’ roll scenes, performing with his own band. He became a central figure of La Movida, whose elements would serve as subjects of his earlier films. The changes were first reflected not in theater, cinema, or literature but on the streets: “All the color, all the liberation, all the humor, you first found in how people were living.”18 He elaborated: “Madrid was the most modern center in the world. If you wanted to, you could find the Shah’s son, Dali, and the Pope.”19
As he later recalled: “My first films coincided with a moment of absolute vital explosion in the city. Madrid in the late 1970s was probably the most joyful, the most fun, the most permissive city in the world. It was really the rebirth of the city after such horrible period of the Franco regime. If there was something characteristic about the culture of Madrid that I belonged to, it was the night life. That was my university, and also the university of many of my generation.”20
In those years, Almodóvar acted with an avant-garde theater group, Los Goliardos, and also wrote comic strips and stories in some underground papers. In 1981, he published a short novel, Fuego en las entrañas (Fire in the Bowels). He also published his parodist observations under the pseudonym of Patty Diphusa (a fictitious international porn star). A pun name in Spanish, patidifusa derives from patidifusion, which translates into “bewildered” or “astounded.” It is the feminine form of an adjective that suggests being both aghast and nonplussed. These texts were collected as Patty Diphusa y otros textos, translated as The Patty Diphusa Stories and Other Writings, and published in London in 1992.
In 1974, Almodóvar shot his first short, Dos putas, o, historia de amor que termina en boda (Two Whores, or a Love Story That Ends in a Wedding), followed by La caída de Sódoma (The Fall of Sodom) later in 1974, Sexo va, sexo viene (Sex Comes and Goes) in 1977, and the Super 8 Folle, folle, folleme, Tim (Fuck, Fuck, Fuck Me, Tim) in 1978. He made his feature debut in 1980 with Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap), a 16mm film that was later blown up to 35mm.
Artistic influences on Almodóvar’s work have been varied, including classic American melodramas and comedies as well as Spanish black comedies of the 1950s by directors Fernan Gomez and Luis García Berlanga. He was flattered when critics described him as Gabriel García Márquez, crossed with Andy Warhol, crossed with John Waters, crossed with Virginia Woolf. He particularly liked the association with Márquez because of his self-perception as a writer, consumed by the passion to tell stories. Márquez has described storytelling as bendita manía (blessed madness), a concept that aptly describes Almodóvar’s passion as a creative storyteller, experimenting with complex, multilayered narratives. In Almodóvar’s case, writing is not only an exacting gift but also—to paraphrase another hero of his, Truman Capote—a self-declared need to overcome aloneness and loneliness.
Almodóvar said he was happy to be in the company of Luis Buñuel, the great Spanish director who, for most of his career, worked in exile. His films—even the good ones—lack Buñuel’s subtlety, delicacy, and light touch, but his narratives, like Buñuel’s, are suffused with surreal, illogical, and irrational elements. However, unlike Buñuel’s films, which found little or no support in Spain, forcing him into exile (in Mexico and then France), Almodóvar has benefited from a new global cinematic order. Buñuel’s best movies were made in Paris, helping him secure a place in the international film circuits (prime among which were festivals like Cannes). In contrast, as Mark Allinson has pointed out, Almodóvar has had it both ways: in Spain, he has enjoyed greater freedom than any of his contemporaries, and abroad he has become the chief embodiment of the new Spanish culture.21
Of Hollywood filmmakers, Almodóvar has acknowledged his debt to Hitchcock, Tashlin, Sirk, and especially Wilder: “If I have to choose one master or model, I would choose Wilder. He represents exactly what I wanted to do.”22 When pressed to define which Wilder he adores, he says: “All of them. I like Wilder of Sunset Boulevard and Wilder of The Apartment, Wilder of Double Indemnity and Wilder of One, Two, Three.”23 Almodóvar’s sensibility, like Wilder’s, is both comic and morbid, offering a satirical look at a world that also includes fetishistic and voyeuristic elements. His films deliberately steer clear of conventional logic or morality, and beneath their frenzied surfaces, they touch on social problems, violence, disability, sexual abuse, rape (in more than half of his films), women’s liberation, and so on.
Almodóvar attributes his strong psychological currents to Hitchcock, a figure he has wished to emulate in his rich narratives as well as his elegant visual style and subtle mise-en-scène. He has been obsessed, like Hitchcock, with the physical and emotional life of objects. Typewriters, telephones, answering machines, microphones, kitchen knives, guns, and even blenders abound in his work. In some of his films—say, Law of Desire and The Flower of My Secret—the typewriter actually functions as a major character, alongside the human figures. Also taking a cue from Hitchcock (and Scorsese), he has been enamored of the color red in all of its hues, a color he has used to signify passion, danger, risk, murder, blood, and death.
Almodóvar was one of the freshest voices of the 1980s, a child prodigy of a news Spanish cohort, determined to throw out the country’s past. His thematic flamboyance and moral relativism are by-products of Spanish culture under Franco’s repressive regime. He has shown emotional affinity with the confusions, anxieties, and desires of young people who came of age in Spain right after Franco’s death in 1975. Almodóvar benefited from the cinematic scenes of Spain and Europe of the early 1980s. It is not a coincidence that he achieved international fame and cult status when Spanish cinema was at low ebb. In the early 1980s, Spanish films amounted to less than one-fifth of an ever-shrinking domestic market. His appearance signaled a new wave, a new pride in a Spanish national cinema, which began to undergo significant changes after Franco. When Almodóvar began his career, Spain’s most famous director was Carlos Saura. Nearly twenty years older, Saura, considered to be the most “Spanish” of Spanish filmmakers, belongs to a different social generation. He is known for making intensely measured and psychologically reflective films infused with the innate secrecy and repressed sexuality of an artist raised under tyranny. Many of his films have celebrated national folklore, particularly music and dance, as evident in his unofficial trilogy: Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) (1981), Carmen (1983), and the colorful rendition of Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo (The Bewitched Love) (1986).
The right film artist at the right time at the right place, Almodóvar also profited from the dearth of new and exciting European directors. He flourished in an era in which Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Bernardo Bertolucci were all in decline or totally inactive. Other major figures, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, François Truffaut, Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Andrei Tarkovsky, had died prematurely, at the heights of their creativity.24 Almodóvar was the most pulpy figure of world cinema of the 1980s, a decade before the Hong Kong–based Wong Kar-Wai became a cult figure in the United States (largely through the efforts of Quentin Tarantino, who himself burst on the scene in 1992 with his splashy debut, Reservoir Dogs). In addition to pumping new blood into Spanish cinema, Almodóvar created a new sensibility in international film, which became widely imitated all over the world.
Almodóvar’s view of camp sensibility differs from that of Waters (see chapter 5): “Camp makes you look at our human situation with irony,” he says.
It’s much more interesting to take camp out of a gay context and use it to talk about anything, everything, but to do that, you must show how much you love it, how much you enjoy camp. Otherwise you look like you’re just making fun. In camp, you sympathize with lack of power, like the pathos of sentimental songs. This is kitsch, and you are conscious that it is, but that consciousness is full of irony, never criticism. You cannot take camp out of its original context if you feel like an intellectual using this element of theirs. To use it outside, you have to celebrate it, to make an orgy of camp. Anyway, it’s a sensibility. Either you have it or you don’t.25
Critical and satirical yet always humanist, Almodóvar’s work is free of judgment or moralizing. He has created characters whose sexuality is fluid and whose identity is confused—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender people. His work has also explored the redemptive power of love, a notion he has consciously taken from Hitchcock. Love, in all of its complications and forms—romantic, erotic, obsessive, and self-destructive—features prominently in his work. The director, like his characters, doesn’t pretend to fully understand love. But for him, love is its own goal and its own justification—mysterious, transcendent, and fatalistic. Love answers to nothing and nobody. Extolling Spanish fatalism, he has made titillating and daring features, in which sex and death are inextricably linked: “I love characters that are crazy in love and will give their life to passion, even if they have to burn in hell.”26 Passion is the key concept due to the fact that “society is preoccupied with controlling passion, because it is disequilibrium, but for the individual it is undeniably the only mother that gives sense to life.”27
Almodóvar’s narratives are personal because he, like Waters and Haynes, has always conceived and almost always written his own scenarios, affording himself a strong measure of artistic control over his work. Despite many offers, he has resisted going Hollywood, though once or twice he was almost tempted. He loved gay writer Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Hours, which, in 2002, was made into a passable but not great film by gay British director Stephen Daldry.
Opting to work in Spain, Almodóvar has enjoyed a most fruitful teaming with his younger brother, Agustín, who is the producer of his films.28 Moreover, as a director, he has relied on a skillful crew of collaborators, especially production designers and composers, and a terrific troupe of actors—most notably, Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz, and Antonio Banderas.
What saves Almodóvar’s films from potential mean-spiritedness and negativism is the tension between his characters’ street-smart cleverness and grim living situations and their use of humor in the most devastating situations: “I always use humor, even in the most dramatic moments, and it’s a direct effect of my spontaneity, which is precisely what sometimes shocks and surprises everyone else. I don’t know if my humor takes away from the intensity of a certain moment, but the fact is that my humor surfaces this way, spontaneously.”29 Beneath the jokes and lurid touches, however, there’s a revisionist strategy, a distinctive POV. As he elaborated: “The main difference between directors is their private morality. I think one auteur is different from another because he has his own morality. When I say morality, I don’t mean ethics. It’s just a private point of view that you can see in films by Buñuel and Hitchcock, and you know exactly that it belongs to Buñuel or Hitchcock, because it’s just their special way of thinking and representing the world.”30 (Waters has expressed the same belief in similar words.)
I propose to distinguish four phases in Almodóvar’s evolving career, which are more or less divided by decades.31 In the first phase, from 1980 to 1989, his work was excessively garish, outlandishly inventive, and joyously irrepressible. For me, the highlights of this phase are What Have I Done to Deserve This? in 1984 and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, his first acknowledged masterpiece, in 1988. The second, weaker phase begins in 1990 with the controversial Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and ends in 1998 with his most restrained and conventional melodrama, The Flower of My Secret, which is populated by middle-aged and middle-class characters and thus is the exception to the norm. The third, most accomplished phase begins in 1999 with the masterpiece All About My Mother and continues through 2006 with three other masterworks, Bad Education, Talk to Her, and Volver. The fourth phase, which finds the director at his most stylishly elegant but also in his darkest mood, begins with Broken Embraces (2009) and includes The Skin I Live In (2011). It is still too early to tell whether his latest (and arguably weakest) feature, I’m So Excited (2013), represents the beginning of a new phase (hopefully not).
PHASE ONE: FLAMBOYANT BAD BOY
Almodóvar’s earliest work was quirky and insouciant, a result of how the vibrant Madrid shaped his screen narratives and characters. This was manifest in the culture of the streets, with their colorful people, coffee shops, taxi cabs, night clubs and their nonstop music. When I first met the director in New York in 1984, he was wearing a flashy outfit with strawberry-colored loafers and carrying a red plastic briefcase. His early films were marked by the intrusion of wild and crazy humor that often relieved the melodramatic tension. Those caustic, irreverent, shocking comedies made him a favorite of international art-house cinema. Representing idiosyncratic themes, his authorial voice revealed the moral and sexual chaos that lies just beneath the surface of “normal life.” This is one reason why he has proclaimed admiration for Lynch’s Blue Velvet, released in 1986 and arguably his masterpiece.
Almodóvar’s camp melodramas, which depicted new characters in Spanish cinema—homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals—were steeped in the liberal culture of the post-Franco era. Speaking for a new generation that rejected Spain’s past, he was committed to the pursuit of immediate and visceral pleasure. As he said: “I never speak of Franco. The stories unfold as though he had never existed, because for people who are 15 or 20 years old today, all of their points of reference, their traumas, the specters of their past are unrelated to the dictatorship.”32 Indeed, there are only a few mentions of the Civil War in his work, and then usually with minor figures. In High Heels, for example, the secretary of the protagonist-singer Becky is the daughter of a Catalan doctor who went into exile during that time. Almodóvar’s postmodern sensibility reflected the spirit of those youths known as pasotas, “those who could not care less.”33 There was a real joy in telling stories and entertaining audiences with dazzling send-ups and irreverent antics. He saturates the screen with primary colors—particularly hot red but also blue and yellow. His films add layer upon layer of narrative strands until the mixture curdles into incredibly zany farce, not to mention outrageous imagery. Like Waters, he is a director who set out to tickle himself and the public. Remarkably, he has accomplished that without violating his principles, which begin and end with commitment to artistic freedom and celebration of joy.
Almodóvar says he is in disagreement with Spain’s contemporary young generation over one issue: “Young people now are very preoccupied with the marketplace, which is natural. But I remember in the early 1980s, everything we did was for pleasure, because we liked to, for the joy of doing it. Now young people are not doing that, and it is a pity. Because when you are starting out, that is when you need to do exactly what you want, with no responsibility.”34
Visually influenced by Frank Tashlin, Almodóvar’s 1980s films exhibit cartoonish abandon and deliberate delirium. Tashlin began his career in the 1930s as a cartoonist, creating a syndicated comic strip. Later, as a film director, his background became evident in the inventiveness and the frenzy of his farces and in the exaggerated tone of his parodies. He directed Jerry Lewis and made risqué romps featuring the cartoonish, big-breasted Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Almodóvar saw Tashlin’s work as the vanguard of a modern style in screen comedy. Ultimately, though, Tashlin’s influence was ephemeral and mostly in the visual department. Unlike Tashlin, Almodóvar has made the artificial world both more seductive and more realistic in the sense that his characters are grounded in recognizable social contexts. Almodóvar added to Tashlin’s approach a strong dose of Freudian psychology, dealing with the subconscious and the unconscious of his characters—the ways in which they feel, behave, and make love.
Almodóvar showed promise in his feature debut, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón), a parody about patriarchy, machismo, traditional marriage, lesbianism, and sadomasochistic relationships. This 1980 movie is a send-up of everything and anything that’s related to sexuality except for one issue that matters the most to the director and about which he would never joke: female friendship, the most recurrent theme in his pictures.
Initially, the triangle of women at the center of this zany comedy could not be more different in age, class, personality, and lifestyle. Pepi (Carmen Maura) is in her twenties and spoiled, Luci (Eva Siva) is a victimized housewife in her forties, and Bom (Alaska, born Olvido Gara Jova) is a punk musician who is only fifteen. Early on, Pepi is visited by a policeman (Félix Rotaeta) who has spotted her marijuana plant from his flat. She tries to buy his silence by offering oral sex, but he rapes her, thus destroying her hope of keeping her virginity for the best “bidder.” Eager for revenge, Pepi asks her friends to beat up the policeman, but by mistake, they attack his twin brother.
Pepi befriends the policeman’s docile wife, Luci, whom she introduces to the punk Bom. Luci’s masochism and Bom’s sadism complement each other, and the two women become instant lovers. When Bom first meets Luci, she says, “Fortysomething and soft, just as I like them.” Their sadomasochistic relationship is a parody of patriarchal stereotypes. Forced to work when her father stops sending money, Pepi sets up an ad agency, designing commercials for multipurpose underwear and other eccentric items. Pepi’s ads are a spoof of traditional gender roles: girls are not expected to fart on dates, or wet their pants, or flaunt their dildos. One of Pepi’s most popular products is a doll that sweats and menstruates. Pepi also begins to write a script and shoot a video about Luci and Bom’s lesbian affair.
Bom, the aggressive teenage singer, plays with a punk group named Bomitoni. Their parties draw gay men who are fond of a competition game called Erecciones generals (General Erections). Almodóvar parodies female beauty parades, watched by voyeuristic males, by putting the male organ on display, thus inverting the male gaze that prevails in traditional cinema. Women, no longer passive sex objects, are allowed to gaze at—and enjoy—men’s genitalia. A voyeuristic male funds the frivolity, which he observes while cavorting with his wife, who is bearded.
Pepi, Luci, Bom is one of the few Almodóvar films in which the female characters are deliberately constructed as types. Luci is the submissive housewife who cannot (and perhaps does not want to) change her ways. Her social relationships are driven by the dynamics of sadomasochism. Early on, she tells Pepi, “I need a firm hand,” confessing that she had married her policeman husband not out of love but out of hope to be mistreated: “I thought that if I married him, he would treat me like a bitch.” And, sure enough, he does.
Determined to make his wayward wife, Luci, pay for her misbehavior, the policeman abducts her. Fully embracing macho culture, he reasserts his patriarchal rule in every interaction. He silences Luci by saying firmly, “Shut up. This is not women’s business.” He questions her about her whereabouts, demanding to know if she had gone out to a bar. He puts down her behavior as a groupie: “You know quite well that I won’t have any of that business of liberated women.” Luci parodies her husband’s sexual mores, stating that she is “a victim of the wave of eroticism which is invading society.” When the policeman calls a colleague to find out if there are legal means to force his wife back home, his friend tells him, “If it came to court, we would have every feminist in the country on our backs.”
The film satirizes dominant-subordinate relationships through the grotesque exaggeration of abusers and victims. Luci complains to Bom that she (Bom) does not treat her badly enough. When Luci returns to her husband, after being bruised by him and sent to the hospital, it’s not because of his authority but because of her perverse pleasure in masochism and her enjoyment of brutality. Luci is fully aware that life with her husband will continue to be abusive and never change.
Referring to herself as a rich heiress, Pepi is supported by her father, a faceless figure that simply serves a function in the story. When he stops sending money, she seeks gainful employment for the first time in her life. Once she gets a job, she forgets all about her biological family. Moreover, Pepi (like her screen sister Pepa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, also played by Maura) is so busy that she has little time to appreciate her home.
After Franco’s death, Spain became an increasingly materialistic society, and this movie shows it. As critic Paul Smith noted, money is the great social and sexual divide. Pepi is prepared to sell her virginity for 60,000 pesetas. Going to see a potential client, she tells Bom, “My capitalist lives around here.” Her friends, Toni and Moncho, sleep with older men, and they are not worried about selling their bodies.
Pepi sets up her own ad agency, and the ad for Bragas Ponte is inserted. Her commercial for antiflatulence knickers shows the product’s other uses: as urine-absorbing knickers and as a dildo when rolled up. The parody becomes more ridiculous and exaggerated in each of the ad’s three sections. The ad states: “Hagas lo que hagas, ponte bragas” (“Whatever you do, put your knickers on”). After seeing Pepi’s ad, Bom remarks that she wishes the urine-absorbing underwear were for real.
When Bom feels lost without Luci, the ever-resourceful Pepi comes up with a solution. Bom should move in with her as her bodyguard, and she should start singing boleros. In the final shot, which suggests a more optimistic future, Pepi and Bom, dressed in lurid pink tights and sporting poodle-like coiffures, walk across a motorway. Holding hands, they promise each other a better life. Pepi says: “A new life is dawning ahead of you,” to which Bom replies, “Ahead of you, too.” “That’s what I am hoping,” states Pepi. Self-sufficient now, the women are not dependent on men to achieve happiness. The resolution presents friendship as a nobler value than romantic love or sexual fulfillment, be it heterosexual or homosexual.
Almodóvar has said: “Men deserve to be deceived by women. I love the idea of a girl deceiving her husband with a girlfriend. It’s an image which I find attractive and which forms part of the secret autonomy of women.”35 In this film, he takes an ultraliberal look at the post-Franco pop culture. Compared with future films, there is less concern with social or political themes and more celebration of freedom in the radical break from the long totalitarian tradition. Amateurish and grotesque in both the positive and the negative sense of the terms—which is why it has been compared to Waters’s “Trash Trilogy”—Pepi, Luci, Bom is a satire of women, who have played submissive roles for so long that they have reached the dangerous point of internalizing their victimization.
With its cheerful sense of trash and gross sex gags that recall (though vaguely) the early Waters work and its attacks on the government and the mass media, Pepi, Luci, Bom sees authority figures as more perverse and corrupt than their normal subjects or even dissidents. Deliberately punky, consciously cartoonish, and unabashedly gay in viewpoint, Pepi, Luci, Bom is the first and only Almodóvar movie that justifies the label of kitsch and one his few films to be shown in midnight screenings and become a cult movie.
Tashlin’s influence is manifest throughout the picture. After the cartoon titles, accompanied by a trashy pop song from Little Nell (known as a bit player in The Rocky Horror Picture Show), Pepi is introduced sitting on cushions and pasting stickers of Superman into an album. Cartoonish irony also prevails in the casting. Pepi is supposed to be young and virginal, but she is played by Maura, who was already thirty at the time. Some of the intertitles are also cartoonish, as the one describing Pepi as “Thirsty for revenge.” Clichés and empty slogans are deliberately inserted in the form of ideological declarations about feminism, politics, pornography, and so on. Luci’s husband says, “Spain is going to the dogs with so much democracy,” without fully understanding his own statement.
Neither the film’s professionals nor its civilians play according to norms of decency—or any norms. Lacking a sense of ethics, the policeman who discovers Pepi’s marijuana expects sexual favors in return for silence. For her part, Pepi takes his compliance for granted when she lifts her shirt, which predictably provokes his sexual response. Moreover, the policeman doesn’t investigate his brother’s attack through the proper channels. He tries to enact revenge on Pepi for his wife’s transformation, wondering why there is no law to force his errant wife to return home. A sexual predator, he tries to seduce his wife’s best friend, Charo. And when another policeman, who serves under him, steals Pepi’s magazines in front of him, he takes no action.
Biological families are absent in Pepi’s and Bom’s lives, and there are no mothers in this film: Luci may be one of the few married women in Almodóvar’s work who has no children. To compensate for this lack, the characters look outside their blood ties for meaningful relationships. Pepi, Luci, Bom is at its best as a celebration of female camaraderie, especially when family relationships are nonexistent or dysfunctional. The central relationship is Pepi and Bom’s friendship, not the sexual affair of Luci and Bom. “I wanted to make a film about autonomous women,” Almodóvar said, “women who are owners of their bodies and minds, who do without men, who make use of men. But I didn’t want to make a feminist film either, but rather one that’s really outside morality.”36
At one point, Luci says, “I think women have to find their true selves.” And, indeed, the women are at their most natural and spontaneous when there are no men around. Pepi cooks Bom’s favorite dish, bacalao al pil-pil, and when they meet, they giggle spontaneously and chitchat freely about this and that. Bom’s relationship with Luci becomes Pepi’s film project. Their intimacy stands in sharp contrast to the cold ambience in Luci’s home when she is with her husband. The women learn to be as aggressive as men by necessity. Determined not to become a victim, Pepi takes revenge on the policeman who raped her with sadistic pleasure: “Give him a good beating,” she says, as she watches her friend beating Juan (who’s, of course, the wrong man). Bom carries photos of nude women, and Luci delights in lesbian sadomasochistic comics.
In contrast, the males are softer and more tender than the usual. The painters who share their house have interests that are more characteristic of women; they read celeb magazines and collect folkloric figures and images of royal families. Pepi’s friend (Assumpta Serna, who would star in Matador) goes out with a boyfriend who is good-looking but mute. The drag queen Roxy, played by Fabio McNamara, is cast as the Avon Lady, decked out in blonde wig, black beret, and glitter miniskirt. He gives a long monologue about the virtues of face masks made out of fruit salad. Like the other characters, he is capable of silly, irrational behavior, seen here when he ambushes an innocent postman. Roxy exudes scandalous sexuality and effeminacy—“I’m hysterical,” he says, using the feminine adjective.
Depicting sexual and scatological taboos, which challenge acceptable (bourgeois) taste, Pepi, Luci, Bom shows the director’s penchant for excess, his need to shock viewers with ultrafrank dialogue and biological and sexual acts considered to be “degrading” by mainstream society. More significantly, this film anticipates Almodóvar’s subsequent career, in which he further explores the themes of female friendship and the impossibility of having a romantic love that’s stable and mutually satisfying.
Placing his film within a broader context, Almodóvar makes references to literature, pop culture, and cinema. Playing a nameless role, simply known as “actress,” Julieta Serrano (who would play the Mother Superior in Almodóvar’s next film, Dark Habits, and a crazy wife in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) runs after a child outside El Bo nightclub at 3 A.M. in the morning dressed as Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. Tennessee Williams’s famous play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is referenced when the wife teases her repressed homosexual husband. The closeted homosexual is hopelessly married to the squealing, bearded Cristina Pascual, who thinks he is upset because his best friend has come out as gay. Her husband’s repression has turned him into a man who buys sex and gets voyeuristic pleasure by watching the members on parade in the General Erections contest. Almodóvar is borrowing here from Williams’s scene in which Maggie the Cat (Elizabeth Taylor), during an argument with her alcoholic and reluctant husband-lover Brick (Paul Newman), accuses him of being upset due to the fact that his best friend had killed himself because he was gay.
Pepi, Luci, Bom played at the San Sebastian Festival and received theatrical release in Spain in 1980, but it was shown a full decade later in the United States. The script was written as early as 1977, but there were problems with financial backing. The director shot on weekends over a period of eighteen months. It took three years to make the film, a time crucial in Spain’s politics, during which the first general elections since the Civil War took place.
From the very beginning, Almodóvar’s cinema was a cinema of extremis. There has always been thematic, verbal, or visual excess in his work. No act of perversion or form of deviance is outside of his realm. There are literally no borders, no boundaries, no limitations to his creative imagination. There are always elements—images, sounds, props—that are not fully contained by the unifying forces of the narrative. His texts do not wholly exhaust their powerful and vivid images, which create playful puzzles that go beyond this unity. His films do not even try to make all the physical elements part of smooth cues. In many of his films, there are dramatic and emotional moments that are not necessarily or adequately motivated and props and images that carry interest beyond their function in the narrative, such as repeated close-ups, decorative patterns, discordant sounds, and shifts between color and black-and-white, all of which potentially cause perceptual shocks. His films offer rich perceptual fields, dense structures that encourage the viewers to keenly observe and to absorb.
The scholar Steven Heath has claimed that excess arises from the conflict between the images’ materiality and the unifying structures within which they are contained.37 But excess in film doesn’t necessarily weaken the overall meaning or emotional impact of the larger structure. While classical Hollywood cinema typically strives to minimize excess, postmodern films do not try to provide motivation for every element in them; they leave potentially excessive elements more noticeable. These elements—single shots, brief scenes, words or sentences—may have no narrative function or may provide little causal material, but they linger in memory, often creating a stronger impression than the more functional elements. In Almodóvar’s work, these dissident moments (linguistic, thematic, and stylistic) do not necessarily disrupt or subvert the movie’s intentional effect because ultimately his narratives are defined by shapely structures and clear closures.
Excessive elements in the narrative, visuals, and sounds also dominate Labyrinth of Passion (Laberinto de pasiones), Almodóvar’s second film, made in 1982 but released in the United States in 1990, after the commercial success of the 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. A screwball comedy about Madrid’s newly invigorated lifestyle, Labyrinth of Passion is marked by an outrageous plot with unexpected twists and turns. A tracking shot of the local bar depicts the director’s favorite screen characters: drug dealers, addicts, drag queens, trendy urban youths, and so on. On a more serious level, the film offers a critique of the dominant culture’s concepts of erotic desire, romantic love, patriarchy, and homosexuality.
The great Argentinean actress Cecilia Roth plays Sexilia (Sexi for short), a carefree nymphomaniac whose father (Luis Ciges) is a world-renowned fertility specialist. Hoping to exorcise her fear of sunlight (which she associates with her father), Sexi consults a therapist who determines that the source of the problem is her incestuous attraction to her father. The therapist then confesses her own attraction to the father, whose patients include the aristocratic Toraya (Helga Liné), former wife of the deposed ruler of Tiran. Toraya, in turn, has set her eyes on Riza Niro (Imanol Arias), her gay stepson, and is now desperately searching for him in Madrid.
Committed to hedonism, Riza just wants to cruise the gay bars and straight discos incognito, but he has difficulty maintaining a low profile, let alone anonymity. Reading El País, Riza focuses on three stories, shown by Almodóvar as inserts à la Hitchcock. The first depicts the flight of Tiran’s emperor to Paraguay, the second concerns a Spanish bio-gynecologist who experiments with canaries, and the third is an ad for porn star Patty Diphusa, which is, of course, Almodóvar’s name for the character he had created for the magazine La Luna. There are scandalous reports about Riza’s activities, especially after he goes to bed with Sadec (the young Antonio Banderas), and soon revolutionary student-terrorists plan to kidnap him.
In the first scene, based on parallel montage, Almodóvar establishes the links between the lead characters. Both Riza and Sexi are wearing dark glasses to conceal their eyes as they stare intensely at their objects of desire, focusing on the same parts of the body, crotches and butts of anonymous men strolling down the street. The only difference between the homosexual and the heterosexual is that Riza tries to conceal his mideastern origins by dressing like a European man, whereas Sexi seems more comfy as a punk. Riza meets Sexi at a night club called Carolina, in which both Fabio de Miguel, in drag, and Almodóvar himself, in fishnet stockings, perform the song “Suck It to Me.” The film’s second performed song, which is lip-synched by Riza, is tellingly called “Big Bargain.” Predictably, Riza and Sexi immediately fall madly in love, and also predictably, the course of their love is not smooth—it never is in Almodóvar’s work.
One issue in the film, and in all of Almodóvar’s work, is introduced in the first sequence, the fluid and fractured nature of identities. Labyrinth of Passion offers erotic possibilities that go beyond permissible behavior and conventional labels of gay and straight. Almodóvar deals with incest, drugs, orgies, and other shocking habits, demonstrating skill in treating offensive material with vivid, cartoonish abandon, which tends to make it less offensive. He pairs couples that are older and younger, fat and thin, beautiful and homely, gay and straight and then breaks them up according to whimsical plans, paying little attention to conventions of age and physical appearance. In the end, the optimistic message is delivered with sharp satirical bite.
Consider the scene in which a drag queen, whose chest seems bloodily butchered, looks at the nasty drill hovering over him before saying, “I deserve it, I’m so bad, I’m wicked,” while a photographer takes pictures of the sight. Or the middle-aged laundry proprietor who takes sexual potency infusions before tying up and raping his own daughter—albeit with tenderness. When she’s not secretly squirting the tea of her lusting father with sex-diminishing drops, the girl is busy tending to her weak fingernails and dry lips.
There seems to be no underlying logic to the convoluted narrative, suitably titled Labyrinth of Passion, other than the goal of subverting accepted norms. How else to explain the love between the gay son of an exiled Mideast emperor and Sexi’s nymphomaniac. Or Sexi’s unusual declaration of passion to Riza: “I went to an orgy, and I couldn’t stop thinking of you.” In the first part of the narrative, the attraction between Riza and Sexi seems random and arbitrary, and her ability to convert him into a happy heterosexual is inexplicable because he is overtly gay. But through a revelatory flashback to their childhood, Almodóvar tries to show the depth of their emotional bond and the reason for their fateful reunion as a couple. As I’ll show, most of the characters in Almodóvar’s films have already “met,” or at least encountered each other in the past (often in public spaces), before they actually meet in the present, turning their emotional and romantic connections into an almost preordained fate.38 In Labyrinth of Passion, the protagonists have met as children, and similar situations prevail in Matador, in which the two would-be lovers first encounter each other in public at a bullfight, and in Bad Education, in which some of the characters have met as boys in a Catholic school.
It is noteworthy that Labyrinth of Passion is the only Almodóvar film in which a homosexual (Riza) turns out to be a bisexual “converted” into a well-adjusted heterosexual through a woman’s love. I suspect that this kind of coda would not have been built into his later, more mature narratives. When the movie played in the United States, most critics pointed out that this kind of resolution is “atypical” and “uncharacteristic” of the director.39 Even so, despite the “straight happy” ending, what lingers in my memory is the film’s outrageous depiction of incest and deviance: the images of stepmother Toraya sleeping with her gay stepson Riza, and of Queti, the girl raped by her father, being transformed by plastic surgery into Sexi, which enables her to consummate her obsession with Sexi’s father.
In making Labyrinth of Passion, a movie firmly grounded in the present, Almodóvar has acknowledged the influence of Richard Lester’s Beatles films, Help and A Hard Day’s Night, au courant visceral and spontaneous chronicles of Swinging London as it was happening in the mid-1960s. (Most movies usually lag behind the zeitgeist because of the lengthy time involved in making them.) For reasons both artistic and economic (to save money), the director composed and performed (as a leather-jacketed drag queen) the soundtrack, inspired by the live concerts and recordings of his group, Almodóvar y McNamara.
Labyrinth of Passion shows the diverse inhabitants of Madrid’s street culture—hustlers, exiled princes, transvestite punks, crazy nymphomaniacs, angry terrorists—all trying to get sexual gratification, even if it’s for a fleeing moment. Although all the characters are driven by their libidos, it is the men, especially the fathers, who are severely flawed and experience sexual crises of one sort or another. Sexi’s father, Doctor de la Penas, finds sex repugnant, and Queti’s widowed father is an impotent who deals with his loneliness by taking aphrodisiacs and engaging in incest.
Context is crucial: the tale occurs after the end of Franco’s authoritarian regime and before the onset of the AIDS era. With its young characters, Labyrinth of Passion is targeted at Spain’s young viewers, those who were not old enough to vote in Spain’s first general elections and who were also indifferent to politics. This phenomenon is referred to pastotismo, which means “political apathy and indifference.” Contrasted with Almodóvar’s future assured works, Labyrinth of Passion is not a major work, but at the time it was made, the movie contained enough poignant and outrageous moments to shockingly entertain its viewers.
It was only a matter of time before Almodóvar, a product and victim of rigid Catholic education, turned his critical attention to the Spanish church, and, indeed, his third feature, Dark Habits, from 1983, is a ferocious attack on institutionalized religion. Although expected to be an outrageous satire of convent life, Dark Habits is more of a melodrama—and one of the most linear in the director’s output. Thematically, like other of his films, Dark Habits is more about obsessive romanticism, which expectedly turns into doomed love and violent death.
The tale is set against a climate of denial and repression, two of Almodóvar’s most consistent targets. The Spanish title, Entre tinieblas, refers to a Catholic ritual. Tenebrae are the days before Good Friday, when candles are extinguished in church, an act implying the socioreligious processes of sacrifice and redemption. Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) is a cabaret singer who witnesses the imminent death of her lover after a drug overdose. Like other males in the director’s work, the boyfriend is gruff and unsympathetic. Desperate to escape the police, Yolanda recalls a visit from the local convent’s nuns who claimed to be her admirers. The function of the order, named the Humble Redeemers, is to serve as shelter for “fallen women,” like Yolanda. Upon arrival, Yolanda is greeted by the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano), only to realize that she is the only resident. All the nuns—Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas), and Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave)—give Yolanda a warm welcome. Predictably, they turn out to be a bunch of eccentrics: Sister Damned likes pet tigers, Sister Manure bakes LSD cakes, and Sister Sewer Rat writes soft-core romans à clef.
The Mother Superior becomes obsessed with Yolanda, and the two embark on a romantic bliss induced by drug abuse. But later on, Yolanda decides to change her ways, working hard to put her life back together. Withdrawal for Yolanda is a painful catharsis, but cathartic nonetheless, but for the Mother Superior, it is a public confirmation of sinful life. Lusting for sex and drugs has made Mother Superior worse than the women she is supposed to help. Meanwhile, the convent is falling apart and is threatened with closure, when Marquesa (Mari Carrilo), the liberated and greedy widow of a fascist, informs Mother Superior that she will no longer provide financial backing for the convent, instead using the money for her selfish pleasures. Desperate, Mother Superior thinks that drug trafficking would help her to maintain the convent’s independence.
In theory, the combination of Almodóvar and convent suggests a sacrilegious farce or high camp, in the vein of American playwright Christopher Durang’s witty spoof Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. Yet in most scenes, Dark Habits is a rather quiet, even tender melodrama. Though hedonism prevails in the Humble Redeemers community, the director focuses on the dynamics of his characters’ relationships.
The Mother Superior’s love for Yolanda pays homage to La Religieuse, a novel written by French author Denis Diderot circa 1780 but not published until 1796, after his death. (Francis Birrell’s English translation is titled The Nun or Memoirs of a Nun.40) Almodóvar relished the novel’s origins, not as a literary work but as an elaborate practical joke, aimed at luring back to Paris the Marquis de Croismare, Diderot’s companion. The novel consists of letters purporting to be from a nun named Suzanne, who implores the Marquis to help her renounce her vows, describing an intolerable life in a convent to which she has been sent against her will. Diderot later revised the letters into a novel, drawing attention both to the cruelty of forcing young women into convents and to the corruption among the clergy. When Diderot publicly admitted his role in the ruse, the Marquis is said to have laughed, as he had behaved with genuine compassion in his willingness to help the imaginary Suzanne. Almodóvar is not as interested in delivering anticlerical messages as was the great Buñuel, who was also inspired by Diderot in such harsh antireligious films as Viridiana.
Dark Habits has no major male characters, reaffirming Almodóvar’s commitment to femme-driven cinema. But there is no negative portrayal of the few males that exist. For example, the worst things that the Chaplain (Manuel Zarzo), who significantly has no name, does in the story are to smoke while extolling Cecil Beaton’s fabulous costumes in George Cukor’s 1964 Oscar-winning musical, My Fair Lady, and to give the church’s statues a polish, with the assistance of Sister Viper, his secret lover.
Like most of Almodóvar’s personae, the characters in Dark Habits are driven by subversive instincts. For him, the greatest sin in life is not deviance or crime but the denial of desire and feeling. Dark Habits tries to balance its characters’ subversive impulses with their need for spiritual redemption. It is “in the imperfect creatures that God finds all His greatness,” the Mother Superior says, ironically serving as the director’s spokesperson. Almodovar’s critique is not so much of religion as it is of rigid and authoritarian institutions (including the church), which suppress individualism and obliterate human desire.
Denying that Dark Habits was meant to send an anticlerical message, Almodóvar claimed that he just wanted to point out the absolute autonomy of the nuns, whose authority is not restricted by any norms. “I didn’t want to shock, and it’s not scandal I’m looking for.” Moreover, for him, Dark Habits was a “Christmas film, because it follows exactly the doctrine that in order to save sinners, you have to become one of them.”41 Thus, the director’s fans, expecting a seriocomic critique of the church and its practitioners, were disappointed with what was shown on-screen.
Dark Habits is the first film in which Almodóvar showed visual progress. There are long tracking shots in which the camera follows the Mother Superior down the chapel’s aisles, placing her in a broader perspective. Or the high angle shots, which call attention to the women’s claustrophobia and their minor stature against the foreboding structure. The color red, a visual motif of the director, is prominent throughout the picture, from the first frames, in which Yolanda’s red fingernails are observed as she relishes using scissors to cut her boyfriend from the photos she is signing for the admiring nuns. And red continues to be prominent: Merchese, a woman running from the police who used to stay at the convent, and the young drug dealer who visit the Mother Superior are both dressed in red, in contrast to the convent’s drab colors. In one scene, there’s a sharp cut from Yolanda’s red fingernails, as she holds the nuns’ visiting card, to a scarlet lipstick trace on a black-and-white photo to an extreme close-up of the Marquesa (trained as a make-up artist) applying red lipstick. It is noteworthy that there’s hardly an Almodóvar film that doesn’t contain a scene showing women, no matter how oppressed or depressed, using make-up—specifically, hot red lipstick—in an effort to look better for others and feel better about themselves.
The film’s novelty resides in the exploration of taboo issues, such as lesbianism, fetishism, and voyeurism, all in a female-dominated context. “My only sin is to love you too much,” says the Mother Superior upon meeting Yolanda. The Mother Superior displays in her room photos of such “famous sinners” as the French Brigitte Bardot and the American Marilyn Monroe, two international sex icons of the 1950s. When the Mother Superior is visited by the young Merche (Cecilia Roth), a former inmate on the run from the police, she stoops to replace Merchese’s shoes as the latter is taken to prison.
The movie ends with Yolanda and some of the other nuns deserting the Mother Superior. As Sister Manure cradles the Mother Superior in her arms, the camera pulls out of the window, leaving the two women enclosed in a frame within a frame. This scene may pay an ironic tribute to Sirk’s device of framing his heroines behind closed windows or doors in order to suggest their emotional stagnation and physical imprisonment in their own homes.
Reflecting his own class, Almodóvar’s features have focused sympathetically on the plight of contemporary working-class women. However, although he puts women front and center, he doesn’t follow feminist ideology or any other rigid political platform. By challenging established sex and gender roles, he has contested Spain’s long-prevailing stereotypes of sexual politics—machismo men on the one hand and long-suffering women on the other. In this process, he has helped to abolish, within and without cinema, Spain’s reactionary past, defined by rigid patriarchy and sexual segregation. He has been seeking truth in travesty through uncompromising explorations of universal matters like sex, love, and happiness.
Almodóvar has placed strong females center stage and weak males on the periphery, or altogether offstage. He doesn’t identify with women, as has been suggested by some critics, but he claims to feel strong affinity with them: “I write better for women than for men, who are dramatically boring to me. I am better able to incorporate my talent for wackiness in female than male characters.”42 As a result, there are far fewer males than females in his work. Early on, the director expressed his motto: “I’m aware that my liking of the private life of women may still be a reflection of machismo. But I hope not. Because I’m really interested in women and their world, not just when they go to gossip in the bathroom, but at all times. I believe I’m one of the least machista men in the world, and one of the most authentically feminist.”43
Almodóvar’s films have shown both the ordinary elements in the extraordinary lives of women and the extraordinary aspects of women’s ordinary existence. The excess and eccentricity are accepted by him as natural and normal states of being, not as special phenomena that call for explanation. Like other gay directors, he has questioned what society considers normal and devious, normative and deviant. He has portrayed the sensational aspects of everyday life and has broken filmic taboos and social codes with remarkable ease. The real, external worlds of his characters are integrated with their internal worlds in texts that are unusually complex and complicated.
Dark Habits did not stir major controversy, and to Almodóvar’s disappointment, it did not create the expected sensation. Those reactions occurred in 1984 with his fourth film, the outrageous black comedy What Have I Done to Deserve This? (¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!), the turning point of his rapidly evolving career. Among other things, as his best work to date, it put him on the international map as a major talent to watch. After premiering to sold-out crowds as part of the New Directors/New Films series, cosponsored by the New York Film Festival and the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art, What Have I Done became the director’s first picture to be released theatrically in the United States. He could not have been happier because the film’s successful run led to the release of his three earlier films. It didn’t matter much that they all got mixed reviews, compared to the rapturous reception for What Have I Done.
One of Almodóvar’s more realistic features, What Have I Done, is a working-class absurdist comedy in which most of the action unfolds within recognizable settings. The pre-credit sequence reveals a Madrid square as a film crew passes by, while a middle-aged woman is seen in the background. The camera moves in on the woman—Gloria (Carmen Maura), a downtrodden housewife—as she looks back at the crew members, who are nailing signs to be used in their movie. Gloria struggles to make ends meet with various cleaning jobs, in addition to the regular, exhausting work in her own home. On her knees scrubbing the floor, Gloria looks up, facing the Kendo students in their costumes as they practice sharp moves with their clubs at the martial arts academy. The next shot places Gloria and the students together in the same frame, indicating that their paths will inevitably crisscross. In this shot, the students are in the foreground, and Gloria in the background, but in the course of the tale, the students disappear and she occupies center stage. The scene ends with Gloria imitating the blows made by the players, using her mop as a substitute for a martial club.
Love starved and sexually frustrated, Gloria gets excited by the sight of muscular men playing at Kendo. Later on, while stealing something from a cabinet, she unexpectedly encounters a handsome man in the gym’s showers. Facing him straight on, she sizedhim up and down, including his genitals. Almodóvar allots her the kind of gaze that typically privilege men when they size up women. Teasing her, the man winks at her and suggests that she comes over. During their attempted sexual act, under the shower head, Gloria remains fully clothed, while the man is naked. The man, who happens to be a policeman, tries to get a hard-on but, as we learn later, is impotent. The irony is not lost on Almodóvar that this archetypal male, a symbol of political power and sexual potency, fails to perform, not to mention that he has a small, flaccid penis.44 Disappointed and frustrated, Gloria picks up the phallic-shaped Kendo and performs solo (for the viewers). The practice proves useful when, later on, she uses the same assertive position to kill her husband in the kitchen.
Gloria lives with her macho husband, Antonio (Ángel de Andrés López), a cab driver; their two sons; and her mother-in-law in a shabby apartment by the Madrid motorway. Antonio, who had worked in Germany, still longs for his former employer-mistress, Ingrid Muller (Katia Loritz), and spends his time listening on the radio to the German singer Lotte Von Mossel. His services for Ingrid involved copying letters that Lotte had allegedly received from Hitler himself. Antonio casually mentions this fact to a client in his taxi, a writer named Luca, and the latter suggests that they forge Hitler’s diaries for big profits.
Addicted to sedatives, Gloria, who has been sniffing laundry detergent and glue, goes to a pharmacy to get the drug No-Doz. But the pharmacist—a big, chubby woman with peroxided blonde hair and big stilt-like eyes—denies her request. The pharmacist treats Gloria with contempt, which is the way Almodóvar had scripted the role. But during the shoot, the director extended the character’s role after casting a real pharmacist he had just met. Incidentally, pharmacists abound in his work and they are usually portrayed in a negative way, denying services, needs, or pleasures (if it’s recreational drugs) to their clients (see All About My Mother).
Desperate to find money to pay the bills and put food on the table, Gloria is forced to take extra jobs as a cleaning woman for the writer Luca and his brother Pedro. While she struggles with her own problems, her sons must learn their own survival strategies. The elder son, Toni (Juan Martinez), is a high school student who deals in drugs, while the younger one, Miguel (Miguel Ángel Herranz), sleeps around with older men, including the father of his friend Raul. When Gloria confronts Miguel about his sexual escapades, the boy’s response is firm and strong: “I’m the master of my own body.” But it’s Gloria who has the final word, telling Miguel that his lovers should feed his body, not just enjoy it.
Miguel’s homosexuality is not easily accepted by his brother, Toni, and in a parodic critique, Almodóvar shows how Toni attempts to “cure” his brother by trying to get him laid by Cristal (Verónica Forqué, who would later play the title role in the director’s Kika), their friendly prostitute neighbor who dreams of going to Las Vegas and becoming an actress. This scene also alludes to Minnelli’s 1956 melodrama, the controversial Tea and Sympathy, in which a sensitive boy (John Kerr) is pressured to see a prostitute to fend off accusations by his classmates that he is a “sissy.” As I’ll show, in the 2002 Far from Heaven, Haynes also criticizes society’s phony beliefs and pressures to “cure” men of their homosexuality by forcing them to see a doctor and get treated. In this picture, Almodóvar satirizes Pedro, the psychiatrist who is supposed to treat and cure the impotent man, but who is presented as a weakling of a professional who has more problems than his patient. He’s dysfunctional and unable to come to terms with his abandonment by his girlfriend.
In a poignant scene that’s both heartbreaking and funny, Gloria “sells” Miguel to a pedophile, a nameless character referred to as the dentist (Javier Gurruchaga), after shrewdly negotiating his duties and her benefits off screen (behind closed doors). The dentist is intentionally constructed by Almodóvar as a caricature of the predatory effeminate pedophile who agrees to all of Gloria’s and Miguel’s conditions. However, it is only after the dentist promises access to video, hi-fi, and to pay for his art classes that Miguel consents to move in, claiming assertively, “no one controls me.”
The defeated Gloria returns home to find her husband all excited after getting a call from Ingrid Muller, who, under pressure from Luca, had decided to pay Antonio a surprise visit. Overhearing Antonio on the phone precipitates yet another vocal argument, and when Antonio slaps Gloria across the face, she attacks him with a leg of ham, putting to use the moves she had learned from the Kendo students. Hitting his neck on the sink, Antonio instantly dies. (A similar murder, in which a daughter accidentally kills her father in the kitchen, occurs in Volver.)
Strangely, after the murder, Gloria, a woman on the verge of nervous breakdown, continues to behave normally, as if nothing bad or extraordinary has happened. To establish an alibi, she goes upstairs to visit Cristal, and she brings the prostitute to her flat to witness Antonio’s corpse, expressing bewilderment at the circumstances of his mysterious death. Surprisingly for the viewers (but not for Almodóvar), the police investigation doesn’t find any person guilty. Here again the director employs his usual portrayal of policemen as ineffective and ineffectual (see Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).
Gloria watches forlornly as elder son Toni leaves with his paternal grandmother (Almodóvar’s regular, Chus Lampreave) for her rural village so that he can work the land. Obsessed with death, the grandmother likes to talk about this issue, informing friends of those who have passed away lately. (The director explores more fully the mores and culture of death, a recurrent theme in his work, in Volver.) What’s a desperate housewife to do? Gloria walks back and forth restlessly in her apartment. She then leans over the balcony as if considering suicide.
But this is an Almodóvar picture, which means that the women are resilient—not for nothing is the heroine named Gloria. Out of the blue, as in a fairy tale in which the prodigal son returns home, an unexpected savior arrives. Miguel reappears, claiming he had gotten bored with the older dentist. Still missing his father, Miguel asks: “Did Dad miss me?”—only to be disappointed by his mother’s short response: “He was so busy he didn’t even realize you were gone, but I missed you!” “I know about father, and I am here to stay. This house needs a man!” Miguel proudly proclaims, while rushing into Gloria’s arms. The film ends satisfyingly as a coming-of-age tale whenMiguel shows new maturity and strong determination to take care of his mother. His return is depicted as a warrior home from the hill, a reference to Minnelli’s 1960 family melodrama Home from the Hill, for which Almodóvar has professed admiration. Minnelli’s film also depicts a two-generation family, in which the estranged patriarchal husband (Robert Mitchum) is concerned with the masculinity of (and lack of it in) his two sons: his elder bastard son (George Peppard) and his younger, sensitive “mama’s boy” (George Hamilton).
In this offbeat comedy, Gloria is a working-class woman “ruined” (ajada, in Spanish) by physical labor. Her oppression and subordination suggest that sexual liberation and gender equality can be most effectively achieved through struggle, which often calls for extreme action like criminal conduct. Suiting the fable’s feminist nature, most of Gloria’s actions are invisible to the men on-screen. When she is not cooking, washing laundry, and scrubbing the floor (all solitary activities), Gloria is socializing with her female neighbors, Juani, the single mother, Cristal, the hooker-wannabe actress, even Patricia, the wife of her employer, although she is initially antagonistic.
Though statistically the film contains more males than females, ultimately, none of the males, except for Miguel, matters much. One by one, Almodóvar critiques the men and then disposes of them—literally or figuratively. Take for example two of Cristal’s clients. The first is an older man who seems excited by sadomasochism, asking his hostess to dress as a dominatrix; the poor woman, lacking whips, runs to Gloria to borrow a stick. The second farcical portrayal is that of an exhibitionist who performs a striptease for Cristal and Gloria, who is dragged into the act as a spectator. The two women are bored to death as he removes item after item, asking them not to go by his slim torso or slender legs but instead to concentrate on his alleged “horse’s dong” of a cock, which we never see; Almodóvar would not privilege him with a shot. Later on, during intercourse, he talks and talks while Cristal fakes yet another orgasm (while looking at her nails) and the restless and bored Gloria indicates that she needs to go back to her chores.
The irony is not lost that, ultimately, the strongest male figure in the film is a young gay man. Though he is the younger brother in the film, Miguel serves as alter ego for Almodóvar, older in real life than his brother-producer, Agustín. Early on, Miguel states that he would like to be a filmmaker. Like Almodóvar, Miguel is a precocious and eager boy. One main reason he willingly goes to the dentist is to acquire free lessons in art. Like Almodóvar, Miguel is sophisticated, mature, and knowledgeable in issues of art and life—more so than his older brother. Miguel is Gloria’s favorite son in the way that Toni is his father’s pride. Named after his father, Toni models himself after his irresponsible dad, all the way down to developing skills for forgery. That said, both siblings need a male role model and, on some level, engage in a rivalry (a futile one, as it turns out) to get their father’s attention and emotional support.
The concluding reconciliation between mother and son and the reaffirmation of their union are now based on greater mutual respect. This coda underscores the deep understanding and bonding that often prevail between women and gay men in Almodóvar’s work, based on their shared recognition of suffering from the tyranny of patriarchy in all its sociosexual manifestations.
The text gets richer and more universal in meaning by including another secondary character, a girl named Vanessa (Sonia Hohmann), who’s abused by her own mother, Juani, a nasty and bitter divorcee. To retaliate against her mother’s physical abuse, Vanessa develops special skills, telekinetic powers, in what is a clear reference to Brian De Palma’s 1976 cult horror film Carrie. Vanessa retaliates against her domineering mother by stopping the elevator midway, or breaking a valuable vase of flowers. When Gloria is left alone, after her two sons leave, she continues to express her maternal instincts by becoming a surrogate mother to Vanessa. The two women bond, and in a scene of magical realism, Vanessa uses her skills to remove the old paint off the walls and replace it with new, clean and vivid wallpaper.
Technically, What Have I Done is crude and its production values are raw, a combined result of the low budget and Almodóvar’s relative lack of experience. But the shabby look is congruent with the tale’s squalid context and the social class of its protagonists. What Have I Done is still the director’s least stylized or camp film, unfolding within a particular historical milieu afflicted with the problems of urban, working-class life: dense population, overcrowded apartments, unemployment (especially for women), rampant illiteracy, rising divorce rates, juvenile delinquency, crime, and drug trafficking. But Almodóvar would not let the viewers forget that it is essentially a comedy, laced with elements of humor and satire and occasionally even camp. Like other animals in the director’s work (tigers, chickens), the lizard, found by the grandmother in the park and brought home to the already cramped apartment, offers some good jokes—and scares. Searching for a name for the lizard, she says she likes cupcakes (which she keeps locked up), the cemetery, and money, and so the lizard is named Money. The lizard later becomes the only (bloody) witness to Gloria’s killing of her husband, but accidentally the cops smash the animal and throw it out of the window, thus relieving Gloria of her guilt.
As the downtrodden, illiterate housewife, Maura, Almodóvar’s muse and dominant actress during the 1980s, renders an outstanding performance, making Gloria’s trials, tribulations, and escapades compelling as well as entertaining. It’s simply impossible to imagine this picture without her presence, and Almodóvar dresses her in such a way (wearing for the most part green shirts and dresses) and grants her sufficient close-ups to ensure that she always stands out in the ensemble-driven tale.
Matador and Law of Desire—the follow-ups to What Have I Done to Deserve This?—could not have been more different. Sultry and erotic, perverse and anarchic, they are gender-bender features reflecting directly the liberalization of Spanish culture and Almodóvar’s strong resolve to test the limits of what’s tolerable in terms of on-screen eroticism.
The plot of the Matador (1986), one of my favorite Almodóvar films, contains every form of deviance: abuse, rape, murder, mutilation, suicide, and even necrophilia. But the thematic and visual treatment of these crimes is so inventive and excessive (by design) that they become less offensive than they would have been if contained in another narrative or filmed by another director. The distinctions between self-eroticism and eroticism, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and femininity and masculinity are explored in a boldly stylized, almost abstract way. The director combines intense emotionalism, seductive eroticism, and cool irony, while playing with viewers’ expectations of narrative development and satisfying closure.
The beautiful heroine María Cardenal (Assumpta Serna) is a criminal lawyer who develops a morbid attraction for former matador Diego (Nacho Martínez) after seeing him gored in the ring (he’s, of course, hit in the groin). The disabled matador is now teaching precision killing at a bullfighting academy, though he continues to long for danger, blood, and violence years after his career tragically ended. For sexual stimulation, Diego watches horror movies, depicted in shocking yet funny, disturbing yet pleasing ways. Sitting in front of his TV set, Diego masturbates to a montage of images of cheap slasher flicks.
One of Diego’s naïve students, Ángel (Antonio Banderas), who tries to prove he is a “real” man and not queer, takes his admiration of Diego to an extreme by trying to rape Diego’s girlfriend, Eva (Eva Cobo). Turning himself in, Ángel admits to a string of murders in which all the victims have been speared toro-style. Sent to prison, Ángel is represented by none other than María, whose personal agenda is to meet her heartthrob, Diego. The police inspector (Eusebio Poncela) who follows the case believes that Ángel is innocent. Visiting Diego’s academy, the inspector stares intensely at the leotard-clad students—their crotches are seen in close-up from his subjective point of view.
As in his other films, Almodóvar provides links between eroticism and violence, ecstasy and death. Dressed in a cape and sporting sleek, pulled-back black hair, María picks up a man on the street, and they go to an empty office. During hot lovemaking, she removes a pin from her hair and plunges it into his neck, instantly killing him. Intercut with this scene are parallel shots in which Diego teaches his students specific techniques for thrusting a sword into a bull. In Matador, the director was able to apply his dramaturgical theory: “I want the characters to live in a universe that belongs only to them, as if they were alone in a world where pain becomes the only protagonist in their life.”45 When Diego and María finally meet, she tries to kill him by sticking her hairpin in his neck, a gesture she had used on all of her victims. Diego prevents her, and the duo, both shocked and impressed with each other, fall in love.
In its broad structure, the plot sounds like a trashy soap opera. But if the motives behind the actions aren’t explored, it’s because Almodóvar deems them irrelevant. What matters to him is not what people say but what they do, in and out of bed. Concrete conduct is a more reliable expression of feelings than verbal declarations of love. Setting the stage for wilder and more hilarious flights of imagination, he places the viewers in a space where camp, pornography, stylization, and lyricism converge or conflict—depending on viewers’ subjective perceptions.
The characters in Matador pursue kinkier-than-normal frills and thrills. Eccentric characters, lead and supporting, abound. When Ángel reports at the police station, the female officer says after sizing him up, “Some girls get all the luck.” Almodóvar himself has a cameo as the effeminate director of a fashion show devoted to bullfight couture. “I told you not to shoot up in the dressing rooms,” he yells at one of his models.
As noted, in the first scene, Diego excites himself with grisly horror videos. Later, while in bed, Diego is aroused by his girlfriend, Eva, only after she pretends to be a corpse. Not interested in normalcy, Almodóvar aims for excess, pushing the narrative to edgy lunacy—“the end of the line,” to borrow a popular line from the 1944 noir melodrama Double Indemnity, by Wilder, one of the director’s heroes. Almodóvar and his co-scribe, Jesús Ferrero (it’s the first scenario not written solo), draw their characters with conviction. The choice of profession (matador) justifies the film’s focus on surface appearances, as bullfighting is very much about lavish costumes and public performance. (Just watch the preparations made by the female matador in Talk to Her.) With relish and gusto, Matador addresses the deviant and perverse in human behavior. There’s no denying the pleasure that the director, his characters (who also serve as spectators in the plot), and the film’s viewers derive from exploiting (in both senses of the term) cinema’s potential for extreme eroticism.
After Bertolucci, who made the seminal and sexually scandalous Last Tango in Paris in 1972, only two European directors, Almodóvar in the 1980s and Lars von Trier in the 1990s (and recently in the two-installment Nymphomaniac), brought back to the big screen the “forbidden” subjects of sex, sexuality, and sexual politics, topics that are seldom dealt with (if at all) with such honesty in Hollywood movies of any era. None of the influential directors of the New American Cinema—Arthur Penn, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese—has ever depicted those issues on-screen in a manner even close to the candid and graphic approach of Almodóvar.
Almodóvar’s achievement is remarkable, considering that his movies were made at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the surrounding anxieties and homophobia. He has placed special emphasis on the libidinal pleasures of the human body and its sexual organs. His characters are driven by a relentless, obsessive pursuit not of power, status, or money but of pleasure, though in his universe, there is no pain without pleasure and no pleasure without pain.
Obsessed with desire, sex, and death, María and Diego represent a match made in heaven—literally and figuratively. They plan to kill each other in one ultimate fantastical ecstasy. Diego’s girlfriend Eva, who overhears the plan, alerts the police, who pursue the lovers to María’s country retreat, but, alas, they’re too late. The lovers find their violent passion and death mirrored and inspired by Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in King Vidor’s 1946 excessive Western melodrama Duel in the Sun, which they had previously watched in a movie house where they landed by “accident” when Diego chased after María.
In the final scene, Diego and María enact their greatest erotic fantasy. Spreading out a cape in front of the fireplace, they sprinkle it with rose petals as the giddy camera pans over their naked bodies, offering unusual visual pleasure. Diego holds a red rose in his teeth, with which he caresses María’s vagina and nipples. Diego penetrates María, and she plunges a hairpin into his neck, forcing him to look at her up close and personal before she shoots herself in the mouth. The lovers fulfill their ultimate experience of sexual pleasure through death. The ceremonial ritual of their final ecstasy evokes in the viewer contradictory reactions of discomfort and disbelief but also of peculiar attraction and even laughter. The scene also suggests the fine line between soft-core and hard-core pornography. Though the movie shows only female genitalia, it is replete with phallic imagery, such as long and narrow objects (the sharp sword, the thorny rose, the lethal hairpin, the pointed gun). The last scene is profoundly disturbing, and yet it offers logical closure to the illogical narrative.
Gender distinctions, like the traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity, are revisited and contested. María is more sexually aggressive than all the men in the film combined. In one of the film’s most sexually graphic scenes, María undresses an anonymous man, pulls him to the bed by his own belt, sits on him while still dressed in a tight corset, removes the jeweled hairpin from her hair (designed in a phallic coiffure), and sticks it with passion into his neck. María’s orgasm is thus one-sided, achieved with a corpse! In another revelatory scene, when María heads to the men’s bathroom, Diego protests: “This is the men’s lavatory. Didn’t you see the sign?” María responds with chilly contempt, “Don’t put your faith in appearances.” The inevitable gap between appearances and reality is a motif running through all of Almodóvar’s work. He presents María as a caricature of patriarchy, reflecting the need of insecure men for domination.
What is most striking about Matador is how ambiguous the text is when looked at beyond its visual surfaces and guilty pleasures. This may explain why the film was misunderstood upon initial release, both in Spain and in the United States. For example, early on, Ángel follows his neighbor Eva down the street. It is a nocturnal scene with the street lamps providing dark shadows, but the light is sufficient to observe that Ángel is wearing a red sweater and Eva a pink jacket. In his assault, Ángel tears Eva’s panties and climaxes quickly, clearly a parody of straight males’ tendency to engage in selfish sex and premature ejaculation. The rape is motivated not by erotic desire but by psychological anxiety and sexual panic. Ángel is trying to prove to himself and to Diego that he is straight—Diego had earlier asked Ángel if he likes girls. Almodóvar turns Ángel into a sensitive male when he apologizes to Eva after the assault. While moving away from him, Eva trips and injures herself, and the very sight of blood causes the squeamish Ángel to faint.
Significantly, of all the figures, the police officer is the only sexless or asexual character, the one man who does not engage in any sexual conduct. He rejects the overtures of a female psychiatrist who is hitting on him. Almodóvar constructed him as “sober, skeptical, and dispassionate,” but allowed him to engage in voyeurism.46 He named Banderas’s character Ángel to suggest that he is pure, naïve, and innocent (he knows nothing about women). Judged by his appearance and insecure demeanor, no one believes Ángel when he claims to be the wanted serial rapist and murderer. At the police station, Ángel, in an act of sexual self-assertion, states: “I’ve come to report a rape.” The police inspector asks: “Have you been raped?” “No,” says Ángel, “I was the rapist!” Still unconvinced, the policeman persists: “Are you sure?” As a boy-man, Ángel mediates between the sexual and oversexed Diego and the sexless-asexual police inspector. And there are enough clues to suggest that the officer might be a latent homosexual.
In Matador, heterosexuality is also criticized and, in at least one scene, compared to necrophilia. When Diego is in bed with Eva, he instructs her to “play dead” before penetrating her and reaching an orgasm. This scene, combined with the one depicting Diego’s autoeroticism, presents an unfavorable portrait of heterosexuality. The characters display narcissism, making love to themselves, whether they masturbate in solitude or climax in couplings. The sexual encounters and orgasms are subjective and one-sided, initiated by and more gratifying for only one of the partners.
This is reversed in the last, lethal scene, which clarifies the link between eroticism and death, indicating Almodóvar’s belief in the impossibility of long-enduring romantic love—death is the necessary and only outcome of extreme passion. The formation of new couples, based on mutual respect, is the exception to the rule, and more often than not it prevails among heterosexuals rather than homosexuals, as would be the case of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Flower of My Secret.
Having dealt with straight sexuality in Matador, Almodóvar followed up with a similarly erotic thriller set in a specifically gay milieu and dealing with the varieties and vagaries of homosexual love. Made in 1987, Law of Desire (La ley del deseo) boasts a more complex narrative and more intriguing characters than those of Matador, but to me, it’s a less enjoyable and less coherent movie. Largely acclaimed after its world premiere at the 1987 Berlin Film Festival, where it played to enthusiastic response, Law of Desire became the first Almodóvar film to be sold right away worldwide.
A self-conscious director, Almodóvar said:
I focused What Have I Done on the Mother figure, and I’m focusing on the Brothers now. I didn’t know what type of fraternity to opt for men when I started writing the screenplay. Given my temper, I turned for reference to Warren Beatty and Barbara Loden in Splendor in the Grass. I’ve always been sensitive to stories of siblings, even in those with a good main love story, my interest was always on the siblings. Pablo and Tina are the type of siblings working in show business. Like Vivien Leigh and Kim Hunter, they are attracted to the same man (in A Streetcar Named Desire). And like Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell (in Paris, Texas), they support one another when necessary.47
One of Almodóvar’s few explicitly gay melodramas, in which most characters are gay, the film contains fully developed characters with distinctive personalities. Law of Desire is also one of his more personal films because the protagonist, Pablo Quintero, is a successful director who makes shocking films bearing such bizarre titles as The Paradigm of the Mussel. Publicly, Almodóvar has acknowledged that only two or three of the plot’s elements draw on his life, such as the scene in which Tina, Pablo’s transsexual sister (Carmen Maura), confronts the choirmaster who had abused her as a boy. (Almodóvar would return to this issue in Bad Education.) For him, the more significant fact was the exploration of erotic desires, expressed in different ways by the tale’s male characters. “This is a movie about guys,” Almodóvar proudly declared, “from now on nobody can accuse me of only directing women.”48
Almodóvar has famously said that his ultimate goal is “to reach audiences directly through their hearts, their minds—and their genitals.” This is clearly achieved in Law of Desire, an exhilarating erotic thriller whose title could describe each one of Almodóvar’s works as well as his entire oeuvre. Moreover, his production company, overseen by his producer-brother, Agustín, is named El Deseo, meaning Desire Unlimited.
In the opening scene, one of the most sexually graphic in Almodóvar’s work, an authoritative voice instructs a gorgeous-looking boy to strip, go to the mirror, and kiss himself. The voice belongs to Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), who then commands the boy to rub his crotch, take off his underwear, caress himself, and masturbate to completion. The brief shot ends with a close-up of the cash money paid to the performer. As tricky and manipulative as this scene is, other scenes and images are imbued with more erotic meanings without being necessarily gay. New theories no longer limit themselves to the analysis of overtly homosexual images. Critic Paul Burston pointed out that the film’s performance of gender and inappropriate acting styles are “by far queerer” than the explicitly sexual opening scene.49
At a party after the premiere of his new picture, Pablo meets Antonio (Antonio Banderas), a handsome, closeted gay, who becomes obsessed with him. They go home, and the provincial, easily impressionable Antonio experiences anal sex for the first time. In fact, after seeing one of Pablo’s movies, Antonio rushes to the men’s room and begins to masturbate while reciting the same words he had heard on-screen, “Fuck me, fuck me” (which paraphrases the title of one of Almodóvar’s shorts). First showing Antonio from the back in a medium shot, the director then cuts from a shot of the boy’s tight jeans to a close-up of his red lips. He may be using Antonio’s character to suggest the immediate and visceral influence of movies, their seductively dangerous appeal. Antonio’s particular social background is used as an explanation for his psychotic behavior. He is the product of a rigid politician of a father and a conservative mother. The mother, who’s of German origin, is perpetually worried about her husband discovering Antonio’s homosexuality and, later, finding out about Antonio’s involvement in the death of Juan, Pablo’s blue-collar lover.
Pablo parts with Juan (Miguel Molina), who’s heading south for the summer. Unhappy with his life and burdened with confused sexuality, Juan needs some time to contemplate his future. Almodóvar conveys the complex, one-sided nature of love when Pablo tells Juan: “It is not your fault if you don’t love me, and it’s not my fault if I love you.” The narcissistic Pablo insists that Juan send him love letters. The plan is to write the letters by himself and then have Juan sign them and mail them back to him. In a touching moment, the two men undress, spending their last night together quietly, while the soundtrack plays the iconic French chanson “Ne me quitte pas” (“Don’t Leave Me”) by Jacques Brel. That iconic song is again played when Tina feels abandoned by her lover.
As always in Almodóvar’s tales, when couples first meet, they engage in steamy sex, as if the director is in a hurry to entrap and captivate his spectators, especially his gay fans. For Pablo, sex with Antonio means just a lusty one-night stand, but Antonio misunderstands his intentions. He wants to have a long-term relationship, and he gets dangerously jealous when ignored or disrespected. Upon learning of Juan’s existence, the jealous Antonio tries to rape Juan and then kills him, throwing him off a cliff. Driving south to see his dead lover, Pablo confronts Antonio, and they argue ferociously before the devastated Pablo drives off. Pursued by the police, Pablo gets injured in a car crash, and in the next scene, he wakes up in the hospital suffering from amnesia. The police suspect both Tina and Pablo of the murder, and only a sympathetic doctor keeps them at bay.
A parallel and more engaging dramatic story involves Tina, who is a struggling actress. In the film’s most shocking scene, Tina visits Pablo at the hospital and makes a typical Almodóvarian confession. Born as a boy, Tina had undergone a sex-change operation in order to experience a full relationship with their father. After she ran away with their father, he left her for another woman turning Tina into a bitter, man-hating individual. Tina is now responsible for raising a teenage girl named Ada, whose mother (played by famed Spanish transsexual actress-singer Bibí Andersen) is seldom at home.
Never a bashful or discrete director, Almodóvar piles one bizarre strand atop another. Tina announces she has found a new lover, and to Pablo’s dismay, it turns out to be Antonio. Regaining his memory, Pablo observes with alarm how Antonio manipulates Tina. Worried that Antonio might harm Tina, he calls the police. Taking Tina hostage, Antonio will let her go if Pablo will talk to him. The stunned Pablo agrees, and the story accelerates to its tragic finale when the couple experiences tender moments for the first time, after which Antonio shoots himself.
At first glance, the thematic transition from Matador and What Have I Done to Law of Desire seems too sharp and radical, but a closer look reveals that in Matador, one subplot concerns the relationship between powerful mentor and disturbed student, and in What Have I Done, the tale centers on two vastly different brothers, engaged in sibling rivalry. Thus, it is not a stretch to claim that Law of Desire revisits the issues of fraternity and bonding between older and younger men. That the younger man in both Matador and Law of Desire is played by Antonio Banderas provides a further link between the tales.
Upon release, Law of Desire was attacked by both right-wing and left-wing critics—for different reasons. Some reviewers were upset by what they considered a politically incorrect depiction of sex during the height of the AIDS crisis. When Pablo and Antonio are having sex for the first time, the latter asks the director whether his promiscuity has made him vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases. Denying the charge, Pablo gets irritated. However, when he penetrates Antonio upon the latter’s request, Almodóvar shows Pablo using lubricant but not condoms, which led to charges of promoting “unsafe” sex. Almodóvar claimed defiantly that he was highly aware of the health crisis but defended the scene due to its specific context and particular characters. Moreover, the director felt that the critics were more upset by the dialogue: “Men, especially straight ones, cannot tolerate hearing a man asking another man, ‘fuck me.’”50 (Van Sant said the same thing when he directed My Own Private Idaho.)
Almodóvar was “more nervous shooting the film’s sex scenes than his actors.” None of the actors was gay, which made it easier for him “because then the performers act and represent; they are not reliving.”51 In general, the director has viewed his work not as mimetic but as stylized and redemptive. He felt that in this particular scene, instead of obeying the dictates of reality, he was relieving the spectators of that reality by conjuring it away, by turning it into an excessive fantasy.
Similar logic guided the casting of Maura, based on Almodóvar’s idea that “a real woman would represent a transsexual more poignantly.”52 For him, the real desire in the film is personified by Tina, not by the gay men. The goal was “to make Tina and the whole film look fresh and natural and these straight people proved so natural about their bodies, they had no shame about their physicality, no sense of something unnatural or prohibited. And after the first half an hour, the audience forgets that the lovers are men; they accept it as a love story. That’s a big change in Spain and really healthy.”53 Thematically, the film stresses Tina’s betrayal by all the people around her, especially the two men she had really loved: the priest, who was her spiritual father-mentor, and her biological father, who took her to Morocco, forced her to have a sex-change operation, and then abandoned her. It makes things worse that Tina is later deserted by her lesbian lover and is left alone to take care of her lover’s daughter, Ada.
Some of the men try to forget the past—but not Tina, who’s haunted by memories and inevitable burdens of the past on the present. When the priest urges Tina to forget their affair, Tina cannot, because all she has now is memories. Similarly, when Pablo suffers from amnesia, Tina insists on maintaining the past and their filial bonding. “Your amnesia deprives me of memory,” she says, pointing to an album of old photos when they were happy boys, a gesture that reduces both of them to tears.
That older gay men can—and do—play surrogate fathers-brothers to their younger lovers is manifest in two scenes, both involving Pablo, in which Almodóvar evokes the religious image of Madonna and La Pieta. In the first, Pablo carries his lover Juan to the bedroom on their last, chaste night as one would carry a child. And in the end, after the psychotic Antonio shoots himself, Pablo holds him in his arms as a baby, again evoking the famous religious iconography. Law of Desire is a dark amour fou, where passionate love leads to death, but it is also a portrait of gay men who, despite promiscuity, can still be tender and sensitive. Juan leaves Pablo because he feels that he cannot love him as the narcissistic Pablo wants and needs to be loved.
Almodóvar has singled out the hose sequence—where Tina, hot, bothered, and frustrated, shouts at a street cleaner to drench her—as one that’s more erotic than the intercourse between the men because the scene is “very physical” and “I made her giant on screen. It’s a great release, something I’ve always dreamed of doing.”54 In an earlier scene, charged by a policeman with “not being a woman,” Tina knocks him down with a punch that would make macho men proud. The inspiration for the wet scene came from Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece, La Dolce Vita, when the lush and iconic Anita Ekberg jumps fully clothed into Rome’s famous Fontana de Trevi.
Almodóvar was particularly proud of the privileged moment, in which Tina, Ada and even the police look up with wonder at the window of the apartment where Pablo and Antonio have sex for the final time. He staged it as a “ritual with music,” making it “surprising and magical,”55 claiming that his visual inspiration came from Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi masterpiece, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which all the characters look up with awesome silence at the UFO.
Banderas, in his pre-Hollywood era, prompted headlines in movie and gossip magazines due to the explicit masturbation scene and the “gay kiss,” reportedly the first seen explicitly in Spanish history. Law of Desire shows stylish elegance and more assured filmmaking, two attributes that would mark the rest of Almodóvar’s endeavor, reaching their height in Broken Embraces and The Skin I Live In.
Law of Desire may be more significant as an experiment in storytelling than as an explicitly gay feature. It’s a companion piece to Matador, as both forced the director “to know how I would get along in a masculine universe.” To meet the challenge, he chose opposing stylistic strategies: Matador is “abstract and unreal, like a fable or legend,” whereas Law of Desire is “concrete, evoking the absolute desire for passion in a life that’s very routine.”56
At the end, in what is a variation of amour fou, Pablo reacts to the suicide of Antonio, whom he has learned to love in spite of himself and despite the circumstances, by throwing the typewriter out of the window. Sure enough, the typewriter lands in another of Almodóvar’s favorite locales, the trash container, where it explodes into flames. Why blame the typewriter? Why accord it so many close-ups? Because the director treats the object as a major character, capable of binding together as well as separating individuals in unpredictable but always intriguing ways. (A similar motif recurs in his autobiographical work Bad Education and in the noir melodrama Broken Embraces.)
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN: FIRST MASTERPIECE
With the exception of Law of Desire, Talk to Her and Bad Education, there are not many men in Almodóvar’s films. At times, there are no men at all, and if there are, the men are on the periphery. The heterosexual males are usually one-dimensional and treated as disposable objects, often violently killed by women in brutal acts of murder. In contrast, the female characters are finely nuanced and complex in terms of motivation, psychology, and conduct. The director celebrates women because, as he has said time and again, “women are the ones who run the whole gamut.”57 What’s consistent about his oeuvre is the indefatigable and incorrigible optimism of his heroines, despite their unhappy situation. He believes that women are much closer to their emotions than men. Women are more concerned with—and more willing to be embarrassed and undignified in—their pursuit of love, which for him is the highest goal. But women need men, especially for sex, which makes them more vulnerable and dependable on men than they wish to be.
The crucial turning point in Almodóvar’s career occurred in 1988, with the release of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios), which established his status on an international scale, not to mention the fact that the movie became the biggest box-office hit in Spain to date. Since then, he has been the most famous and recognized Spanish director in the world, surpassing in popularity his elders (Carlos Saura, Victor Erice) and contemporaries (Bigas Luna, Fernando Trueba). Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar’s first acknowledged masterpiece, is a sexy romp about obsessive love in all its shapes and forms. The elements of gaiety, melodrama, and hysterics are merged effectively, resulting in his most satisfying work to date. It was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle, and Almodóvar was named best young director at the European Film Awards. The film also won best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, where it had received its world premiere.
With Women on the Verge, Almodóvar consolidated his reputation as a world-class moviemaker, demonstrating ease at inventing stunning visual gags and fluent (if also bizarre) social interactions. Thematically, as strange as it may sound, the film is inspired by Jean Cocteau’s classic monologue The Human Voice, filmed by Roberto Rosselini in 1948 under the title L’Amore with Anna Magnani and still done as a theater piece. Almodóvar has said that “nothing remains of the original, except for the essence of an abandoned, shattered woman, sitting on a couch, next to a telephone and a suitcase filled with memories, waiting for her lover to pick it up.”58
The hot color palette of red and pink dominates the entire film from the opening credits to the closing ones. The telephone, which is repeatedly thrown, broken, and repaired (by various men) is red, and with the exception of one or two blue outfits, Pepa parades in and out of her penthouse in various red shirts, skirts, and shoes. Flushed with bright lights and cartoonish hues, the movie pays homage to the visual strategy of Tashlin, among others. Almodóvar has also acknowledged that for his film he tried to adopt the frantic pace and zany absurdities of Hollywood screwball comedies, such as Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday.
Based on missed connections and both peculiar and funny coincidences, the narrative is triggered by a single event. Iván (Fernando Guillén), a desirable middle-aged married man, abruptly abandons his longtime mistress, Pepa (Carmen Maura), unaware that she is pregnant with his child. Desperate, Pepa frantically tries to track down her elusive lover, first via hysterical phone messages and then via more personal and dangerous pursuits. Finally, she encounters him in person at the airport, where she ironically saves his life. Pepa’s search unfolds as a road movie, replete with loopy drives and chases by any form of transportation—taxicabs (always driven by the same blond and jolly driver), cars, and even motorcycles.
In the course of her pursuit, Pepa meets the women in Iván’s life, including his crazy wife, Lucía (Julieta Serrano), by whom he has fathered a now-grown-up son, Carlos (Antonio Banderas). That Carlos is shy and insecure is reflected in the way he looks (he wears eyeglasses) and moves (he walks slowly) and in his gentle naïveté with women. The tale’s female antagonists are initially anonymous to each other. Lucía first spots Pepa placing a message on the door of their apartment. The jealous wife then removes the message and throws it into the garbage can, with Pepa secretly observing. Rest assured that this piece of paper would turn up later in the plot, when a garbage collector reads it. Almodóvar also pays a personal tribute to Hitchcock’s Rear Window when Pepa sits on a street bench and observes the windows of Iván’s building, zeroing in on a young woman who does her exercise routines, just as Miss Torso did in Hitchcock’s 1954 classic.
Pepa—like Gloria in What Have I Done to Deserve This? though belonging to a different social class—is distraught and depressed to the point of contemplating suicide (with the emphasis on contemplating). As punishment and revenge, Pepa prepares a batch of gazpacho laced with barbiturates, which is meant for Iván—“I’m sick of being good,” she says, setting the stage for revenge. Observed in close-up, Pepa chops the hot red and ripe tomatoes with a sharp knife, giving herself a minor cut. In a moment of revelation, she takes one pill for herself and dumps the rest of the package into the uniquely Spanish drink. Assuming a life of its own, the gazpacho then becomes a key to some strange, unexpected events. Because Women on the Verge is structured as a farce, it is anticipated that all the “wrong” individuals, and not Iván, will drink the gazpacho at one point or another.
Looking for a change, Pepa puts her apartment up for rent. Let the parade begin: soon all kinds of bizarre people show up at the luxurious flat. When she is around, Pepa functions as the hostess, at one point even entertaining two policemen. Not surprisingly, they prove to be stupid and ineffectual, drinking the gazpacho and falling asleep when they are most needed. When Pepa is not around, which is half of the time, other guests assume the role of host, with varying degrees of success. The bell rings and doors are opened and closed with frequent regularity and sharp precision, as are the norms of bedroom farces.
Pepa’s penthouse and large terrace are introduced as the day dawns on a polluted Madrid, accompanied by her voice-over narration. Though an urban dweller, Pepa has fulfilled her desire to live in the country, so to speak. She has palm trees with birds; a little yard with hens, which refuse to “behave” when she talks to them; a cock that crows; and several rabbits. Every element of this urban farm is designed with cheerfully perverse taste that’s slightly kitschy—but not in an offensive way. Pepa enjoys watering her plants with a long hose and feeding and socializing with her family of animals on the rare occasion when she’s alone.
Like the dichotomies in the narrative, Pepa’s space is defined by a series of binary oppositions: country and city, upper and lower class, men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, spouses and mistresses, older and younger, authority figures and ordinary civilians. The movie belongs to a genre described by Almodóvar as alta comedia, or “high comedy,” defined as a “comedy of manners characterized by anti-naturalism: The sets are deliberately artificial, the performances and dialogues excessively rapid, and the deepest human ambitions treated in an abstract, almost synthetic manner.”59
In the opening act, a voice-over is heard in a black-and-white scene that shows an older man surrounded by many women. It’s Pepa’s voice narrating a monochromatic dream, which reflects her anxieties over Iván’s betrayals. The women in the dream, clad in different dresses, walk toward Iván, noticed or unnoticed by him, in a parade that recalls sequences in Fellini’s 8½, made in 1963 and also shot in black-and-white. The black-and-white dream both parallels and reaffirms the reality of Pepa’s life, albeit in color. This sequence is a prime example of Almodóvar’s penchant for the “trick beginning”—namely, a premonition of an event that will happen later, such as the slasher footage at the beginning of Matador or the steamy sex scenes in Law of Desire and Broken Embraces (discussed in the last section of the chapter).
Lighting a cigarette, Pepa sets her bed on fire by accident. Staring into the flames, she seems strangely excited, even thrilled by the sight, as if wishing for bigger catastrophe. However, snapping out of her fantasy, she throws her cigarette into the fire and goes for the hose. Eccentric and crazy as Pepa is, she is not stupid. Almodóvar’s women can be dreamers and losers—but only for a while, and only up to a point. Eventually, they all get up on their solid feet and wear their sexy high heels (the title of Almodóvar’s 1995 picture). Pauline Kael was the first American critic to note that it is “no small thing” for these women to look good and to get recognition and affirmation that they look good.60
The film’s initial reel has an unsettled rhythm, defined by sudden shifts in the plot’s many locales and personas. There are at least ten speaking characters, all fully developed. Pepa is first seen passive and asleep, and the ensuing tale is about her waking up and getting in touch with her inner feelings by gaining self-awareness. Almodóvar’s femmes may be flighty, spontaneous, tempestuous, and driven to momentary madness, but ultimately they are pragmatic and sane, motivated by common sense rather than intellect and fueled by a newly formed female friendship or community.
The aging Iván and the younger (but not young) Pepa both work in the film industry. Pepa is doing some commercials (a funny one about detergent is seen on a TV in the film), but her main job is dubbing. Iván and Pepa provide the Spanish voices for Sterling Hayden and Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s 1954 cult Western Johnny Guitar, which Almodóvar, like many other cinephiles, greatly admires. The dubbing sequences are as crucial as the movie chosen for them to dub. Each addresses only the microphone—there is lack of reciprocity because they are not physically present at the same time. Moreover, the dialogue offers an ironic commentary on their own “relationship” when Hayden’s Johnny is begging Crawford’s Vienna to “deceive” him—that is, to tell him that she loves him as much as he loves her. This phrase is ironic, as Hayden almost always played “macho” roles (Asphalt Jungle, The Killing) and Johnny Guitar was the exception to the norm, casting him in a more vulnerable role. More significantly, in Women on the Verge, it is the female, Pepa, who’s desperate to know whether Iván loves her as much as she loves him—or loves her at all, as Iván plans to leave town for a vacation with his latest mistress.
Pepa, the film’s protagonist, is contrasted with two women. First, there is her weepy friend Candela (María Barranco), who is wearing an ultra-mini blue skirt and earrings in the shape of espresso machines. In her big scene, delivered in tears that make us laugh, Candela tells of her affair with a Shiite terrorist who had used her apartment as a meeting place. She now fears that the police will arrest her as a crime accessory, perhaps even a conspirator. Candela is seen, just like Pepa earlier, packing the belongings of her (unseen) terrorist lover in a suitcase, which she buries in a public dumpster. In contrast, Pepa’s suitcase, containing Iván’s possessions and love letters to her goes from one hand to another, again obeying the rules of the farce genre. At the end, the suitcase lands in a public dumpster and is conveniently retrieved by Iván’s current lover, who “just happens” to be sitting nearby in her car.
The second contrast is offered by Marisa, played by the iconic star Rossy de Palma, known for her cubist face—her extraordinary long and crooked nose—which gives her a distinctive look. Dressed in sensual red, like several of the other women, Marisa first turns up at Pepa’s apartment with her boyfriend, Carlos, who “just happens” to be Iván’s son. When Marisa, among others, drinks the gazpacho intended for Iván, she falls into a sleep that induces a wet erotic dream in which she experiences her first orgasm ever. This is Almodóvar’s satiric stab at men who brag about sexual prowess—here it takes a surreal reverie for a virginal girl to have her first climax. Meanwhile, the virginal Carlos courts Candela before she falls asleep in his arms; the way he caresses her breasts suggests that he has never done it before and lacks any knowledge or experience of sex.
Almodóvar’s description of the setting illustrates his theory of happiness, his utopian manifesto: “Society has now adapted itself to individuals, and all their social and professional needs have been met.”61 For him, the most significant human goal is to be happy—or unhappy—with the person you love. Love is a sacred value and the highest goal in life. Sex in his movies could be both dreamy (and dream-like) and realistic, exciting and messy, fulfilling and dangerous. It is an activity and a performance carried out in complete abandonment and total immersion, to the exclusion of other interests. However, as an all-encompassing act, sex is often humiliating in its obsessive pursuit, and hot sex can be dangerous and risky to the point of death, as it is in Matador and Law of Desire.
Though Iván offers the dramatic connection among the characters, he is shown only in brief glimpses, walking down the street, making a call from a phone booth, hiding from his crazy wife, or recording in a studio. Almodóvar reduces Iván’s presence to a voice talking to a microphone in a close-up. An aging, dwindling Lothario, he is deliberately an underdeveloped character, a philandering husband blessed with an erotic voice that proves alluring to women. He is really fully seen, and given some dialogue, in the last sequence, set at the airport, when he is about to depart for a vacation with his younger mistress.
In the preceding scene, there is a seriocomic confrontation between Pepa and Iván’s wife, Lucía. Both are holding a glass of gazpacho, but knowing its contents, they refuse to drink it. Breaking the impasse, Lucía throws the gazpacho in Pepa’s face and runs out. At gunpoint, Lucía forces a punkish motorcyclist who “just happens” to be outside the building to take her to the airport. Fearing the potential consequences, Pepa rushes to the airport in a taxicab (again the same one). A chase scene with shoot-outs ensues, in a satire of Hollywood’s notorious chase scenes. At the terminal, just when Lucía is about to shoot Iván, who’s standing on line with his mistress, Pepa saves his life by pushing a luggage cart at the mad wife before fainting herself. Spotting Pepa, now in the role of his lifesaver, Iván rushes toward her, holding her in his arms while apologizing for his behavior. But, alas, it’s too late. Finally sober and in control of her emotions, Pepa realizes that Iván is really not worthy of her love. Iván, and by implication all men, is a big liar and phony performer.
The discussion of this film began with an analysis of Pepa’s space and should conclude by suggesting that initially the penthouse is just a place but doesn’t qualify as a home. For most of the story, the apartment is just a physical site that Pepa leaves and returns to, only to leave again. Before each departure, she makes sure to change her dresses carefully and apply make-up properly. Throughout the tale, Pepa’s space is visited or invaded by her amigas and strangers (Candela, the police, the couple looking to rent it, Iván’s wife). Crucial to the film’s meaning is Pepa’s journey of self-discovery: the realization that the penthouse is her home and, as such, should serve as a place of stability and happiness.
For every death in Almodóvar’s films, there’s birth; for every terminated relationship, a new one is formed. In the last shot of Women on the Verge, all the invaders and guests have left except Marisa. Both women have been deluded by their relationships with men, who emotionally, no matter their age, are still boys. There is no chemistry or meaningful rapport between Marisa and Carlos; they look more like siblings or classmates than lovers. In the very last image, the two women toast their new friendship.
In celebrating female camaraderie, Almodóvar reaffirms the endings of such classic Hollywood melodramas as Old Acquaintance, in which Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, initially rivals and then best friends, have a drink in front of the fireplace. Gay director George Cukor chose the same closure for the 1981 Rich and Famous, his loose remake of the 1943 Warner Brothers melodrama, with Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset. Almodóvar would again reference that scene in his 1995 film, The Flower of My Secret.
Again proving he is a great actors’ director, Almodóvar coaxed superb performances out of his large, uniformly skillful cast. Maura, an Almodóvar regular and consummate farceuse, brings out with remarkable energy and authenticity the pathos and the tragic but also the joyous elements of a farcical melodrama about a dejected woman. It is not a coincidence that most of this picture’s stars, including Maura, de Palma, and especially Banderas, went on to become major stars of Spanish and international cinema.
PHASE TWO: MATURE MELODRAMAS
Wearing his outrageousness effortlessly, Almodóvar is still able to upset and to shock, after three decades, as was evident in the 2011 The Skin I Live In, his creepiest work. However, as he grew older and more mature, he also started, by his own admission, “to look deeper inside myself,”62 which led him to expand the range of his subjects and focus on their emotions. As he told A. O. Scott: “I think that emotions have always been present in my films, but I’m conscious of a change, of almost deciding that I will focus solely on emotion and take away as much of anything extraneous to them as I can. I now deal with a completely open heart.”63
In 1990, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!) had the misfortune of being released after Almodóvar’s most appealing and commercial picture, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which, among other accolades, was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The winner, however, was the Danish film Pelle the Conqueror, starring Max von Sydow. Almodóvar’s follow-up became his most controversial film to date after its distributor, Miramax, appealed in court its initial rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. Put in perspective, however, most critics consider Tie Me Up! to be a bold but not entirely satisfying work in the director’s large and impressive output.
Tie Me Up! begins as a hostage melodrama, but after a series of unpredictable events, it turns into a wildly bizarre love story. The film moves at a deliberate pace and with disrupted momentum toward a sentimental ending that evokes a mixed reaction of both laugher and disbelief. Continuing Almodóvar’s exploration of a female-dominated world, Tie Me Up! depicts a clique of women in a milieu in which, initially, men have only temporary presence. The mother of the two central sisters—played by Francisca Caballero (Almodóvar’s real-life mother)—is a matriarch, but there’s no information about her late husband. Her two daughters, Marina and Lola, are career-oriented, working in the film industry. Marina is a single, strong, vibrant woman, capable of standing up to all kinds of men, including her older and sleazy director (in the movie-within-a-movie). Her sister, Lola, has a daughter, but there’s no husband or man in her life.
By placing the story in a heterosexual milieu, Almodóvar might have tried to broaden the appeal of his work beyond the art-film and gay-film circuits. Although the movie was Spain’s top-grossing picture that year, it was not very popular in the United States, not only because of the NC-17 rating but also because of the divisive critical response.64 It would take another decade for Almodóvar to enter into the mainstream with two melodramas: All About My Mother, in 1999, and its follow-up, Talk to Her, in 2002.
“I’ll never love you … ever!” the sexy Marina (Victoria Abril) tells the love-struck Ricky (Antonio Banderas) while being handcuffed to a bed. In Almodóvar’s world, the way to conquer a woman’s body and heart doesn’t exclude forced captivity and physical abuse—at least initially. Who is Ricky as a character? The director has constructed him as an immature man who has nothing in life—and therefore nothing to lose. He has to work at getting everything he has or desires—including love. In a sense, he has only the night, the day, and the vitality of an animal—just like the flamenco singers say in their song. Orphaned at three, Ricky has spent most of his life in orphanages and mental institutions. When Ricky is let out, he has high hopes for his newly gained freedom.
Marina, the film’s heroine, is a “B” movie actress making cheap slasher films and trying to adjust to her recent success after years in the porn industry, not to mention dealing with a drug problem. Ricky had slept with Marina once during an escape from a mental ward, and now he’s determined to marry her. Ever since that glorious night, Ricky has been thinking of Marina. Determined to win back her affection, Ricky shows up unexpectedly at the studio where Marina is shooting her latest horror flick.
When first seen, Ricky, in tight blue jeans and hot red sweater, is at a psychiatric hospital trying to fix something with a screwdriver, which is just one of many phallic objects that serve as symbolic reminders of the relative sexual impotency of the male characters. Called to the hospital office, he is interviewed by its stern female director, who projects an authoritative tone even as she is chain-smoking. Interrogated about his plans, Ricky claims he wants to get married and have children—to live like a “normal” person. The hospital director then cuts him off abruptly: “You are not a normal person.” And on at least one level, Tie Me Up! goes on to show the fine line Ricky is navigating between “normal” and “abnormal” life.
Quite expectedly, Almodóvar immediately subvert notions of normalcy and social order. Going to the window, the hospital director turns the shades up, and the light comes in. Standing behind her is Ricky, who, as a gesture of gratitude for what she has done for him, begins to kiss her. The pragmatic director turns the blinds down, and they have sex (offscreen). Like all the other women in the film, she cannot resist Ricky’s appeal, a combination of charming childishness and sexual animalism. Almodóvar describes him as a child-man—with the smile of an innocent child and the eyes of a tiger. For many people, the tiger stands in for the male principle, but for Almodóvar, “it was more the presence of the irrational, which is just as natural and believable.”65 The hospital director joins other professional women in Almodóvar’s films, such as the lawyer in Matador, who compromise their ethics for immediate sexual gratification.
Ricky boasts a hustler’s mentality; he is used to working hard and even paying for everything that he needs or owns. With a big smile on his face and macho braggadocio, Ricky leaves the hospital and joins the masses walking on a busy Madrid street. But he always stands out, even in the lonely, anonymous crowds. Stopping at a candy store, managed by a young woman who also looks at him in a sexual way, Ricky gets a red, heart-shaped box of chocolates, for which he underpays, before hopping on a bus whose color is, of course, red.
Sneaking into the studio, Ricky heads into Marina’s dressing room and smells the underwear that we had observed her removing earlier. He places the chocolates in her purse, steals some cash from another dress, picks up a pair of handcuffs from her desk, and dons a long rock-star wig. After standing in front of the mirror playing an air guitar, he walks out to the set incognito, sort of a spy-voyeur. Ricky is dismayed to see the film’s older director, Máximo Espejo (veteran actor Francisco Rabal), hitting so blatantly on his leading lady. The movie-within-a-movie scenes are observed from the POV of Ricky, who feels that this is his last chance to rescue Marina from the clutches of the sleazy director and claim her as his own grand amour.
In a parody of male voyeurism and potency, Máximo, a victim of stroke, is seated in an electric wheelchair, restlessly moving around the set, while always keeping an eye—gazing—on Marina. In what may be an inside joke, he is asked to choose between two knives (phallic symbols) to be used in the horror flick that he directs, and he predictably opts for the longer, sharper knife. Talking to Marina while seated in a wheelchair, Máximo’s staring eyes are at the level of her crotch. Marina is used to being the object of male gaze by her director, crew members, spectators, and now Ricky. But she can also hold her own in a male-dominated milieu. She tells Máximo to stop staring at her “that way,” and the director says that he is not looking at her—he’s just admiring her. (It sounds better in Spanish: “No te miro, te admiro.”) Marina then coolly observes that she has no use for such admiration. This doesn’t deter Máximo, who continues to stare intensely. When he is denied attention or when Marina is absent from the set, in frustration, he circles around and around in his wheelchair—going nowhere. Back home, the dirty old man watches Marina’s former porn videos, including a scene of anal intercourse shown in extreme close-up, on his big TV screen.
After completing the last scene, Marina goes home to change for the postshoot party. Taking a luxurious bath, she begins playing with a toy in a semierotic mode. The electronic male-shaped toy approaches her slowly, flipping its legs until it penetrates into her. With a big smile on her face, Marina removes the toy and places it on her breasts. Suddenly, Ricky bursts into Marina’s apartment and knocks her to the floor while she’s kicking and screaming. In the next scene, she wakes up with a terrible headache that no painkillers can help (we know she’s addicted to strong drugs). Holding Marina captive in her own apartment, Ricky tries to convince her that she does love him, that he is good for her, that they have a future as one big happy family. But all of his persistent wooing and manipulative attempts end in failure.
Shocked by his confession and still in pain, Marina persuades Ricky to take her to the doctor. Unable to get the drugs she needs at the pharmacy, Ricky decides to get them on the black market. Not knowing his place, he attacks the drug dealer (played by Rossy de Palma), a tough dyke on a motorcycle. In retaliation, the cyclist later asks her groupies to beat Ricky, which leaves him unconscious. While he is gone, Marina finds a way to get out of her chains but not out of the apartment. When Ricky returns home wounded and bleeding, Marina is both touched and upset. Now it’s her turn to tend to his needs. As the plots thickens, the kidnapper and hostage engage in a bizarre role-playing, sort of a parody of bourgeois marriage, including breakfasts served in bed, domestic arguments in the bathroom, and trips to the doctor, with Marina handcuffed and Ricky holding a knife. When Marina tries to escape, Ricky ties her up, albeit tenderly—Almodóvar goes out of his way to show that Ricky is using the “softest” rope available.
Ricky’s beating is a turning point in the relationship. Gradually, Marina begins to understand his devotion to her, and her feelings toward him soften. For the first time, they make love that’s passionate and mutually satisfying. Meanwhile, Marina’s sister, Lola, is worried about her and makes periodic trips to her apartment, leaving notes under the door, which Ricky destroys. As a precautionary measure, Ricky moves Marina to another, more lavish apartment that belongs to his neighbor.
In the end, when Marina gets a chance to escape, she makes the choice to stay. She no longer needs or wants to be rescued. The very last image depicts a newly formed family, a triangle composed of Marina, Ricky, and Lola. Significantly, Lola is in the driver’s seat, Marina in the passenger’s seat, and Ricky in the back. Driving off into the distance, the trio sings aloud Gloria Gaynor’s popular disco hit “I Will Survive.”
Thematically, Tie Me Up! echoes some of the issues in William Wyler’s 1965 The Collector, based on John Fowles’s novel and starring Terence Stamp as the kidnapper and Samantha Eggar as the captive. And, in turn, Almodóvar’s movie might have influenced Boxing Helena, the controversial 1993 indie about forced love from Jennifer Lynch, better known as David Lynch’s daughter. For Almodóvar, Tie Me Up! is a story of “how a man attempts to construct a love story in the same way as he might be studying for a degree or diploma—by means of effort, will power, and persistence.”66 But underlying the film are some more philosophical concerns: Can passion be planned? Can it be forced upon another person?
Some reviewers criticized the notions of forced love and the sadomasochism in Tie Me Up! and several feminist critics were downright offended. Questions were raised about the film’s outrageous title, which was found to be disturbing in its depiction of romantic yearning, even if it took place in a heterosexual milieu. Other critics didn’t like the film’s uncertain tone: some scenes are boisterous and hilarious as befits a farce, whereas others are serious and dramatic in dealing with the anguished pain caused by a fatalistic love.
Responding to criticism at home and abroad (the picture’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival drew a mixed response), Almodóvar rationalized:
The moment when Marina says, “Tie me up,” is the moment when she realizes she cannot live without love. At the same time, she sees that she’s accepting with love a whole lot of things she doesn’t desire—the knowledge that Ricky is a little crazy and that the world they’re going to live in together is a hostile one. She cannot live without this passion, but at the same time, she has to accept everything that goes with it. In my movie, the heroine doesn’t say, “I love you.” She says, “Tie me up!”67
As noted earlier, Almodóvar has played a significant role in international cinema. He was responsible for the revival of Spanish art-house cinema. As a result of his work, foreign audiences have come to expect Spanish art cinema to display graphic eroticism, zany comedy, eccentric humor, and stylish elegance. Luna’s scandalous film The Ages of Lulu (Las edades de Lulú)—which came out the same year as Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up!—could not have been made without Almodóvar’s pioneering features. Luna’s film concerns the sexual awakening of a young woman, whose curiosity leads her to involvement in dangerous sexual experimentation in Madrid’s gay scene, including S&M clubs. Ángela Molina, who was originally cast in the lead, withdrew upon learning of the film’s explicit sex scenes. In one of his first roles, the young Javier Bardem plays a small role of a corrupt gay man, and María Barranco won the Goya Award for playing a transsexual prostitute. In several countries, scenes were cut from this sexually bold movie, which is also replete with erotic images, including an S&M orgy at a gay club and an opening scene in which Lulú is baptized as a baby, because it exposed her genitalia. Luna’s 1992 sex comedy Jamón Jamón, which is replete with casual heterosexism, could not have been made without Almodóvar’s preparatory work. There are images in this picture that could have been seen in Almodóvar’s features—crotch shots of trainee matadors, scenes in the women’s lavatories—vividly conveyed with flashy camera angles and saturated colors.
From a strange melodrama about amour fou, Almodóvar moved to a relatively more conventional woman’s picture about intergenerational love. In High Heels (1991), he changed genre and tone. Though framed as a murder mystery, this movie is essentially a melodrama about the rivalry between mother and daughter. Once again, the movie divided critics. Some claimed that the tale was old-fashioned in its stereotypical depiction of a neurotic career woman who becomes a self-sacrificing mother—sort of a Spanish Mildred Pierce.68 But others praised the movie for putting center stage not one but two strong females—and again relegating the males to the periphery.
In interviews, Almodóvar pointed out that the Spanish title, Tacones lejanos, actually means the noise of high heels coming from afar—sort of Distant Heels, inspired by titles of Hollywood Westerns like Distant Drums. For him, the essence of the melodrama was a showdown or a gunfight between a mother and her daughter.
Reteaming with Victoria Abril, Almodóvar cast her as a TV presenter named Rebeca, a woman anxiously awaiting the arrival of her star mother, Becky (Marisa Paredes), whom she has not seen since childhood. Becky is also eager to rekindle the relationship with her daughter after fifteen years of estrangement. Diagnosed with an incurable heart condition, Becky’s time might be limited—“an animal that sees its cycle as finished” in Almodóvar’s words. Insecure, obsessed, and desperate to emulate her mother, Rebeca has even married one of her mother’s old lovers, Manuel (Feodor Atkine), who no longer loves her; he foolishly attempts to restart an old affair with Becky. Not wasting any time, Rebeca has impromptu sex with Letal, a transvestite whose show includes, among other acts, an impersonation of Becky.
As mother and daughter begin making up for lost time, Manuel is suddenly found dead at his home. After making the quintessential Almodóvarian confession, revealing that she had an affair with her son-in-law, Becky returns to Madrid. Rebeca goes public, telling the whole nation of her husband’s death. She is imprisoned, but despite incriminating evidence, the investigating judge is determined to prove her innocence. The judge arranges for Becky to see her daughter, and Rebeca denies killing Manuel but confesses to her mother of killing Becky’s second husband. As a child (seen in flashbacks), Rebeca had overheard her stepfather deny Becky’s wish to go to Mexico for a film. To grant her mother freedom, Rebeca swapped his pills, which caused a lethal overdose.
Rebeca’s confession proves too much for Becky’s already weak heart, and her condition worsens. Meanwhile, Rebeca discovers that she is pregnant with Letal’s child, and the judge releases her from prison. Rebeca goes to see Letal’s drag performance, and in his dressing room, she discovers that he is actually the judge himself; Letal is just one of his masks. Claiming that dressing up is no more than an investigative strategy, Letal then asks for Rebeca’s hand. While considering his offer, Rebeca watches a TV broadcast that reports Becky’s sudden heart attack. Rushing to the hospital, Rebeca confesses to her mother of murdering Manuel. Becky decides to take the blame so that her daughter will go free, and once the sacrifice is made, she dies more peacefully.
High Heels owes its existence to Ingmar Bergman’s 1978 Autumn Sonata, an intense family drama about a successful concert pianist (Ingrid Bergman) who goes to visit her daughter (Liv Ullmann), whom she has not seen for years. The mother is guilt-ridden, and the daughter is bitterly resentful of years of neglect, not to mention the burden of taking care of her chronically ill sister. It is impossible not to view Ingrid Bergman’s movie role in autobiographical terms: as is well known, in 1949, Ingrid left her husband and daughter (Pia Lindstrom) to work for Italian director Roberto Rossellini, whom she later married and had children with. Like other directors, Almodóvar has professed admiration for Autumn Sonata, the first and only film that Bergman the director and Bergman the actress made together, which sadly marked the latter’s last big-screen performance, for which she received the New York Film Critics Circle Award and her eighth Oscar nomination.
High Heels was also inspired by the 1959 Imitation of Life, Sirk’s last American movie, which was his most commercially popular and also his most influential, largely due to its heightened stylization. Imitation of Life centers on a beautiful white actress, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner at her most glamorous), who is a neglectful mother. Lora cohabits with her self-sacrificing black housekeeper, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), who is the biological mother of her black daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), and the surrogate mother of Lora’s white daughter, Suzie (Sandra Dee). Lora’s dilemmas are typical of the Hollywood woman’s melodrama: career versus family, professional success versus personal life, public fame versus personal love. In childhood, the two girls are treated as equals by Lora and Annie, but there are already interracial tensions when Sarah Jane refuses to play with a black doll. As the girls become adolescents, the conflicts increase when Sarah Jane tries to pass as white. Caught, she is brutally beaten by her white boyfriend (heartthrob Troy Donahue), and her self-denial ultimately causes the death of her grieving mother.
The similarities and differences between Sirk’s and Almodóvar’s films are telling. High Heels, unlike Imitation of Life, shows no concern with social class or race. In High Heels, Becky escapes to Mexico to pursue her career, abandoning her daughter. Her daughter, Rebeca, is married to her boss at the TV station, but they have no children. In Imitation of Life, unbeknownst to her insensitive mother, but fully recognized by the black housekeeper, Annie, the teenager Suzie falls in love with her mother’s lover, Steve Archer (John Gavin). However, Imitation of Life is a 1950s American melodrama, so Suzie is attracted to Steve, but she doesn’t “dare” to sleep with him. In contrast, for Almodóvar, it is natural and no big deal that mother and daughter sleep with the same man. When Rebeca confesses to her mother that she is responsible for the deaths of her stepfather and husband, Becky just says, in a typically Almodóvarian cool comedic mode, “You must find another way of settling your differences with me.” Finally, both Sirk and Almodóvar are concerned with stylish elegance and the ability to deal with serious issues in seemingly crass material, without condescending to any of the characters.
There is, however, one significant difference between Sirk and Almodóvar, as the latter himself pointed out: “I love Douglas Sirk, but I can’t make a Sirk film because I’m not upset over those old issues of morality; I just use them.”69 Almodóvar repeated his philosophy of melodramas in a later interview with me: “I like big, intense melodramas, but I can’t actually make them because my point of view is amoral. I don’t believe in Imitation of Life and Splendor in the Grass underlying morality, which is the basis for Hollywood melodramas of that era. In my films, ‘bad girls’ like Susan Kohner or Natalie Wood are not bad at all; you can look at them and enjoy them because there is no judgment.”70
American viewers failed to see the extra-filmic significance of the casting, but Spanish and Latin viewers did. The real-life father of Miguel Bosé (who plays the dual role of Judge Dominguez/Femme and Letal/Hugo) was a famous bullfighter, Luis Miguel Dominguin, who, among other things, was one of Hollywood star Ava Gardner’s lovers when she lived in Spain. Miguel’s mother, Lucia Bosé, was Miss Italy and went on to pursue a successful acting career in films by Fellini, Antonioni, and Buñuel. Up until High Heels, younger Spaniards, especially girls, admired Miguel as a popular rock star, and Almodóvar relished changing his image by dressing him in drag, perceiving him as a “mutant,” a very tall man wearing very high heels.
Having done a serious-trashy woman’s melodrama, which was met with mixed critical response, Almodóvar was ready to revisit two of his most recurring themes, deviant sexuality and morbid death, in a joyous farce. The result was the 1993 Kika, centering, for a change, on the troubled relationship between a stepfather and his stepson. Both men are enamored of Kika (Verónica Forqué), a Madrid make-up artist—and one of the most optimistic and upbeat characters in Almodóvar’s oeuvre. Kika is good-natured to a fault, which doesn’t help when she becomes involved in two criminal schemes. One scheme revolves around her lesbian maid Juana (Rossy de Palma) and the latter’s disturbed brother, Pablo (Santiago Lajusticia), ex-boxer and porn star. The other deals with the stepson Ramón and his novelist stepfather, Nicholas (played by American actor Peter Coyote).
The plot begins with the arrival of the young and handsome photographer Ramón (Alex Casanovas, in a role similar to those that Antonio Banderas had played) at the home of his mother (Charo López) just in time to hear gunfire. It seems that she has killed herself, after shooting and wounding her husband, Nicholas. The beautician Kika relates how she had first met Nicholas when she made him up for a TV interview. Nicholas now asks Kika to apply make-up to Ramón, who had presumably died of a heart attack. Kika begins her work, endlessly rambling, but she feels that something is wrong—Ramón’s skin is too warm for a dead man. When she alerts Nicholas, he dismisses it as nonsense. But the intuitive Kika proves to be right when, suddenly, Ramón opens his eyes.
Almodóvar cuts to Madrid, when Nicholas, having spent time abroad, is met at the train station by Ramón. The color design chosen for both men is noticeable: the macho Nicholas is in a white and blue shirt, young and romantic Ramón in a white shirt with red stripes. The relations between stepfather and stepson are strained, to say the least. Ramón asks Kika to marry him, but she is doubtful, having already slept with Nicholas and also concerned with Ramón’s voyeuristic nature.
In a parallel subplot, Nicholas is approached by Ramón’s former lover, Andrea Caracortada (Victoria Abril), who hosts a morbid TV reality show called The Worst of the Day. One of the show’s episodes tells the story of a rapist and prison escapee, who happens to be Pablo, the brother of Ramón’s maid Juana. Pablo rapes Kika, unaware that he is being filmed by the voyeuristic and spying Ramón. Less traumatized by the brutal rape than by its public transmission on Andrea’s TV show, Kika leaves Ramón.
Influenced by the movie The Prowler (directed by Joseph Losey), a noir tale in which a bad cop (Van Heflin) seduces a vulnerable married woman (Evelyn Keyes), Almodóvar emphasizes the subplot of Ramón’s suspicion that it is his stepfather who murdered his mother. Ramón decides to confront Nicholas but has an attack, and Nicholas assumes he’s dead. By that time, Andrea has figured out that Nicholas is the actual murderer, and when she challenges him, they end up killing each other.
Almodóvar’s tenth feature benefited from the biggest budget he had worked with; it was the second coproduction of his company El Deseo (Desire L.T.D.) and France’s Ciby 2000, which may account for the polished technical values and lavish costume design. Except for the maid, who’s clad in the same outfit, the other characters, especially Ramón, change shirts in every scene. Most of the gear is in red, or red and white, in various patterns.
As a follow-up to High Heels, which was not as well received or as successful as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar must have felt the pressure to deliver a more commercial film, which resulted in a narrative in which the various strands do not converge smoothly and whose tone is not farcical enough, as is required by this particular genre. The movie makes allusions to two seminal films of the 1960s, Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Antonioni’s first English-speaking feature, Blow-Up (1966). But, ultimately, these references don’t offer the poignant parallels or ironic commentaries that prevail in Almodóvar’s other self-reflexive pictures.
The stylish credit sequence shows in black-and-white and then in color a spotlight, a keyhole, and a camera shutter, signaling that Kika would deal with voyeurism, both male and female, and shady family secrets, past and present. All the characters in Kika live a double life: in addition to embodying individuals grounded in particular locales, they fictionalize their own lives or those of others. Andrea, the film’s most mysterious and least engaging character, roams the streets of Madrid on her motorcycle, searching for (and surely finding) authentic crime scenes in all kinds of places, including the cemetery. Looking ridiculous, like an alien in a sci-fi movie, Andrea sports a black uniform, equipped with a camera on her helmet and flashing lights placed on her chest that from afar look like exposed breasts.
The voyeuristic photographer Ramón may be seen as Almodóvar’s version of David Hemmings in Blow-Up. Ramón is obsessed with recording every piece of reality, from models (early on) to his own sex with Kika, a prolonged graphic scene in which he shoots Kika as she performs fellatio on him. Ramón then asks Kika to film him as he penetrates her, and the poor girl obliges, though she never stops talking during sex. Almodóvar lifts a whole sequence out of Blow-Up, showing Ramón sitting on top of his model, arousing her and himself with his phallic camera, just as Hemmings did with the model Verushka in the 1966 picture.
Almodóvar misfires in the central set-piece, in which Pablo, the criminal who escapes from prison, invades Kika’s flat. Before raping Kika, Pablo complains to his sister that he has grown tired of screwing gay men (maricones) in prison. Using a peel of mandarin, Pablo begins caressing the crotch of the sleeping beauty before assaulting her sexually in a lengthy and excessive sequence. Kika tries to protest and resist her rape, but to no avail, as Pablo pulls a knife and continues his assault. Pablo’s sister, Juana, gagged and bound by him to a chair in the kitchen, moves herself to the room and sits by the bed, watching with horror Pablo’s hard work at reaching a climax. Ironically, the rape is finally interrupted by an act of voyeurism from a neighbor who calls the police. Andrea has manipulated a mysterious voyeur to hand her the video of the rape.
By now, Almodóvar’s low opinion of the police (and authority figures) is well established. In this film, there are two inept policemen (one tall, the other short) who invade Kika’s apartment. They untie the maid, but they seem unable to remove Pablo, who’s still inside Kika. The sequence ends with the couple being dragged together out of bed. Rushing to the terrace, Pablo, still aroused, continues to masturbate and finally climaxes. His cum lands on the cheek of Andrea, who simply removes it with a nonchalant gesture; nothing bothers or shocks her. The scene is meant to be comic, but instead it drags on and on. The director’s parody of men, as perpetually horny and obsessed with orgasms, becomes too blatant.
The cum shot in Almodóvar’s 1993 picture may have inspired Todd Solondz’s black comedy Happiness, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman jerks off to completion, as well as the Farrelly brothers’ wonderful romantic comedy There’s Something About Mary, in which Ben Stiller’s sperm lands on Cameron Diaz’s hair. Both American movies were made in 1998, which prompted one of my students to write a paper titled “The Year of the Cum Shot.”
Some of the more personal notes in Kika also miss their mark. Like Scorsese, Almodóvar has cast his mother in a number of films, and in Kika, his mother plays a TV presenter who interviews Nicholas about his latest novel and future plans. Significantly, the interview ends with her saying, “Nothing compares to Spain.” And, by extension, nothing compares to Almodóvar. Despite the horrors that Kika has witnessed, including the double murders of Nicholas and Andrea, she remains hopelessly and hopefully upbeat. In the very last scene, Kika hits the road in her red sports car. Shortly thereafter, she opens the door and her heart (with her body to follow?) to a young hitchhiker in what seems to be the beginning of yet another amorous adventure.
Almodóvar’s humorous treatment of rape in Kika was criticized by reviewers who could not understand his obsession with sexual assault. Kika was the director’s third consecutive feature facing charges of misogyny and exploitation.71 It is hard to tell whether or not this line of criticism had any impact on Almodóvar, as rape would feature prominently in several of his future pictures. Nonetheless, his subsequent features became more dramatic than satirical, more serious and less tinged with black humor.
Enamored of the stupendous Marisa Paredes, arguably one of the best actresses working in world cinema today, Almodóvar built a whole “woman’s picture” around her in The Flower of My Secret (La flor de mi secreto). It’s a film that some critics (not I) consider to be Almodóvar’s first truly “mature” work because it’s devoid of visual excess and outlandish humor and the heroine is more mature and complex than Kika or Marina.
Paredes plays Leo Macías, a middle-aged novelist trapped in a bad marriage to Paco (Imanol Arias), a NATO official working in Brussels for the Bosnian peacekeeping force. The first sequence is highly symbolic. Leo, wearing with love the boots that Paco had given her, can’t remove them because they are too tight. She rushes out to the streets and asks a homeless man to do it for money, but he cannot either, and both are drenched by water from a nearby pool. Desperate and wet, she arrives at the office of her psychologist friend Betty (Carme Elias), who is finally able to remove the boots. Like her playful director, Leo is a self-conscious heroine, a lovelorn romance novelist who describes her romantic predicament in terms of the plot of Wilder’s 1960 Oscar winner, The Apartment. Deep down, however, Leo knows that what’s serious is not that her boots are too tight but rather that the man who used to take them off for her—Paco—is not there. In phone conversations with Paco, she tells him that every day she wears an item that he has bought her—and removed (for sex?). Leo (whose name means “I read” in Spanish) shares her marital discord with the seemingly more rational and pragmatic Betty, who then recommends that she contact her publisher friend Ángel (Juan Echanove), editor of the “Culture” section of El Pais. Leo obeys, and after their meeting, Ángel commissions her to write a literary column. Excited, Leo calls Paco to share her news, but he cuts her short, attributing her contentment to the influence of alcohol; Leo does have a drinking problem.
Eager to see her handsome husband after a long time, Leo is burning with desire for the kind of sex that Maggie was desperate for in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Preparing herself for the meeting, Leo wears a sexy red dress and helps make Paco’s favorite dish, paella. But, alas, the meeting turns out to be disastrous from the second that Paco arrives. Cold and detached, he announces that he has only two hours (instead of the promised full day), needs his clothes ironed, and is very hungry. Leo has given her housekeeper, Blanca, the day off so that they can be alone. But nothing she does pleases Paco, and everything she says irritates him.
It is one rejection after another. When Paco takes a shower, the yearning Leo stares at his body through the glass door, but when he notices her, he turns to the other side. Helping him to dry up, she kneels down, burying her face in his crotch, only to be pushed away. Paco complains that the paella is too cold, but he won’t let her reheat it in the microwave. Dressing up quickly in his uniform, Paco is in a hurry to leave, despite Leo’s protest that he has not even given her the promised two hours. In one of the tale’s saddest scenes, she sits at her bed, opening up to Paco, who stands behind her. We observe how Paco leaves the room, while Leo continues to relate her unconditional love for him, unaware that she is talking to herself. Then, realizing she has been talking to the walls, Leo rushes after Paco and finally confronts him with a direct and burning question: Does their marriage hold any future? Paco coolly confirms her worst fears by saying, “None.”
Along with her “serious” unpublished work, Leo has written best-selling romances, using the pseudonym of Amanda Gris, but she now feels incapable of delivering the upbeat plots required by her contract. Drinking heavily, she has begun writing grim novels about accidents and murders, and her editors get angry at her for departing from her previously satisfying, if predictable, stories. No doubt Leo’s productivity is affected by her loneliness and sterile marriage. Contemplating suicide, like other Almodóvar heroines, Leo empties a bottle of pills. However, when she hears her mother’s voice on the answering machine, Leo vomits the pills. Rushing out, Leo runs into Ángel, who kindly takes her back to his flat to recover. The next day Ángel reveals that he has disclosed her secret—her identity as the famous writer.
Leo visits her perpetually anxious sister, Rosa (Rossy de Palma), who lives with their querulous and hypochondriac mother (Chus Lampreave). The sequences between Rosa and their mother provide the only comic relief in a film that’s otherwise straight, serious, and a bit dull. Almodóvar has said that Chus is his “cinematic mother”—“an actress who understands me perfectly.” As a result, he kept giving her more lines just minutes before shooting her scenes.72 Demonstrating his belief in gender-bending, he modeled the on-screen mother on his own birth father, who had cancer and decided to return to his village to die in the same room in which he had been born.
The long-suffering Rosa is married to a man (unseen) who’s out of work and has a drug problem. Feeling out of place in Madrid, the mother longs to go back to her native village. She endlessly complains about being starved and treated like a dog, unable to take a nap in the afternoon. “I cannot do anything to please your sister,” she tells Leo, who’s clearly her favorite daughter. “When I doze off, she is waking me, ‘Get up, get up.’ Christ, what does she want me to do, aerobics?” The mother shows contempt for Rosa’s taste in furniture, which she describes as that of a gypsy. For her part, the exasperated Rosa complains that their mother is so out of it that she cannot distinguish between skinheads and yuppies. More annoying is the mother’s insistence on taking laxatives on a daily basis because “she wants to shit all the time.”
Things become unbearable, and the mother calls Leo—this is the call that saves Leo’s life—to say that she has made up her mind to leave. Defeated and exhausted, Leo accompanies her mother, and they are greeted with the expected warm response from the villagers. Once Leo begins to recover, she sits among the women (mostly widows), who are studiously knitting. She asks them to sing traditional folksongs, and showing female solidarity that empowers Leo, they all sing, which makes Leo relax and smile for the first time in years.
In a separate, less engaging subplot, Leo’s loyal housekeeper, Blanca (Manuela Vargas), is visited by her son Antonio (Joaquín Cortés), who persuades her to resume her career as a flamenco dancer. Needing money for the show, Antonio retrieves a manuscript that Leo had dumped in the garbage, after it was dismissed by the publishers, and also steals her earrings. Meanwhile, the distraught Betty confides in Leo in the requisite Almodóvarian confession that she and Paco have been seeing each other.
Back in Madrid, Leo and Ángel attend a flamenco performance by Blanca and Antonio, after which Ángel avows his love. At midnight, Antonio shows up at Leo’s and admits he stole her things in order to finance the show. Handsome but much younger than Leo, Antonio treats her like a desirable woman, willing to “do anything” to repent for his sins. In a shrewd piece of casting, Almodóvar assigned the role of Antonio to Cortés, then a teenage sex symbol and a popular flamenco dancer. Leo accepts Antonio’s apology but resists his advances after verbal flirtation. Though vulnerable and tempted, Leo knows the line between proper and improper conduct for a woman her age. In the end, freed from any obligations, Leo can rebuild a new, healthier life.
The Flower of My Secret is the only Almodóvar picture in which there is no sex at all! Restraint is the name of the game in every aspect of the production, including the acting. The director instructed Paredes to focus on “the economy of gesture,” to do “as little acting as possible.” In the scene in which she comes back to life in the bathtub (after vomiting the pills), he wanted her to look like one of the living dead. In the last scene, Leo and Ángel have a toast on New Year’s Eve. Sitting in front of the fireplace, Ángel tells Leo that they are recreating the last scene from Cukor’s Rich and Famous (1981), in which the two old rivals, played by Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen, behaved in the same way. Almodóvar has said that he intended Ángel to undergo a process of feminization, to the point where at the end he and Leo become sort of two female writers. For him, turning Ángel into Leo’s best girlfriend is “a very positive process,”73 but for me, it’s one of the reasons the new bond lacks tension and the movie is a bit boring.
Live Flesh (Carne trémula), Almodóvar’s twelfth film, is the most interesting of his mature melodramas. This 1997 movie is perhaps more significant for the director’s allotting equally strong roles for male and female actors and for his treatment of serious, relatively unexplored issues, such as disability, in addition to his recurrent explorations of love and desire. As a result, he was praised by most critics for breaking new ground in his restrained approach to characterization and in his construction of a shapely narrative.
Live Flesh is also significant as the first Almodóvar film to feature Penélope Cruz, who would become a major player in his repertory company. Cruz was then mostly known for playing the pregnant girl in Jamón Jamón, made in 1992 by Almodóvar’s rival Luna (who passed away in 2013). The film’s cast is interesting for its inclusion of inexperienced actors, such as Cruz and the young Javier Bardem (who would become an Oscar-winning actor and appear as the villain in the Bond picture Skyfall), as well as world-renowned actors, such as Francesca Neri and Ángela Molina, who brought rich cultural associations to their roles.
For this film, Almodóvar bought the rights to Ruth Rendell’s book, which is set in London, only to throw it away, like Hitchcock used to do to the source materials of his films. “When I set out to adapt something, I don’t respect anything,” he told me in an interview, “and I gave the same advice when they wanted to change the protagonist of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from a white woman to a black one who’s younger (Jane Fonda, who was interested in a Hollywood remake, felt that she was too old to play a pregnant woman, the American counterpart of Pepa in the Spanish film).74 The script, which deviates from the novel, was co-penned by Almodóvar and Ray Loriga, a younger writer who was hired to assure greater authenticity and also establish a stronger connection with Spain’s younger audiences, as Almodóvar was nearing the age of fifty.
The tale begins and ends with a birth, reaffirming the director’s view that for every death, there is a new life. Live Flesh again demonstrates Almodóvar’s use of binary oppositions. In the first chapter, set in 1970, Victor, the son of an unmarried prostitute (Cruz), is born on a bus during a state of national emergency. In the symmetrical ending, set in 1990, Elena and Victor, the newly formed couple, are about to have a child, also on the streets of Madrid, just like Victor’s birth two decades ago.
The story takes place at the present time, when the twenty-year-old Victor (Liberto Rabal) is working as a pizza delivery boy. Victor is excited about his prospective date with Elena (Francesca Neri), but she turns him down. Like most of Almodóvar’s determined and horny males, Victor, unfazed, breaks into Elena’s apartment. In the argument that ensues, Elena fires a shot, but no one is injured. Two policemen arrive at the scene of the crime after the gunshot is reported, and in a panic, Victor takes Elena hostage. Sancho, the elder, drunkard policeman, tries to grab the gun. Another shot is fired, this time injuring the younger policeman, David (Javier Bardem), leading to Victor’s imprisonment, accused of causing David’s paralysis.
After he is released from prison, Victor seeks revenge against David and Elena, who are now married. Victor works as a volunteer in a shelter for homeless children, which “happens” to be run by Elena. Victor’s stalking of Elena angers David, who warns him to stop—or else. Victor then meets Sancho’s mistreated wife, Clara (Ángela Molina), and they begin an affair. Clara reveals that it was Sancho who pulled the trigger because of her affair with David. Feeling responsible for his false imprisonment, Elena softens toward Victor and goes to bed with him. After confessing her betrayal, Clara flees, but the jealous Sancho tracks her down, and they end up killing each other.
In the pre-credit sequence, Victor the baby is presented in a mischievous black-and-white parody of the NoDo and via newsreels from the Franco era. The first sequence introduces the main characters in their typical locales. The drug-addicted Elena is waiting for her dealer in a lavishly decorated apartment while Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is playing on the TV. The two policemen, David and Sancho, are seen patrolling the streets of Madrid. Reversing age-related stereotypes, David, the younger, is rational and serious, whereas Sancho, the older, is volatile and alcoholic. Clara, Sancho’s brutalized wife, is seen on her terrace tending her plants, just like Pepa did in Women on the Verge.
Victor, who begins as Elena’s ignorant sex partner, seeks access to her apartment, feeling she had used him for sex and then dumped him. Once again, Almodóvar contests sociosexual stereotypes by showing women as sexual aggressors and men as their more submissive partners. In the book, Victor is a psychotic serial rapist, but Almodóvar presents him as a more multi-nuanced character. Victor is played by the rising star Liberto Rabal, cast in the kind of role that Antonio Banderas used to play, an innocent adolescent (Women on the Verge) or a sexy and disturbed youth (Tie Me Up!).
Influenced perhaps by Hitchcock’s 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt, the doubling principle is put into effect: there are two cops, two shootings, two deaths, two births, even two voice-over narrations. The tale begins on Christmas with Franco’s minister Manuel Fraga suspending the few civil liberties that prevailed under the dictator. And it closes symmetrically on Christmas, two decades later, with Victor’s voice-over about how Spaniards stopped being afraid. The birth, which could be read as Almodóvar’s version of The Nativity, also has political dimensions, as it occurs toward the end of the Franco regime.
In Rendel’s book, the handicapped man is sexually impotent, having been traumatized, like Norman Bates in Psycho, by witnessing a primal scene between his parents. But Almodóvar changes that: in a bathroom scene, David makes love to Elena through oral sex. For Almodóvar, a steady, satisfying sexual bond between the physically abled and the disabled is not an insurmountable problem.75
Male frontal nudity is still the biggest taboo in cinema. Banderas had never consented to frontal nudity in Almodóvar’s films, not even in the 2011 The Skin I Live In. And in the 2004 Bad Education, Mexican sex symbol Gael García Bernal (who, in Y tu mamá también, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is seen masturbating with a peer) agreed to appear in tight white underwear while emerging out of a pool, but not fully naked, or seen engaged in anal intercourse. Rabal, Spain’s sex icon at the time, however, did consent, and he is briefly shown nude against smoky flames, when he gets out of the shower to extinguish a fire in the kitchen. As critic Paul Smith has noted, there is no particular dramatic reason for Rabal’s nakedness, other than perhaps to please Almodóvar’s core audience of gay and other curious viewers. Liberto is the grandson of the veteran actor Francisco Rabal, who had appeared in Buñuel’s 1961 masterpiece, Viridiana, a shrewd piece of casting that adds extra-filmic resonance.
As played by Francesca Neri, the famous Italian actress, Elena goes through radical transformation from a junkie to a loyal wife to a social worker. Clara, the abused wife seeking sex outside her loveless marriage, is played by Ángela Molina, who had appeared in Buñuel’s last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, as a foil to Carole Bouquet, who played the same character. As I will show, Buñuel’s 1977 film, in which the two actresses played the same part, inspired the casting strategy of Haynes in I’m Not There. Other actors also bring rich cultural baggage associated with Buñuel. Molina is remembered by many from Buñuel’s anticlerical The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), whose narrative, just like Live Flesh, deals with the issue of taking responsibility for a killing; as noted, a scene from that picture is seen on Elena’s TV screen.
The narrative’s organizational principle is based on circularity. The story begins and ends on the high holiday of Christmas, signifying birth and renewal. The two lovers begin their interaction in casual sex but end up living together twenty years later. Victor, the baby born on a bus, becomes a father, and Elena becomes a mother who, like Victor’s mother, gives birth in public.
Masculinity is portrayed in revisionist, varied, and deeper ways than has been the norm in the work of Almodóvar, who would continue to explore other dimensions of manhood in Talk to Her. Tough, brutal males, such as Sancho, are contrasted with sensitive and tender ones like David. Moreover, in this film, the men, just like the women, are capable of changing their behavior to accommodate their partners. One of the most moving scenes depicts David’s entrance into his car, which involves folding and stowing his wheelchair. Almodóvar shows respect in portraying the everyday lives of disabled people. The film benefits immensely from the fact that, as the disabled David, Bardem renders a remarkable performance of dignity and restraint.
The existence of mutually satisfying love is rare in Almodóvar’s work. Live Flesh represents a point of departure, even though Almodóvar insists that reciprocal love is possible only when the individuals involved are willing to take responsibility for their actions. In this film, real love materializes when Victor and Elena search and find, in a series of Almodóvarian confessions, the truth about the shootings, which have affected all the characters. In placing his domestic melodrama against a specific political context, the director indicates the importance of Spain’s shift from dictatorship to democracy. Despite the death of one couple, the happy ending for the other one emphasizes the movie’s ultimately upbeat tone. Victor and Elena, like Spain, are better human beings at the tale’s conclusion, (re)starting a relationship based on mutual respect.
PHASE THREE: MASTERPIECES
Announcing Almodóvar’s newly gained maturity, and continuing his boundless creativity, All About My Mother is the first in a series of four great films made between 1999 and 2006, representing the best phase of his career. All About My Mother, still my personal favorite of his films, is one of his universally acknowledged masterpieces and also one of his most commercially profitable films.
A summation work, All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) is a fiercely emotional yet unsentimental movie representing thematic, visual, and tonal synthesis of Almodóvar’s entire work. It is his first film to be shown at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, where most of his works would premiere in the future. For this accomplished film, he won the Cannes Best Director Award, though many critics thought he should have won the Palme d’Or. All About My Mother was his second picture to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and his first one to win. When the director got the Golden Globe Award for this film, he said it was like having an orgasm, but he likened winning the Oscar to experiencing “multiple orgasms.”
Arguably his warmest film, All About My Mother represents a loving tribute to women in their various shapes, ages, classes, and professions. On the surface a woman’s melodrama, the movie covers the entire range of emotions: loss, grief, reconciliation, camaraderie, and redemption. It depicts a circle of women who confront with forceful courage all kinds of ills: terminal disease (AIDS), desertion by husbands and lovers, old age and dementia, unplanned pregnancy, and death. Well balanced, the film mixes elements of comedy and drama, sentiment and humanity in equal measure, all contained in a multilayered narrative of extraordinary cohesiveness and emotional power. Critic Paul Smith noted that, if the plot is too melodramatic and the setting too theatrical, the characters and performances are decidedly not—they are grounded in realistic contexts. There is no surface glamour, despite the theatricality. The close-ups of the characters—the mother-nurse Manuela, the aging diva Huma, the terminally ill nun Rosa, the dying transsexual Lola, the drug-addicted lesbian Nina—reveal wrinkled faces of women who have gone through a painful life, allowing themselves to look downtrodden.
The opening credits appear and dissolve as the camera pans over medical objects, drips and dials in the primary colors of blue, red, and yellow, colors that will serve as the film’s visual codes, again signaling issues of life and death, birth and demise. The tale is dominated by women—many women. The heroine, Manuela (Cecilia Roth, the Argentinean actress who had starred in Labyrinth of Passion), is a single mother living in Madrid with her only son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín). On his seventeenth birthday, Manuela takes him to see a production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, starring the famous star Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). Manuela confesses to Esteban that she had once played Stella to his father’s Stanley Kowalski in Williams’s play—so we anticipate this information to come back later in the plot, as it does. The play’s legendary last scene, when Blanche is taken away after descent into madness, is repeated several times, though each time a different actress is playing Stella.
For most of her adulthood, Manuela has lived a life of quiet desperation, replete with lies—small and big lies—to herself and to others. Manuela, who has told Esteban that his father had died before he was born, promises to tell him more about his lineage after the show. Sadly, this never happens due to a fatal car accident. On a fateful rainy night, Huma and her co-star and lover Nina (Candela Peña) enter a taxi after the show. Running after them for an autograph, Esteban is hit by the taxi. The devastated Manuela, who witnesses the accident, is a nurse who organizes seminars to counsel relatives of prospective organ donors. Having decided to donate Esteban’s body, she violates the rules and takes a trip to meet (incognito) the recipient of her son’s organs. Almodóvar inserts a close-up of the chest of the middle-aged recipient when he gets out of the hospital, blessed with Esteban’s young heart.
After the tragedy, Manuela tries to bring together the disparate and unfinished elements of her life. Honoring Esteban’s last wish to find his father, who’s also named Esteban, she returns, after eighteen years away, to her hometown of Barcelona to seek him out. The boy’s father is a transsexual, Lola the Pioneer (Toni Cantó), who doesn’t know he has a child because Manuela had never told him. Manuela later relates how Esteban became Lola in Paris, when he got “a pair of breasts much bigger than mine.”
Manuela is now looking for Esteban-Lola in the marginal milieu of a sleazy pick-up site where dirty older men cruise hustlers and prostitutes, both male and female. Upon arrival (by taxi, Almodóvar’s favorite mode of transport), Manuela encounters La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a battered transsexual beaten up in the open fields by a frustrated customer. La Agrado has big fake breasts and a huge real cock (more about it later). She turns out to be Manuela’s old friend from their Barcelona days. She is named La Agrado because, as she explains, “I always agree.”
Two decades earlier La Agrado lived with Manuela and Esteban’s father before the latter had a sex-change operation. La Agrado complains to Manuela that she had taken in the sickly, HIV-positive Lola, but the ungrateful Lola ran off with her money and possessions. Through La Agrado, Manuela meets Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a nun bound for missionary service in El Salvador. Manuela then becomes a personal assistant to Huma, the stage actress whom her son had admired. She helps Huma manage her life, which includes controlling Nina, her tempestuous, drug-addicted younger lover, who periodically abandons her. Deciding to change her life, La Agrado goes to see Sister Rosa for counseling. She learns, however, that it’s Sister Rosa who needs help—Rosa now carries the HIV virus after sleeping with Lola. Though initially resistant, Manuela nurses Sister Rosa through her pregnancy, the birth of her child, and eventually her death (at childbirth). In the climax, Manuela confronts Lola, the dying transsexual and her son’s father. In the happy ending, Manuela brings up the baby boy, also named Esteban, who succeeds in defeating the lethal HIV virus.
Like other Almodóvar features, this film deals with the binary oppositions of procreation and death, creativity and stagnation, individual and community, self-sacrifice and social redemption, and love and loneliness. As in most of his films, for every death, there’s new life: Esteban’s heart beats within another man. Lola transmits the virus to Rosa, but her baby miraculously recovers. Esteban never sees the photo of his father, but his father (Lola) sees the photos of his dead son (by Manuela) and learns of the existence of his other son (by Rosa).
Structurally, unlike Live Flesh, which was circular, the story unfolds in linear mode, using only a few flashbacks. In the first, Manuela recalls the performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, which she had seen with her son on the night he was killed. The second and third flashbacks are inserted when Manuela tells Huma about her son and Huma recalls vividly that rainy night when she got a glimpse of the boy through the taxi’s window.
Consistent with Almodóvar’s worldview, in the end, the show, just like life itself, must go on. La Agrado, the “chick with a dick,” takes to the stage after a performance of Streetcar is canceled—Huma and Nina are both hospitalized after a fight. Proving that any woman has some acting skills, the likable La Agrado gives the audience a choice to leave or to stay, and several leave. Performing his/her own life story as a transsexual endowed with both male and female parts, La Agrado takes equal pride in her natural big penis and her fake big breasts. “A woman is authentic only insofar as she resembles her dream of herself,” she proudly exclaims. Each of his/her body parts has a price in the marketplace, except for her penis, which is a vital part for procreation as well as an object of pleasure.
Despite the occurrence of tragic events, humor prevails in the most devastating situations, as when Sister Rosa suddenly proclaims, “Prada is perfect for nuns,” or when Huma discloses, “I have not had one of those [penises] in a long time,” or when La Agrado performs onstage, describing each of her organs. Unity is brought to the narrative by a single character, the dying Lola, who has affected and infected all of the women, albeit in different ways. There is a price to be paid, however, and before dying, Lola sums up her life in one sentence: “I was always excessive, and now I am very tired.”
Almodóvar brings together the diverse characters in masterful two-shots. In the first act, mother and son are in the same frame, whether watching Bette Davis on TV or watching Huma performing onstage. Making a special dinner for her son on the night before his birthday, Manuela is rushed by Esteban to the living room, as All About Eve is about to begin playing on TV. They always change titles, Esteban complains. In Spanish, the movie is retitled Eve desnuda, which literally translates into Naked Eve, à la Goya’s painting Maya desnuda. Eagerly waiting for midnight, Manuela enters his room with her personal birthday gift, a book by Truman Capote. Reduced to childhood, when she used to tuck him in bed, Esteban asks his mother to read aloud. Densely self-referential, All About My Mother alludes to works by other directors and playwrights. Manuela is reading aloud to her son from Capote’s book: “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip, and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.” Capote’s often-quoted line becomes a running motif of Almodóvar’s text.
Manuela shares the screen with each of the characters—Huma, Rosa, La Agrado, and even Rosa’s mother, who is initially antagonistic. But significantly, Manuela doesn’t share the same space in the crucial reunion with her ex-husband. Almodóvar cuts sharply between the two, who lost touch decades ago and can never occupy the same frame and universe again. With Esteban’s imminent death, Manuela is spared of taking care of yet another individual, but if she needed to, she would have.
On the one hand, All About My Mother is a glossy melodrama, modeled partly on Sirk’s visual splendor, epitomized in All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life—all 1950s Hollywood films that Almodóvar admires. However, unlike the detached and ironic tone of Sirk’s works, the tone of Almodóvar’s film is lyrical, warm, meditative, and decidedly nonironic and noncynical. And although the latter celebrates the work of American writers and directors (Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Joseph L. Mankiewicz), he never lets the viewers forget that he is still a Spanish director. All About My Mother concludes with a specific reference to Spain’s indigenous culture, showing Huma again fully committed to her calling, the theater. She is now rehearsing the part of the rigid matriarch in Federico García Lorca’s best-known play, Blood Wedding. (As noted, Saura made a film of this play in 1981.)
Several scenes are set in the theater, a prevalent domain of melodrama as a distinct genre, and Almodóvar’s use of this particular milieu is strategic. The most crucial scenes take place backstage, in the dressing rooms, and they are played for earnest rather than for satirical points, as is the case of the actress Lora (played by Lana Turner) in Sirk’s Imitation of Life, a title that Almodóvar would never use because for him there’s no such thing. Almodóvar also cites his own pictures. Like The Flower of My Secret, this movie centers on one woman, Manuela, mourning the loss of her only son, whom she had raised alone. The movie’s theater scenes of A Streetcar Named Desire include the one in which Blanche DuBois is carried out of the Kowalski house after recycling the legendary line, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” These allusions to life, onstage and off, recall those of Cocteau’s monologue The Human Voice, which Rossellini had filmed with Anna Magnani, in Almodóvar’s film Law of Desire.
At one point or another, each of the female protagonists is dependent on the kindness of a stranger—always a female in Almodovar’s work—to borrow from Williams’s play. This is manifest in the random encounters, accidental meetings, spontaneous friendships, and unexpected needs that are ultimately met by and through female camaraderie. The dubbed inserts of the Bette Davis–Celeste Holme sequence from the 1950 Oscar-winning All About Eve parallel the Joan Crawford–Sterling Hayden clips from Johnny Guitar in Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. However, unlike the treacherous and greedy Eve Harrington in All About Eve, Manuela is a good-hearted and generous-to-a-fault femme who would never betray or deny the needs of other women. Unlike Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Almodóvar’s heroines may slip and “lose it” for a while, but they never really descend into madness (or commit suicide), surviving with stoicism and humor.
Stylistically, too, there are references to and parallels between All About My Mother and other Almodóvar pictures. La Agrado’s defiant claim, “I am authentic,” recalls that made by the maid Juana in Kika. Showing remarkable facility in constructing seamlessly cohesive narratives, the director is equally at ease with Prada and Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Lorca. As Paul Smith observed, he fuses pop culture and high culture, stylized aesthetics and genuine feeling, fake silicone breasts and real penises, and performance onstage and necessary acting offstage.
This film celebrates women qua women, viewing them all as performers. All About My Mother is dedicated to Almodóvar’s mother, who passed away shortly after the shoot was over, and to all the actresses who have played actresses on the stage or in film, including Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, and Romy Schneider. Manuela, who had once performed in A Streetcar Named Desire opposite her then husband, becomes an understudy—by necessity, not by calculated design. She represents the actress in all women, including the women in the director’s personal life. He said in an interview: “My initial idea was to make a film about the acting abilities of certain people who aren’t actors. As a child, I remember seeing this quality among the women in my family. They pretended much better than the men. Through their lies, they were able to avoid more than one tragedy.”76 As is clear by now, for the director, gender roles are performatively constituted, and as such, they need to be played inwardly and outwardly, serving the crucial function of revisionist, antihegemonic representation.77
Early on, Almodóvar became known as an actor’s director, one who spends a lot of time with his performers, based on his philosophy that “actors are the life of the cinema, everything is transmitted by them. Lighting, mise-en-scène, and all the rest are important, though nothing compared to the actors.”78 The richest, most subtle acting to be found in the work of the five directors considered in this book is found in the films of Almodóvar because of his perception of actors as “the special effects of my films.” Known for his rigorous mise-en-scène, in which the actors (not objects or décor) are central, he has paid attention to the minute details of acting, guiding his performers in terms of voice, facial expression, gestures, body position, and body movement. He loves actors because, as he has said time and again, “It’s impossible for them to lie to me when I’m directing them. I ask the actors to be completely naked in their emotions.”79 He recounts, “I work very hard on how the actors express the dialogue, how they walk and talk. When they pick up an object, I want it to be very physical—not obvious but definite.”80 Like the British director Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies), he aims for the acting to feel fresh and spontaneous, though all the dialogue is rehearsed and scripted before shooting begins: “Nothing happens for the first time in front of the camera. We’ve always rehearsed it before.”81
Addressing the charge of many critics that his cinema is essentially female-driven, Almodóvar decided to focus his next feature on men—two, in fact, and straight. Talk to Her (Hable con ella), made in 2002, is considered by many critics (not by me) to be Almodóvar’s most serious and emotional work, a dramatic feature that’s extremely risky due to its subject matter and narrative form and style. The film’s critical status was reflected by its nominations for the Best Director and the Best Original Screenplay Oscars, winning in the latter category. Showing the director’s humanism at its fullest, this fourteenth feature is an intimate exploration of friendship between two heterosexual men brought together under unusual but strangely similar circumstances.
Stylistically, there are similarities between Almodóvar’s last two works. All About My Mother ends with a theater curtain opening to reveal a darkened stage, and Talk to Her begins with the same curtain. The characters in All About My Mother are professional actresses and other women who play out their lives, on- and offstage. Similarly, Talk to Her is about narrators who recount their own lives, men who can (and would) talk to whomever is willing to listen, as most of the time there is no live audience for their performances.
A curtain of salmon-colored roses and gold fringing is pulled back to reveal one of German choreographer Pina Bausch’s signature dances, Café Müller, a tension-ridden piece, in which the stage is filled with wooden chairs and tables, while two women, eyes closed and arms extended, are moving to the music of Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. Among the spectators are the film’s protagonists, two men sitting next to each other by chance. Benigno (Javier Cámara) is a young, chubby nurse in his late twenties, and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) is a more masculine-looking and handsome writer in his early forties. The dance is so moving that Marco starts to cry. Benigno can see the gleam of the other man’s tears in the darkness of the stalls. He would like to tell Marco that he, too, is moved by the spectacle, but for now, he doesn’t dare. In this scene, playing with viewers’ expectations, Almodóvar contests gender-induced stereotypes, such as the notions that ballet is a “feminine” art form, that women like dance more than men, and that male spectators are not supposed to show overt emotions in public (“boys don’t cry”). In the course of the narrative, the director will blend the attributes that each man initially stands for: Marco’s emotional, tearful identification (expected of tragedy) with what he sees onstage and Benigno’s more distanced and observational approach (expected of comedy) to the dance.
Benigno’s apartment overlooks a dance studio run by Katerina (American actress Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Charlie). Day after day, Benigno is voyeuristically watching one of Katerina’s students, Alicia (Leonor Watling), eventually becoming infatuated and then fatally obsessed with her. Early on, Benigno follows Alicia down the street, and when she drops her purse, he is quick to give it back to her. Almodóvar’s movies abound with coincidence of this kind, in which the characters first encounter each other without actually meeting or speaking to each other.82 They meet again when Alicia is admitted to El Bosque, the clinic where Benigno works, after a car accident leaves her in a coma. Given her condition, Alicia is unaware that the man who gives her extra attention and erotic massages is none other than Benigno. Going beyond his duties as a nurse, Benigno spends a lot of time caring for a woman he is deeply in love with but has barely met. He volunteers to take over nightly shifts when his female colleague has domestic problems and needs to be replaced. Some of the staff members notice, first with curiosity and then with alarm, how he caresses her thighs, going higher and higher, or how he sensitively washes her body (including her bleeding vagina) with a white towel that turns red.
Meanwhile, Marco is assigned to interview Lydia (Rosario Flores), a well-known bullfighter whose on-the-rocks romance with the noted toreador El Niño de Valencia (Adolfo Fernández) has made the tabloids. Marco first notices Lydia on TV while he exercises. She is being interviewed by an aggressive female anchor that literally won’t let her go until she opens up about El Niño, who walked out on her. Intrigued, Marco requests to do an in-depth profile of Lydia for the Sunday section of El Pais. Their first encounter, during a trip to Madrid, doesn’t go well, and she is reluctant to collaborate. However, when Lydia runs hysterically out of her house after seeing a snake and the gentlemanly Marco kills the snake, she becomes considerably softer, and soon they fall in love. Marco treats Lydia kindly, and she responds to his attention. Unfortunately, during a bullfight that he attends, Lydia is gored, and her coma also sends her to El Bosque.
Months later the two men meet again at the clinic. Marco walks by Alicia’s room, staring curiously through the half-opened door as she lies naked and gets treated by Benigno. The second time he engages in voyeurism, Marco is caught gazing by Benigno, who invites him in. Finally gathering his courage, Benigno approaches Marco, telling him exactly how and when they met. Benigno recalls every small detail, including the tears in Marco’s eyes, although Marco doesn’t remember a thing about their first chance encounter.
This conversation serves as the “beginning of a beautiful friendship,” to quote Humphrey Bogart’s declaration to Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca. It’s an intense friendship between two men, containing some tensions on Benigno’s part but devoid of explicit homoerotic overtones. Marco is a sensitive, romantic, sensual male, capable of crying on more than one occasion, whereas Benigno’s sexuality is more troubled and complicated. Living with his mother (and taking care of all of her needs, including doing her hair and make-up), initially he comes across as a mama’s boy, claiming to be a sexual virgin despite his age. When Benigno visits a psychiatrist, who happens to be Alicia’s father, he states a preference for men rather than women, but we never see him engage in any encounter—social or sexual—with other men. When the psychiatrist insists on knowing if he has a partner, Benigno simply says, “More or less.” At first, Almodóvar constructs him as a type, an effeminate male, with a manner of speaking and gestures to match, who knows how to aestheticize his female patient. Gradually, he is revealed to be mentally disturbed, capable of raping Alicia while she is in a coma, an act for which he is sent to prison.
Unlike other Almodóvar films, Talk to Her does not show the rape, but it is implied that there may have been several rapes. While in jail, Benigno, who is not allowed to communicate with his colleagues, is eager to know if Alicia has given birth. Later, learning that the baby was born dead, Benigno realizes that his only way to escape his fate is to commit suicide, and he informs Marco of his intention. Rushing to the jail, the alarmed Marco arrives too late.
Most of the narrative depicts how, during a period of suspended time inside the clinic’s walls, the lives of four characters flow in various directions—past, present, and future—pushing the quartet toward an unknown destiny, while keeping the viewers in a state of anticipation and suspense. The names of the four characters must bear some significance: the first couple is A (Alicia) and B (Benigno), and the second couple is L (Lydia) and M (Marco). The goal of the text is to get rid of B and L so that A and M (amour?) will be able to form a new couple, free of past constraints and looking ahead to a brighter future. Thus, Lydia dies and Benigno commits suicide (not uncommon for Almodóvar’s obsessive lovers, as seen in Labyrinth of Passion, among other films).
The film’s boldest stroke is the insertion of a seven-minute, black-and-white silent film titled The Shrinking Man, which Almodóvar shot specifically for the movie. Breaking narrative continuity is always a dangerous act for a filmmaker—and is especially so here, as the sequence is tragic-comic in tone, describing a tiny man climbing, entering, and disappearing into a huge vagina. Almodóvar said that he did it to hide something that was going on in the story but the spectators should not see. For him, this kind of silence, which is the film’s leitmotif, is a mechanism that protects both his characters and his viewers.
Almodóvar brings the physical aspect of the relationship between the two men to a closure in a brief but touching scene set at the cemetery. Visiting Benigno’s grave, the grieving Marco leaves the hairpin that Benigno had stolen from Alicia and cherished all his life. The hairpin belongs to the director’s large gallery of physical objects that are infused with symbolic meanings (see Matador).
Talk to Her is a quiet, poignant meditation about aloneness and loneliness and the long convalescence from wounds provoked by passion. In a session with his psychiatrist, Benigno declares, “I’m not alone anymore,” and from his subjective POV, he is not, due to his passion for Alicia and the full-time job of tending to her needs and misperceiving her desires. Though the relationship is one-sided, Benigno tells Marco: “My relationship with Alicia is better than the relationship of many married couples I know.” Almodóvar has said that he wanted to show that “for utopian love to exist, only one person is necessary, and that that peculiar passion is sufficient in moving the relationship forward.”83
It is also a film about the varied and shifting nature of communication between couples, from the explicitly verbal to the sexually gestural to the scary and ominous silence. The movie shows how monologues delivered to a silent (noncommunicative or physically disabled) partner can be just as effective as actual dialogues, even (and especially) if they substitute for live interaction. Almodóvar dissects the notion of silence as an “eloquence of the body,” providing, much like Ingmar Bergman, a reflection about film as the ideal medium for conveying rich human relationships in minute detail. He shows how film can bring time to a standstill, affecting the lives of those who are telling, the narrators, and those who are listening, the characters in the film and the spectators in the movie theater.
Like other Almodóvar works, Talk to Her concerns the joy of narrativity and narration, the use of words as weapons against solitude, illness, insanity, and death, all of which recur in this picture—and in the rest of the director’s oeuvre. You might say that the characters’ lifestyle of solitude borders on madness. But there is also sensitivity and tenderness in these experiences, although they are not readily noticeable and thus do not deviate much from ordinary states of normalcy. Self-reflexive, Talk to Her comments on the film medium’s unique properties, capturing the essence of monologues and dialogues, especially when they are shot in close-ups. Benigno and Marco develop a powerful bond in their deep love for—and shared devotion to—women who cannot talk back (even when they open their eyes) or return their affection. Here, too, Almodóvar contests Western values of masculinity and femininity—specifically, the notion of males as “men of few words” and females as “nonstop talkers.”
In defiance of mainstream cinema, Almodóvar shows women to be capable of initiating contact, verbal and sexual, with men who are sensitive. The film’s last scene is particularly evocative, both fateful and coincidental. It stresses the symmetry and circularity of the text, which begins and concludes with a performance piece and shows how the chains of a haunting, unhealthy past can be broken.
Almodóvar has acknowledged that of the four characters, Alicia is the least developed—by design: “I know very little about Alicia. Only what is seen in the film. At times, the writer knows the characters’ past and their future, far beyond the ending of the film. In this case, I have the same information as the spectator.”84 Marco and Alicia meet during the intermission of Pina Bausch’s Masurca Fogo. It is the first time that each is aware of the other’s presence, though they had actually met before. Alicia was in a coma when Marco first saw her in the hospital. Later Alicia is not conscious that Marco is staring at her through the window, just as Benigno had, after Marco moved into Benigno’s apartment while the latter was in jail.
During intermission, Alicia recognizes Marco as the man seated just two rows in front of her; there’s one empty chair in the row that divides them. In the lobby, they sit on matching red couches. Alicia stares at him, as if expecting a look back from him. She holds his gaze as he collects himself and sits on a sofa. Initiating talk for the first time, Alicia asks, “Are you all right?” “Yes,” Marco says and then quickly adds, “I don’t know,” indicating his fragile state and lack of self-confidence. “I’m much better now,” Marco says in a whisper, almost to himself.
Alicia, after four years in a coma and confined to bed, is like a magical creature, an angel moving freely and talking. Her gaze suggests strong desire to interact with Marco. She and Marco finally occupy the same space, to which they belong physically and emotionally. Almodóvar accords each a close-up before slowly panning, rather than cutting, as they look at each other intensely.
With this picture, Almodóvar finally showed his remaining detractors his transformation from a rude boy into a sophisticated interpreter of modern melodramas, still retaining a gleeful capacity to affront conventional mores. Like other works, for every death, there’s birth, here in the shape of couple formation. Alicia and Benigno’s bond must be terminated so that she can form a new bond with a more suitable male, Marco.
On one level, the film is a cautious warning of relationships in which the one partner who loves carries his passion to an extreme. “It’s a horrible situation, full of anxieties and problems, when only one person loves,”85 Almodóvar has said. Ultimately, though, Talk to Her is meant to be an ode to the platonic love between two men, unfolding in a tale that is, by turns, strange, comic, tragic, and creepy. Thus, in spite of its admittedly perverse elements, the film is touching and poignant, finding humor in the most grotesque situations and rays of hope in the most devastated conditions.
It was only a matter of time before Almodóvar revisited a traumatic chapter of his past with a more detached perspective. Again changing gears, Almodóvar’s next feature, Bad Education (La mala educación), released in 2004, was his most autobiographical film. As he observed: “I had to make Bad Education. I had to get it out of my system before it became a destructive obsession.”86 Bad Education is my fourth favorite Almodóvar film, after All About My Mother, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Matador.
Almodóvar dug deeper than usual into his own past and psyche, making Bad Education harsher, darker, and more bitter than his two previous works, the accessible and enjoyable All About My Mother and Talk to Her. Past and present collide in complex and unexpected ways in this personal meditation about the dual power of love to liberate and to enslave, to inspire and to destroy. Occupying a significant place in his already rich oeuvre, Bad Education ranks as one of his strongest films, based on a multilayered script that took over a decade to write. As expected, it was not as commercially successful as the prize-winning Talk to Her and All About My Mother, but it is a more ambitious film, bringing together strands of his gay films of the 1980s with those of his more intimate and introspective melodramas of the 1990s.
Though drawing on personal experience, Almodóvar insisted that Bad Education is not completely autobiographical. Its origins go back to his Law of Desire. In that 1986 picture, Tina (played by Carmen Maura) goes into the church at the school where she had studied as a boy. A priest playing the organ in the choir asks for her identity, and she confesses that she had been a pupil at the school and that he (the priest) had been in love with her. But Almodóvar is not interested in settling scores with priests who continue to “bad-educate” boys like him. He has empirical evidence on his side: sex scandals have afflicted the Catholic Church over the past decade, damaging severely its reputation. In an interview, he disclosed: “The church doesn’t interest me, not even as an adversary. If I needed to take revenge, I wouldn’t have waited forty years to do so.”87 Although he attacks the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, that’s not what the movie is about.
Spanning seventeen years, the saga begins in 1964 and ends in 1980, with one crucial interval in 1977. Though a large part of the story is set in Madrid, the movie is not a reflection on La Movida of the early 1980s. What interests Almodóvar about that specific historic moment is the explosion of freedom, as opposed to the repression and obscurantism that prevailed in the 1960s, when he was growing up.
Despite some humor, Bad Education is a quintessential film noir—as dark as they come. It blends noir and crime elements in an erotic melodrama laced with personal memoirs, which again explores the issues of desire, obsession, and death. Thematically, in previous films, Almodóvar was inspired by, and borrowed from, Williams, Sirk, and Mankiewicz. In this picture, however, he goes deep inside the noir territory, mixing elements of such melodramas as Leave Her to Heaven; dark, excessive, and incestuous stories like Mildred Pierce; and obsessive romances like Laura. Like American film noir, Bad Education draws heavily on the hard-boiled literary tradition, defined by its crime-thriller elements and critique of societal mores. More specifically, Bad Education pays tribute to Wilder’s Double Indemnity and to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Like those classics, Bad Education is about obsessive love, illicit affairs, double-dealing, and scandalous revelations. The opening credits pay homage to Saul Bass (who did many striking title sequences for Hitchcock and Preminger), and the loud, discordant score of Alberto Iglesias is very much in the spirit of Bernard Herrmann’s thunderous scores for Hitchcock—specifically, Psycho.
Set in 1980 Madrid, the first act finds Enrique (Fele Martínez), a gay director, with no idea or inspiration for his next feature. Out of the blue, he’s visited by Ignacio (Mexican actor Gael García Bernal), a handsome youth claiming to be his old classmate and first love. Ignacio, who now goes by the name of Ángel, says he is pursuing an acting career. He hands Enrique a story titled The Visit, an allusion perhaps to Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s famous play The Visit of the Old Lady—later filmed as The Visit, starring Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn—a tragic comedy about a wealthy woman who offers the people of her hometown a fortune if they execute the man who had jilted her years back.
Ignacio’s tale is inspired by their childhood experiences, when they were abused by the school principal, Father Manolo, and by Ignacio’s subsequent life as Zahara, a drug-addicted transvestite. Bad Education might have been called Almodóvar’s Secrets & Lies, though bearing different meanings than Leigh’s acclaimed 1996 picture. Appearances are deceiving, and when it comes to identity, nothing is what it seems to be on the surface. As soon as we form an opinion of a character in Bad Education, Almodóvar presents a challenging twist, such as the revelation that Ignacio has a “mysterious” younger brother, Juan.
The childhood episodes display a lyrical, dreamy quality—especially noticeable in an idyllic scene out in the country with the boys relaxing and swimming. Ignacio is singing upon request Audrey Hepburn’s theme song, Moon River, from Blake Edwards’s 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, based on Capote’s most famous novel. That novel and film are admired by Almodóvar, who had made a significant reference to Capote in All About My Mother. Father Manolo is genuinely in love with the angelic Ignacio, and his cruel decision to separate him from Enrique is driven by obsessive jealousy.
Structurally, Bad Education displays one of the director’s most intricately woven plots. The movie unfolds as a labyrinth, with layers on top of layers, strands interfacing with other strands. It is a masterful work, in which symmetry works—but often in reverse. The organizational principle of the text is that of the triad. Bad Education is the story of three triangles: the trio of the two pupils (Ignacio and Enrique) and their school principal, the trio of the two brothers (Ignacio and Juan) and Mr. Berenguer, and, finally, the trio of the director, actor (Angel), and Mr. Berenguer.
A visitor who calls himself Mr. Berenguer and intrudes into Enrique’s set turns out to be Father Manolo himself, dressed in civilian clothes. It has been seventeen years since the last time they had met, when Manolo had expelled him from school. Now, it’s Enrique, as director, who expels Manolo-Berenguer from his office. However, when Manolo offers information about Ignacio’s death and Ángel’s identity, Enrique becomes intrigued, driven by the same curiosity that had led him to work with Ángel.
The metaphor of crocodiles, shown earlier in the film, comes full circle, making its meaning clearer. While listening to Manolo’s story, Enrique begins to feel like the woman who threw herself into a pool of crocodiles and was hugged by them while they ate her. (In this motif, Almodóvar might have been inspired by Eve Arden’s witty one-liner about crocodiles in the 1945 crime noir melodrama Mildred Pierce.)
Almodóvar borrows from the noir genre the elements of desire, deception, fatalism, double identity, and crime. But if in American noir the femme fatale is a female, in Bad Education, it’s a male, Juan. He is an enfant terrible who combines in his sultry and soulless nature elements from the roles played by Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Greer, and Jean Simmons, to mention some of Hollywood’s famous femme fatales and black widows. The scene in which Berenguer and Juan go to Valencia’s Museum of Giant Creatures to plan a murder pays explicit tribute to the supermarket scene in Double Indemnity, in which Stanwyck (in blonde wig and dark glasses) and Fred MacMurray plan to murder her husband. It may also allude to the famous aquarium scene between Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in Welles’s 1948 quintessential noir, The Lady from Shanghai.
Almodóvar uses the screen as a reflective mirror for the protagonists and the spectators. When Juan and Mr. Berenguer go to the movies after committing murder, the theater they choose “happens” to be showing two French noirs: Renoir’s The Human Beast and Marcel Carne’s Therese Raquin. These movies involve situations similar to those surrounding the men who are watching them. Leaving the theater, the devastated Berenguer complains, “It’s as if all the films were talking about us.” He is not kidding; they were!88
Fiction and reality continue to interface up to the end. When Berenguer visits Enrique’s set, he sees himself as Father Manolo in front of the camera—it’s a film about him, written by one pupil (Ignacio) and directed by another (Enrique). Berenguer is thus forced to contemplate his own past as it’s narrated and thus deconstructed by his former pupils-victims.
The density in Bad Education is manifest in the text’s multiple layers, based on the duality, duplicity, and mirrors that inform what is seen by the characters. There are at least three narrative layers: The first is the “real story”; the second is the story told by Ignacio in his short story (inspired by the “real story”); and the third is the story Enrique is adapting from the short story, now visualized as a film. Like many American noirs, the “double” and role reversal motifs are expressed in the portraiture of desire. The passion Father Manolo feels for the boy and his abusive power turn him into an executioner. However, years later, when Manolo calls himself Mr. Berenguer and falls in love with Juan, the wrong man, he is the one who becomes the victim. The handsome and versatile actor Garcia Bernal (currently in Jon Stewart’s Rosewater) does a remarkable job in impersonating three characters: Ignacio, Juan, and Ángel.
For me, Bad Education is a stronger, more personal, and more significant work than the universally acclaimed Talk to Her. It received a rapturous response when it played at the Cannes Film Festival, as the first Spanish film ever to open this prestigious international event. Almodóvar was aware that the film’s subject would limit its potential commercial appeal. Indeed, after a series of hugely successful pictures, Bad Education performed only moderately at the U.S. box office.89
Though stylistically different, thematically Volver belongs to the same universe as All About My Mother, centering on a group of victimized but resilient women who have (almost) no use for men in their lives. Three generations of women have survived with strength, audacity, and vitality various disasters, some caused by Mother Nature (gusting winds, ferocious fires) and others by many deaths, both natural and executions.
The film is set in a lively working-class neighborhood where immigrants from various Spanish provinces share with other groups the harsh realities of daily living and occasionally their fantasies and dreams. In Volver, Almodóvar contests the prevailing clichés about “Black” Spain, offering instead the opposite, a “White” Spain, in which communal life still prevails as a spontaneous, supportive, and life-affirming experience.
Volver could be described as a cross between Mildred Pierce and Arsenic and Old Lace, infused with elements of Almodóvar’s own What Have I Done to Deserve This? The film’s strong female protagonist takes over a restaurant (just like Mildred) and makes a successful business out of it after her daughter kills her indifferent, parasitical, and abusive husband. Unlike Mildred, though, she does not go back to conventional domesticity at the end.
The heroine, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz, in an Oscar-nominated turn), is married to an unemployed laborer with whom she has raised a teenage daughter (Yohana Cobo). Over the years, she has remained close to her sister Soledad, nicknamed Sole (Lola Dueñas), who makes her living as a hairdresser, operating an illegal beauty parlor in her home. Their mother Irene (Carmen Maura), who was believed to have died in a fire along with her husband, suddenly appears as a living ghost. As such, she begins to interact with Sole, then with her granddaughter, and finally with Raimunda. Strong and stubborn, mother Irene still has unresolved issues with Raimunda, who had moved to Madrid and neglected her, and she also needs to settle some matters with her village neighbor Agustina (Blanca Portillo) regarding the latter’s dead mother.
In terms of genre, Volver is neither surreal nor comedic, though it has elements of both. It shows how the living and the dead coexist without any tension or discord, resulting in situations that are both hilarious and emotional. Volver is essentially a film about the culture of death in La Mancha, where people practice death-related rituals with admirable naturalness. Almodóvar contemplates the mysterious but real ways in which the dead continue to influence the living. The seriousness with which the residents treat the rites honoring the dead suggests that the dead may be buried in the ground but they never really die, in the sense that they never disappear from their survivors’ existence—in both real and symbolic ways.
The first scene, set on a sunny and windy day, depicts cheerful women at the cemetery, cleaning the tombstones of their families. The buried are mostly husbands, and Almodóvar makes a point of indicating that the women tend to live longer than men. But in Raimunda’s case, the deceased are parents, soon to be joined by her husband, Paco, who, significantly, would not get a proper ceremony or burial. All of her life, Raimunda has believed that her parents were devoted to each other and died together, tightly embraced to the bitter end, in a lethal fire. We later learn that Raimunda’s father, just like her husband, Paco, was an adulterer who cheated with their neighbor, Agustina’s mother. Moreover, the fire was no accident, as everybody assumed, but the police (always ineffectual in Almodóvar’s films) never suspected that it was a deliberate act, a crime committed by Raimunda’s mother. Never subjected to real investigation, Irene disappears quietly and then just as quietly returns to the village as a ghost.
The first reel concerns the domestic life of the hard-working Raimunda, waiting on her lazy brute of a husband. Sitting in front of the TV, he watches soccer and guzzles one beer after another, creepily watching his daughter’s crotch as she sits with her legs spread in a natural way. Later on, Paco stares at his daughter through the half-open door while she undresses. In bed, trying to make love to Raimunda, she rejects him—“Don’t be a pest.” “Don’t call me a pest,” the macho man charges back, and the submissive Raimunda feels obligated to apologize, fearing his temper. Insensitive to Raimunda’s mood—she’s worried about her sickly Aunt Paula, who lives by herself—and lack of energy to make love, Paco begins to excite himself while lying behind her. Almodóvar stops the music and concentrates on the natural sounds of the masturbation, shot from the POV of Raimunda, who’s appalled and horrified.
While Raimunda is absent at work, the drunkard husband makes a pass at his daughter, telling her it’s all right because “You’re not really my daughter.” The girl, frightened and shocked, defends herself with a kitchen knife, seen earlier in a close-up when Raimunda was washing the dishes. Upon learning the truth, Raimunda protects the girl and creates an alibi—“Remember, I killed him,” she says, and the two engage in cleaning up the blood and wrapping the body, in what may be a tribute to the lengthy scene in Psycho, in which Norman Bates cleans up the bloody mess and buries Marion’s corpse and her car in the nearby swamps. For the time being, Raimunda deposits Paco’s corpse in the deep freeze of a restaurant owned by her friendly neighbor Emilio, who had asked her to supervise the business while he was taking a trip to Barcelona.
The restaurant serves as the major site in the second reel, when a film crew working in the region needs daily lunches. Pragmatic and with no signs of panic or hysteria, Raimunda promises to serve lunch to a crew of thirty later that day, at 4 P.M. to be precise. In just several hours, she rushes to the marketplace and borrows money and food from neighbors and passers-by—all women (including a hooker), of course—who gladly come to her rescue. The film director is one of the four males in Volver, and the most positive character. Almodóvar may be paying tribute to himself and/or to other male artists, who are expected to be more sensitive to the needs of all others, especially women.
Volver is the most extreme of Almodóvar’s films in terms of depicting complete solidarity among women, who have no use for men, not even as sex objects. There is not a single woman who’s happily married or attached; the teenage daughter is also deprived of a boyfriend. There are also no couples to be seen around. All the femmes live sexless lives; having repressed their libidos, they channel their anxieties and energies into rich family and community life. Almodóvar even refrains from showing the growing affection between Raimunda and the film director, who frequents her restaurant. There is exchange of simpatico looks, of some open and inviting smiles, but that’s about it. For now, Raimunda lives a sexless life—she is done with relationships, though clearly she enjoys the attention paid to her by the courteous director. As soon as she notices his gaze, Raimunda takes better care of herself, applying hot lipstick and flaunting a cleavage that gets deeper and deeper, exposing her beautiful breasts.
For Almodóvar, the most difficult thing about Volver was writing the script, perhaps because he decided to tell the story chronologically with no insertion of flashbacks, a characteristic device. (We never see the fatal fire or the adulterous affair.) Overall, though, it was a joyous experience, especially after Bad Education, which he described as “absolute hell.” “I had forgotten what it was like to shoot without having the feeling of being on the edge of the abyss. This time I suffered less; in fact, I didn’t suffer at all.”90
Displaying one of the shortest and most significant titles of Almodóvar’s films, Volver is also one of few films to use the original Spanish in all foreign theatrical markets. Bearing many meanings, Volver translates into “to come back,” “to return,” “to come home,” and “to repeat,” all of which apply to—and are valid with—the text. Volver includes several acts of coming back. It represents Almodóvar’s return to comedy, his return to a distinctly female world, and his return to La Mancha (“this is my most strictly Manchean film”), to its language, customs, patios, and streets. Moreover, after seventeen years of separation, he worked again with Carmen Maura, his muse and dominant actress in the 1980s. Other regular actresses, such as Penélope Cruz, Lola Dueñas, and Chus Lampreave, were cast in Volver, lending a sense of continuity, on-screen and off.
Volver also signaled a return to maternity as the essential source of human life and as the origin of fiction. More specifically, the film pays tribute to Almodóvar’s mother, the most influential figure of his life. He has said that “coming back to La Mancha is always like coming back to the maternal breast.”91 During the writing and shooting, he asked his mother to be physically present on the set—he needed her to be around. He later said, “My mother hasn’t appeared to me, though I felt her presence closer than ever.”92
Almodóvar claims that he has never fully understood the notion of death. This put him in a distressing situation when faced with the fast passage of time in his own life. The ghost of the mother who “appears” to her daughters is a recurrent phenomenon in his village. As he recalled: “I grew up hearing stories of apparitions, and this fiction has produced serenity in me such as I haven’t felt for a long time.”93 His innate restlessness has acted as a stimulus. With Volver, he believes he has recovered “part of my patience” and “a sense of my balance.” With this film, “I have gone through a painless mourning (like that of Agustina, the neighbor). I have filled a vacuum, I have said goodbye to my youth, to which I had not yet really said goodbye and needed to.”94
Volver honors the rites practiced in Almodóvar’s village, based on the myths that the dead never really vanish. The director has said that he always envied the naturalness with which his neighbors talked about the dead, cultivating their memories, carefully tending their graves on a regular basis, and so on. Like the film’s Agustina, many neighbors look after, and periodically visit, their pre-assigned graves while they are still alive. It was the first time, Almodóvar said, that “I could look at death without fear. I’m starting to get the idea that death exists.”95 Despite being a nonbeliever, he brings Maura’s character (Irene) from the other world and makes her talk about heaven, hell, and purgatory. “I’m not the first one to discover that the other world is here. We all have hell, heaven or purgatory, they are inside us. Jean-Paul Sartre put it better than me in his essays and plays (No Exit, for example).”96
Raimunda, looking for a place to bury her husband, decides to do it on the banks of the river where they had first met as innocent children. Time never stands still in Almodóvar’s movies. Rivers, like transports, tunnels, bridges, and passageways, prevail in his work (like the boys singing and swimming at the river in Bad Education), serving as potent metaphors for the transience of time, just as they did in Sirk’s films. In Sirk’s Written on the Wind, there is a flashback to the younger characters of Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson, having a picnic by the river and engraving on a tree the heart symbol of their love. Malone returns to this romantically pure site as a woman, her nymphomania and obsession with Hudson partly blamed on his sexual rejection of her. In Volver, assisted by the village’s prostitute, Regina, Raimunda digs a hole and buries Paco by the river. She later returns to the scene with her mother and daughter, telling the latter that this was Paco’s favorite site. She makes an engraving on an ancient tree, just like Malone did, but instead of a heart, she lists Paco’s dates of birth and death.
A dramatic comedy, Volver defies realism in its portrayal of local customs in favor of what Almodóvar has described as surreal naturalism: “I’ve always mixed genres. For me, it’s something natural. The idea of including a ghost in the plot is a comic one, particularly if you treat it in a realistic way. Sole’s attempts to hide the ghost of her mother from her sister, or the way in which she introduces her to her clients, as a dumb Russian, are essentially comedic.”97 Although the events in Raimunda’s house (her husband’s death) are terrible, the way she conceals the crime and the way she gets rid of Paco’s corpse (first freezing him in a cooler) create situations that are comic. Moving between divergent genres and opposing tones, often in a matter of seconds, one of Almodóvar’s signatures, calls for a more naturalistic interpretation of life, a strategy that makes the most ludicrous situations slightly more plausible and bearable—occasionally even funny. The other “realistic” element in Volver, apart from the recognizable setting, is the troupe of reliable actresses, who are all in top form—“in a state of grace,”98 to quote the director.
Almodóvar pays tribute to the positive parts of Spain that he had experienced as a child—especially to supportive neighbors, unmarried or widowed women who live alone and take care of their neighbors. This also was the director’s personal acknowledgment of the final years of his own mother, who was helped by her closest neighbors and served as inspiration for the composite character of Agustina. One of the film’s memorable moments finds Agustina alone on an empty and dusty road, forlornly watching as Sole’s car disappears in a long shot into the horizon. It conveys the notion of rural solitude, ordinary life stripped of any adornment.
Cruz has shown (from her screen debut in Luna’s Jamón, Jamón) that she is more forceful playing working-class characters. In Live Flesh, she played an uncouth hooker who goes into labor and gives birth on a bus. She appeared in only the first eight minutes of the film, but she made such an impression that she was remembered for the rest of the tale. In All About My Mother, she was memorable as the resilient yet sensitive nun named after a flower, Rosa. In Volver, her Raimunda belongs to the same type of woman that Maura had played in What Have I Done to Deserve This?: a force of nature, undaunted by any man—or any obstacle. But unlike Maura’s Gloria, Cruz’s Raimunda is a woman who can be furious one moment and defenselessly fragile a moment later. Her disarming vulnerability and the speed with which she could get in touch with her innermoset feelings surprised Almodóvar.99
Watching how Cruz’s beautiful brown eyes suddenly fill with tears was an indelible sight. Almodóvar noticed how at times the tears spill over like a torrent or how in other sequences they fill her eyes without ever spilling over. Witnessing what he described as “balance of tears within imbalance of crying” was thrilling, indicating Cruz’s contribution to the overall emotional impact of Volver.100 For Cruz’s wardrobe, Almodóvar and his costume designer decided on straight skirts and cardigans because they are classic garments, feminine and popular in any decade. The wardrobe was meant to channel the young and voluptuous Sophia Loren in her pre-Hollywood career, when she played sexy simpletons like a Neapolitan fish-seller. To approximate Loren’s sensual and lush look, Cruz wears a similar hairdo, dresses with deep cleavage, and uses extra pads to make her backside appear bigger and rounder.
Many viewers were happy to see Maura back in Almodóvar’s work, two decades after a falling out. The lyrics of a song by Latin American singer Chavela Vargas—“You always go back to the old places where you loved life”—apply to his reliable cast (Vargas’s songs had accompanied crucial scenes in Live Flesh). There is a long sequence in Volver, almost a monologue, in which Maura’s ghostlike character explains to her daughter the reasons for her death and for her return. It took a whole night to shoot this sequence, but it was rewarding. The director said that he cried each and every time he revised the text for this scene.101 He later admitted with self-deprecating humor that his conduct was not original. The inspiration for his emotionalism derived from Kathleen Turner’s persona in Romancing the Stone, an author of kitschy romantic novels who cries whenever she is writing.102
Just like All About My Mother, Volver represents a lovely portrait of women. The group includes the grandmother, Irene, who comes back; her two daughters, Raimunda and Sole; her granddaughter, Paula; and Aunt Paula, who still lives in the village. The ensemble also includes Agustina, the neighbor who knows the family’s hidden secrets. Agustina is a woman who as soon as she gets up taps on Aunt Paula’s window and doesn’t let up until Paula answers. When Aunt Paula dies, Agustina opens her home to the corpse in order to give it a proper wake until the nieces arrive. She has the ability to convert the mourning for her neighbors into mourning for her own mother, who had disappeared years ago. Agustina behaves as if she is an integral member of Raimunda’s family. An opposite type of neighbor, who hates his neighbors and transmits his hatred from generation to generation, also exists in the film, and not surprisingly, he is a male.