Confessions—Almodóvarian style—dominate the last reel. As we expected and suspected, Paco is not the daughter’s birth father, though he has raised her as his own. Thus, Raimunda, sexually abused by her own father, is both the mother and the sister of her daughter, just as Faye Dunaway revealed in the notorious, much imitated dramatic climax of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (“she’s my daughter, she is my sister…”).
The final chapters center on Agustina, now suffering from terminal cancer and determined to find out what had happened to her mother—it’s her last wish. (Thematically, Volver could have been easily called All About Her Mother.) Having performed invaluable duties in caring for Aunt Paula until the latter’s death, Agustina feels she is entitled to the same honorable treatment from Irene and Raimunda.
The very last scene is extremely touching, even by Almodóvar’s high standards. Irene takes care of the dying Agustina, administering the injection needed to relieve her of pain and perhaps helping her die quietly and peacefully in her own bed, before she is “returned” to the grave she had already prepared for herself. Irene is watching TV, allowing Almodóvar to pay tribute to another great actress in a quintessential maternal role: Anna Magnani in Luchino Visconti’s 1951 comedy, Bellissima. A force of nature, Magnani plays Maddalena, the overbearing stage mother of a daughter who has no talent. Standing in front of the mirror, Maddalena is combing her hair, and at one point, it feels as if she is staring directly in Irene’s eyes. Irene turns off the TV and engages in the film’s last dialogue, which offers a more ambiguous closure than is the norm for Almodóvar. Though unclear whether Agustina is dying in a case of euthanasia, she tells Irene, “That’s our business.” To which Irene responds, “That’s right. And nobody else’s.” Having redeemed herself and having reached rapprochement with her alienated daughter Raimunda, Irene closes the door, and the screen turns black before the end credits begin to roll down.
A film about a family of women, Volver is also made by a family of female actors, both reel (on-screen) and real (offscreen). On this picture, Almodóvar’s sisters served as his advisors when he shot scenes in La Mancha and Madrid. They made sure that the sites of the hair salon where they work, the kitchen where they prepare meals, the bathrooms, and even the cleaning materials are all authentic. Then there is the presence of two quintessential actresses of Almodóvar’s troupe, a generation apart, Maura and Cruz, with the former passing the torch to the latter, echoing the relationship between Divine and Ricki Lake in John Waters’s Hairspray (see chapter 5).
Almodóvar is much more of a “woman’s director” than Cukor (The Women, for example, not to mention numerous films with Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Greta Garbo), albeit without the pejorative meaning of that label in the case of Cukor. Historically, women feature more prominently in the works of Antonioni (the intimate collaborations with Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau, and others) and Hitchcock (about half of his fifty-three narratives are about women, and several are named after women). Yet neither Antonioni nor Hitchcock has ever been described as a woman’s director, largely due to the fact that they were heterosexuals. Almodóvar has earned the title of The Man Who Loves Women much more than Truffaut, to paraphrase the title of one of the famous French director’s films. For that matter, Truffaut’s Love on the Run would also apply to at least half of Almodóvar’s oeuvre.
The most recurrent motif of Almodóvar’s work is the celebration of women—a diversity of women, past and present, working class and middle class, young and old, and urban or rural. This was his reaction against the prevalent Hollywood genre of the buddy film, with its focus on male adventures and male camaraderie. “I am becoming a specialist in women,” he has said. “I listen to their conversations in buses and subways. I show myself through them. For me, men are too inflexible. They are condemned to play their Spanish macho role.”
Even hard-core feminist critics would have to acknowledge Almodóvar’s genuine affection for women and his empathetic understanding of them. The director believes that women, no matter their age or class, are closer to, and in more direct touch with, their feelings than are men. Women in his works begin as oppressed and subjugated victims before they turn into avengers. They often end up victorious over pain and grief, invariably caused by men, who tend to be betrayers, abusers, and oppressors. He has repeatedly observed: “I enjoy the complicity that exists between women. Women have been able to give themselves up unashamedly to friendship for cultural reasons, because they have been condemned to live out their private life in secret and that private life has only been revealed to female friends.”103 What humanizes all of Almodóvar’s women (even the tough ones) and makes them more vulnerable is their need to feel and look desirable. Thus, there are numerous close-ups in his films of women keeping themselves up, primping, applying hot red lipstick, lifting breasts tucked under tight bras (if they wear bras). His femmes never forget the importance of deep cleavage and high heels to their physical looks, morale, and impact on men. The desire to look desirable is one of the most significant motifs in his work.
PHASE FOUR: ELEGANT STYLIST
After experiencing unparalleled success for a decade with four consecutive masterpieces, Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos), from 2009, had a lesser impact on viewers because it was more impressive visually than narratively. Though showing that Almodóvar is a distinctive stylist, the film treads water rather than breaking new ground. The feature displays the director’s control over every aspect of the production, but this time it also shows the deliberate work involved in the textual construction. Despite elaborate mise-en-scène and a rich color palette, Broken Embraces feels less like an original feature and more like yet another take on the noir melodrama, a genre overused in cinema over the last two decades.
Almodóvar’s most expensive movie to date, Broken Embraces revisits old themes that have intrigued him for decades. The movie combines his three favorite genres: amour fou, crime noir, and seriocomedy, a mixture better understood when placed in the context of classic Hollywood cinema—and in the context of his own oeuvre. Thematically, the tale concerns Mateo (Lluís Homar), a former filmmaker who’s now blind. Mateo is trying to piece together a tragic episode of his past, his doomed affair with Lena (Penélope Cruz), a would-be actress and the mistress of Ernesto Martel Sr. (José Luis Gómez), the millionaire producer of Mateo’s latest picture. Crammed with many characters and subplots and structured as a film-within-a-film, Broken Embraces is a work in which the director places in one text almost everything he knows about cinema. There’s another problem: the closure in the last reel, which brings everything together by deploying a Freudian perspective, may be too facile.
Like other Almodóvar pictures, Broken Embraces starts with a tricky beginning—here a steamy sex scene between a blind, middle-aged but still handsomely virile writer and a much younger girl (half his age) he invites to his place after she helps him cross the street. Mateo asks the girl to describe in detail her face, her skin, her dress, and, above all, her body measurements—specifically, breasts and thighs. Surprisingly for a stranger, who doesn’t know a thing about her host, she responds to each question with a curious glee in her eyes. Mateo begins to caress her perfectly shaped breasts, and soon the couple is in the sack. Through a slow tracking shot of a purple sofa, we see just one foot of the girl hanging up in the air, with sounds of moaning and groaning in the background. When the quick sex is over, the girl goes to clean up in the bathroom, and in perfect timing, the bell door rings and his producer, Judit García, enters. Realizing what has happened, she helps Mateo retrieve his shirt from the floor while he zips up his pants.
Having a double identity, the protagonist answers to two names. At times, he is Harry Caine (perhaps a combination of the hero of Citizen Kane and Harry Lime, the character played by Orson Welles in The Third Man), a playful pseudonym with which he signs his stories. However, as a famous director he went by the name of Mateo Blanco, his real name.
Switching back and forth between Madrid in the 1990s (first 1992, then 1994) and the present time, the story establishes that fourteen years ago Harry-Mateo had a brutal car accident on the magnificent island of Lanzarote, in which he lost his sight and the love of his life, Lena. After the accident, the circumstances of which would be revealed at the end, Mateo goes back to his pseudonym, denying his past. Harry is being taken care of by Judit (Blanca Portillo, who played Agustina in Volver), his faithful production manager, with whom, we find out later, he had a brief affair. Also helping him is Judit’s sensitive son, Diego (Tamar Novas of Alejandro Amenábar’s Oscar winner, The Sea Inside), who’s multitasking as Harry-Mateo’s secretary-assistant, driving him around, typing his scenarios, serving as his guide and social companion, and listening to his advice and his stories. In a state of denial, Harry, still dynamic and attractive, lives a lifestyle caused by a self-induced amnesia. Over the years, he has learned how to benefit from his other, ultradeveloped senses, a compensation for the loss of his sight. Though Harry is a good listener, he is a much better raconteur.
Harry’s and Diego’s mutual affection evolves into a deeply intense male bonding when Harry rescues the youth after a drug overdose accident in a disco club sends Diego to the hospital. The two men conspire not to tell Judit, who was out of town that night. During his convalescence, Diego asks Harry about the origins of his other name, Mateo. Initially resistant, Harry goes on to tell him the story of his life as a form of entertainment, the way fathers tell children fairy tales when they put them to bed. In the course of the narrative, Harry also embraces the role of Diego’s father, first surrogate and then biological.
Like Manuela in All About My Mother, all of her life Judit has lied to Diego about his father’s identity, leading the boy to believe that he is the product of an affair with a stranger. Manuela had no chance to reveal the truth to her son, but Judit has. In a lengthy confession, she discloses that she had a brief affair with a man (who unbeknownst to her or to him was a closeted gay), but that Diego is actually Mateo’s biological son, a fact unknown to the father as well but disclosed at the end.
Not surprisingly, Harry’s fable is dark, a classic amour fou in which the central triangle is formed by Lena, a beautiful aspiring actress, and two older men—Harry, her director in a film called Girls and Suitcases (Chicas y maletas), and Martel, the film’s producer and Lena’s older lover and provider. Early on, Lena works as Martel’s secretary, and when she confides in him that her father is dying of cancer, Martel, who’s been lusting after her, comes to the rescue, providing expensive private care for him.
We learn that Lena has occasionally worked as an escort-prostitute for an old madam. One night, when Lena’s worried mother calls to report that her father’s condition had worsened, Lena, out of desperation, calls the madam. In yet another tribute to Buñuel, Lena introduces herself as Séverine; the heroine in Buñuel’s celebrated surreal masterpiece, Belle de jour, is Séverine Serizy (played by Catherine Deneuve). Violating professional ethics, the madam gives Lena’s personal number to her client, who “happens” to be Martel. Martel calls Lena right away, prompting the frightened girl to hang up and to immediately protest the madam’s violation.
Broken Embraces is, after all, a melodrama, so to complicate matters, Almodóvar introduces Ernesto Martel Jr., the abused gay son of Martel Sr., who hates his father and seeks revenge. Wishing to be a filmmaker, Martel Jr. follows all of the characters with a video camera that produces incriminating footage of them. The extensive use of phallic items, such as canes, guns, and staircases, is symbolic, as are the motif of the double (prevalent in Almodóvar’s films), the playful tone, and the self-reflexive references.
Girls and Suitcases, the film-within-a-film in Broken Embraces, starring Lena and produced by Martel Sr., is a funny, self-conscious tale bearing striking similarity to Almodóvar’s own satire Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, right down to the barbiturate-laced gazpacho. In Girls and Suitcases, Cruz plays Carmen Maura’s role in the original—her name is Pena in lieu of Pepa. Both films were shot in the same location, and the terrace is populated by the same creatures. Cruz’s physical appearance in Girls and Suitcases is an imitation of the look of the young Audrey Hepburn. Other wigs worn by Lena in the tale are inspired by such sex icons as the platinum blonde Marilyn Monroe and the dark-skinned and voluptuous Sophia Loren.
The color red is one of the unifying elements of Lena’s guises, a color that defines her numerous costumes and the whole picture. Just as in Hitchcock’s Marnie and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Red, each and every scene in Broken Embraces contains several objects in red, be they shirts, shoes, dresses, or paintings of big revolvers, which Almodóvar time and again pans, tracks, and scans as ominous signs of things to come. His careful scripting and methodical editing result in an intricate fusion of disparate elements. Jumbling genres and characters, he crams everything that he loves about cinema into Broken Embraces. In the movie that Lena is making for Mateo, Almodóvar pokes fun at the casually shocking contents, bright colors, and hysterical tone of his own work. His trademark hot primary colors leap out of the shadowy backgrounds in the exquisite imagery of Rodrigo Prieto, the brilliant Mexican cinematographer.
Broken Embraces reflects the work of a director confident in his game, though it is hard to shake the feeling of déjà vu. The film is replete with self-conscious references to other films and other directors. Particularly touching is the homage to Italian neorealist cinema. In a brief scene, Mateo and Lena flee Madrid for the vacation that would end disastrously. In their hotel, they watch on a small TV screen a famous scene from Rossellini’s 1953 masterpiece, Voyage to Italy, starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a couple whose marriage collapses while they are visiting archeological ruins. The scene, which shows in close-up Bergman’s horrified reaction to the skeletons, proves to be too much for the already distraught Lena, and Mateo turns off the TV abruptly. There are also allusions to classic Hollywood staircase falls, such as the one taken by Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, though here it is not self-induced; Lena is pushed down by her insanely jealous husband.
Like most American film noir, Broken Embraces contains time shifts and unfolds in flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. The flashbacks to Lena’s story begin in 1992, when she’s hoodwinked into marrying her wealthy stockbroker boss, Martel Sr. The latter is brilliantly played by Almodóvar newcomer José Luis Gómez, whose performance blends ruthlessness, benevolence, and vulnerability; Gómez is equally impressive in a small part in the director’s next feature, The Skin I Live In.
Early on, Mateo declares that he wants to make a movie about a relatively unknown story: the son of the famous American playwright Arthur Miller and his wife, Inge (whom he wed after Marilyn Monroe), who has Down syndrome. There is a good inside joke here. When Judit claims that it would be tough to get rights for a biopic about Miller, not to mention Mateo’s contempt for this popular but artistically debased genre, Mateo says that they will just fabricate and fictionalize the truth. There are the by now expected torn-up photos, suppressed secrets that scream to be revealed in public, blood ties that need to be restored before it’s too late, and even scripts about cosmetic-inventing vampires. Sporadically, there are some comedic touches, such as the lip-reading girl (Lola Dueñas), hired by the insanely jealous Martel Sr., who insists on hearing every word that the adulterous Lena had said, when the tape’s sound fails to reproduce her speech.
Cruz, who has always looked more comfortable in Spanish than Hollywood films, is terrific as Lena, offering a more nuanced performance than the one that accorded her the Oscar in Allen’s romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she plays the crazy former wife of Javier Bardem! (The two are now a real-life couple, raising their children.) Broken Embraces suffers considerably from the disappearance of Cruz three-quarters of the way into the film, and her riveting presence, as a femme fatale juggling lovers and guises, is very much missed.
Broken Embraces is so rigorous in its aesthetic strategy that it’s easy to disregard its overwrought narrative and succumb to the flow of strikingly artful images. However, formal style aside, the film is cold and detached, in sharp contrast to the effortless warmth and emotional depth of Almodóvar’s previous features, Talk to Her and Volver. One of the director’s most inward-looking films, Broken Embraces, he has said, is rooted in the migraines that began afflicting him in recent years. While recovering from them in a darkened room, he conjured the character of a blind filmmaker, reflecting his nightmare (and that of many other directors) of losing his vision. In Broken Embraces, the middle-aged director takes stock, exploring his roots as well as imagining his future. But for all its dark tragedy, it is ultimately an optimistic film. In the end, the disabled Harry-Mateo continues to work, determined to (re)embrace life. In one of the film’s most moving moments, he answers to his Caine identity for the first time after a long denial in a surreal Felliniesque scene, set on the beach surrounded by kites, surfers, lovers, children, and dogs.
No Almodóvar film is complete without personal confessions, revelations of secrets, and acts of redemption. Taking revenge on Mateo, who has run away with his wife, Martel Sr. cuts the footage of his film senselessly and mercilessly. Upon release, the film is predictably panned by the critics and proves to be a flop, a fact that Mateo and Lena learn from the newspaper clips they read during their vacation. But perhaps reflecting Almodóvar’s wish fulfillment as a director, the last word belongs to the auteur. Knowing Mateo’s love for this particular movie and his devotion to his work, Judit had secretly kept an assemblage with all the takes, which she now gladly hands over to him. Broken Embraces is a film in which pleasure emerges out of darkness, in which light needs to struggle before conquering the shadows. At the end, the newly formed social and professional family, composed of Mateo, Judit, and Diego, sets out to work on a new version, which is faithful to the director’s original vision, resulting in a satisfying movie. After two hours of a relentlessly bleak melodrama, Almodóvar lifts his viewers’ spirits by making them realize that, no matter how bad things are in the present, there’s always something to enjoy in the present and anticipate for the future.
The gloom and doom of Broken Embraces goes further in The Skin I Live In, Almodóvar’s creepiest film to date. After its world premiere at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, it played at the Toronto Film Festival and served as the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival before opening theatrically in October 2011 to a mostly positive response.
Asked about the artistic influences on his medical horror-thriller, Almodóvar mentioned Buñuel, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, the Hammer horror films, the psychedelic and kitsch style of cult Italian director Dario Argento, and the lyricism of Georges Franju—specifically, Franju’s best-known film, Eyes Without a Face. This multiplicity of inspirations might be one of the problems with The Skin I Live In, a feature that tries to do too much thematically and then is too eager to present a “neat” closure.
Despite my concerns with the narrative and its ideological foundations, The Skin I Live In boasts stylish elegance, rigorous mise-en-scène, and ultrapolished production values that are striking even by the director’s usual high standards. Harsher and grimmer than Bad Education, The Skin I Live In is the director’s first genuine tragedy, a horror drama devoid of humor or light notes. The film takes the Frankenstein-like fable to its most terrifying extremes, justifying for the first time the label of “cinema of cruelty.” More specifically, it borrows the bondage and captivity from Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! as well as the brutal rape (in fact, dual rape) from several films, and the car accident in which a loved one (here a wife) is injured or killed recalls Broken Embraces.
Almodóvar has lamented the “loss” of Antonio Banderas to Hollywood and star-wife Melanie Griffith (now divorced), claiming, “I can no longer afford him.” Reteaming with Banderas for the first time in two decades, The Skin I Live In is a welcome collaboration for both filmmaker and actor. Banderas’s cool image and effortless sex appeal were evident in Matador and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as well as in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado, in 1995. But that was two decades ago, after which he has experienced a dwindling career. One could hardly come up with three or four decent Hollywood movies—the Zorro films included—that Banderas has made in the United States. Ironically, Banderas was cast for his overt sex appeal as Tom Hanks’s lover in the AIDS drama Philadelphia, but the director (Jonathan Demme) and writer (Ron Nyswaner) lacked the courage to show the couple in intimate scenes, not even kissing.
Well cast in The Skin I Live In, Banderas plays Dr. Robert Ledgard, a famous plastic surgeon and widower whose wife was burned in a car crash. The accident left his wife nearly dead, burned with deep wounds, and placed under her husband’s loving care. It also left Ledgard the responsibility of raising by himself a young, oversensitive daughter. In flashbacks, it is later disclosed that the adulterous wife was running away with the wild son of Marilia, the loyal housekeeper, when they got into the accident.
Ever since that tragic event, Ledgard has been trying to create a new, special skin that he believes could have saved his wife. It has taken extraordinary time, energy, and money to develop in his laboratory a “miracle,” multifunctional skin that’s sensitive to caresses but that also serves as a shield against aggression, both external and internal. In his work, Ledgard has relied on thorough studies, risky experiments, and his ambitious personality; he lacks any scruples and morals—his obsessive goal justifies all means. To fulfill his aim, he has relied on one accomplice, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), the loyal housekeeper who has looked after him from the day he was born. The two reside in a huge, splendid estate named El Cigarral (The Orchard), seen as a prison, as an isolated, inaccessible place in the midst of Nature.
The early images are crucial in establishing the film’s particular locale and mood, showing a mansion surrounded by trees, a seemingly idyllic place protected by stone walls and high barred gates. Through one of the barred windows, a female—later revealed as Vera—is in motion. Almodóvar’s piercing camera tracks Vera, who is presumably naked as she is doing her yoga exercises. However, it turns out that she’s wearing a flesh-colored stocking that clings to her like a second skin (pun intended). In the kitchen, Marilia prepares Vera’s breakfast, which she sends up in a dumbwaiter that opens directly onto the Vera’s room. Vera is the captive woman, and Marilia is her jailer, supervising each and every move via TV screens all over the house.
Vera now serves as a guinea pig for the doctor. In a previous life, Vera was a handsome boy who had seduced and then brutally raped Ledgard’s only daughter during her first outing to a wedding party with her father. The girl is still troubled by the suicide of her mother, who had jumped out of the window upon seeing a reflection of her ravaged face. In one second, during which the otherwise ultraprotective father is not watching, she is approached by a charming young man. It is clear that this is the first time the shy girl has been courted. This is depicted in a magnificently shot nocturnal scene in a fable-like forest, lending the film the aura of a fairy tale, populated by male wolves and young innocent virgins. Tracing his daughter’s whereabouts, Ledgard retrieves one of her purple shoes, whose heel is broken, and her purple scarf before finding the girl comatose by a tree.
Ledgard recalls seeing a man fleeing the scene on a motorcycle. Seeking revenge, Ledgard captures the rapist, starves and tortures him for days like a dog, and then forces upon him a sex-change operation, renaming him Vera. The scene in which the boy realizes that he is now a girl is horrifying to him and to us. Through flashback, we learn that the boy worked in a women’s clothing store owned by his stern and domineering mother. A peculiar boy, he is both a mama’s boy and a bigoted womanizer, unable to accept the fact that his attractive coworker is a lesbian who rejects his persistent advances.
In six years of enforced reclusion, Vera has lost her own skin—literally—but she hasn’t lost her identity entirely. She’s tougher than her appearance suggests: As a survivor, she has been forced to learn how to live within her skin, even if it is imposed by others. Once she accepts her new skin, Vera instructs herself in endurance and patience—learning how to wait. But wait for what? The dramatic turning point occurs during a carnival, when a tattooed man, in a tight tiger costume that accentuates his crotch, forces Marilia to open the gates. He turns out to be Marilia’s birth son and, unbeknownst to Ledgard, the doctor’s stepbrother. Marilia has always preferred Ledgard, treating the other son as a mad man. Blaming his mother for what he has become, he ties her up in a chair and gags her in a scene that recalls Kika, where Rossy de Palma’s maid is tied and gagged in the kitchen by her brother.
Retrieving the key to the sealed room where Vera is held captive, he brutally rapes her. Arriving just in the nick of time, Ledgard shoots and kills the tiger man (his stepbrother). Vera, bleeding and severely injured, begins yet another healing process. She proves resilient and indestructible: later, after a failed attempt to run away from Ledgard, she slits her own throat but survives.
Too hermetic and inward-looking, The Skin I Live In also suffers from a forced closure, though it is decidedly not a happy one. After a gory shootout, in which both Ledgard and Marilia are killed, Vera finally escapes. Showing up at his mother’s store where he used to work as a man, Vera identifies herself/himself to her/his coworker and his mother. Ironically, Vera is wearing the same dress that early on he wanted his female coworker to try, and the latter suggested jokingly, “Why don’t you try it on?” The joke has become a tragic reality. The last image depicts a newly formed family unit, now composed of three females, including Vera, whom Almodóvar places at the center, flanked by the two other women.
Ledgard could be seen as a modern-day Frankenstein, sending postmodern chills through our bones as he’s seen walking in his huge, meticulously decorated estate as if it were composed of halls of mirrors. Visually, the film is gleaming with seductive images, but they are mostly on the surface. The film’s more serious issues—the extent to which human beings feel comfortable in their own skin and how that feeling relates to their identity—are presented in provocative and shocking ways. A close female friend of mine pointed out that for her the movie is fascinating because it portrays in graphic detail the pain involved in penetration. There are three scenes in which the doctor tries to penetrate into Vera’s (reconstructed) vagina but has to stop because she cannot tolerate the pain. This makes Vera’s rape by the tiger man all the more horrific, teaching her a lesson about what it means to rape a young girl (Ledgard’s daughter).
Almodóvar shows masterful skill over the technical aspects of the production. Over the years, he has turned from a jokester into a stylist, from the maker of joyous satires into the director of shrill and polished melodramas. It is impossible not to admire the slow pans along the decorated walls and the carpeted floors, the gates/curtains used to introduce new chapters and characters, the subtle and seamless dissolves, the elegant tracking shots, and the smooth cuts. But his early trademarks of vivid spontaneity and joy are sacrificed for what is essentially a calculated, cold-blooded revenge tale.
Of Almodóvar’s nineteen films to date, Broken Embraces and The Skin I Live In stand out in their distanced approach and lack of empathy for most of the characters, be they male or female. Broken Embraces is a manipulatively constructed puzzle that relies on a film-within-a-film to supply answers to its issues in order to make sense of the convoluted narrative. In The Skin I Live In, the grimmest of the director’s films, five of the tale’s six characters and up dead in one way or another, and the only survivor is a former young man forced to become a woman.
After a couple of stylized melodramas, devoid of any humor or fun—the film noir Broken Embraces and the horror-thriller The Skin I Live In—Almodóvar went back to his roots with I’m So Excited. The movie was complete in time for showing at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where all of his pictures since 1999 had premiered. However, for a variety of reasons, it did not make it as an official selection. Sony Classics, the director’s loyal distributor, decided to open the movie in June, as counterprogramming to Hollywood’s blockbusters.
A minor work, I’m So Excited is an ultra-slight sex farce that’s retro in both the positive and the negative senses of the word. The picture is rude and crude in the manner of Almodóvar’s first pictures, except that it’s airless and only sporadically involving. It divided the British critics and got similarly mixed to negative reactions from their American counterparts. For me, it’s Almodóvar’s weakest movie in what has otherwise been a glorious career spanning thirty-five years and consisting of nineteen features, most of which are good or really great.
Almodóvar’s seemingly wild and transgressive feature is too simple, too broad, and too silly as a comedy or farce. The movie goes out of its way to joyously celebrate free-for-all sexuality, in its variations of gay, straight, and bisexual. I’m So Excited is meant to be light and fluffy, and for a while it is, but, ultimately, it’s too strained, fractured, and lacking in genuine comic energy. The cast reunites many thespians from all the phases of the director’s career, beginning with Cecilia Roth, who was in his first two pictures and in his 1999 masterpiece, All About My Mother (still my favorite Almodóvar picture).
The first scene is sort of a teaser, featuring Almodóvar’s regular actors Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas in cameo parts as airport workers-lovers who suddenly realize they are soon going to become parents. The action then moves up into an airplane that’s bound for Mexico. Due to technical problems, it begins circling in the air—just like the film itself, which never really takes off.
Almodóvar is obviously in a camp mood, manifest in his introduction of three male flight attendants, whose roles are scripted as caricatures (by intent, I assume). Javier Cámara (Talk to Her) plays Joserra, a high-strung, fast-talking gay attendant who has something to say about everybody and everything. Raúl Arévalo is the slender, pill-fueled Ulloa. Carlos Areces is the chubby, sexually repressed, religiously fanatic Fajas, who prays for the souls of his mates and passengers with a portable toy altar he carries with him.
Most of the action is confined to the passengers in business class, as those traveling in economy have been given sleeping pills. The passengers include Bruna (Lola Dueñas), a sexually hung-up psychic who has a particular ability for sensing death and claims to be a virgin. Bruna is the first to see the oncoming troubles, which she shares with the pilots. The middle-aged but still attractive Norma Boss (Cecilia Roth) is a former actress who is now a dominatrix serving members of Spain’s political class. Norma claims to have video recordings of Spain’s 600 most important people as they engage in bondage. Also on board, and initially not mixing together well, are the soap star Galán (Guillermo Toledo), the corrupt businessman Más (José Luis Torrijo), and the notorious Mexican hit man Infante (José María Yazpik).
The pilots are forced to circle for hours, and so does Almodóvar, unable to find good or funny or crazy reasons for the queeny flight attendants, first-class passengers, and pilots to fight and fuck. The movie offers some superfluous fun, like the bitching, vamping, eye-rolling, and humping. But, overall, the visual pleasures are minor, such as the safety signs that look like erections or the piles of suds bobbing up and down, not to mention the name of the airline, Peninsula Airlines, which has phallic connotations. It’s as if the director set out to exploit the most facile attributes of his earlier features, bitchy dialogue and high camp—here associated with the gay-dominated profession of flight attendants.
The attendants decide to keep the passengers’ spirits up by lacing their drinks with mescaline. Later on, they suddenly erupt into a performance of the Pointer Sisters’ disco classic “I’m So Excited,” which gives the picture its English-language title. In Spanish, it’s called Los amantes pasajeros and initially was known as The Brief Lovers. When the drugs kick in, all class and sexual barriers disappear, resulting in erotic scenes between the pilots (one bisexual, the other straight) and the attendants and among the passengers, forming some of the most unlikely and unappealing couples in Almodóvar’s output.
A pre-credits note states that the film bears no relation to anything factual, but I suspect that it may have resonated better in Spain, due to the allusions made to that country’s economics, politics, and morality. Artistically, I’m So Excited is a misfire, a satire that’s just wildly erratic but neither funny nor erotic. Thirty years ago I’m So Excited might have been considered sexually audacious, but by Almodóvar’s standards, the movie is retro camp. The stylistic control and formal restraint that had characterized his last two pictures are all gone, replaced here by the kind of anarchic mood that’s simply not humorous enough.
Predictably panned by most critics, the movie also failed to attract viewers. The screening I attended at the Provincetown Film Festival, where the audience was largely gay and familiar with Almodóvar’s work, went poorly; there were even some walkouts. After the showing, I overheard a spectator tell his companion, “This is Almodóvar for the masses,” echoing the perceptive review of critic Wesley Morris: “Almodóvar is basically exploiting what people presume an Almodóvar movie to be—bitchy campiness—in order to get some stupid telenovela fun out of his system. By the time you see a pile of suds bobbing up and down, the sight gags have basically driven over a cliff. Yeah, this is what people think Almodóvar is. But it’s Almodóvar for people who assume they can’t get Almodóvar otherwise. It’s Almodóvar for Target.”104 As a result, the picture was not seen or liked by any demographic group, resulting in a flop for the distributor, Sony Classics, with a paltry gross of $1.5 million.
Having made nineteen films, Almodóvar may be going through a transition, perhaps even a turning point in his career. His next feature or two will be crucial to maintaining his reputation as a major director. Over the past thirty-five years, he has produced a body of work that’s thematically challenging and visually compelling. At sixty-five, he’s still an inventive director who has many more stories to tell. I have no doubt that I’m So Excited is just a footnote in an otherwise diverse and impressive oeuvre of a director who continues to boast the most significant voice in contemporary European cinema. As of this writing, Almodóvar is shooting his new film, Silencio, which he describes as a hard-hitting drama and a return “the the cinema of women.” Starring Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarge as the older and younger versions of the protagonist, the film is slated to release in 2016.
PEDRO ALMODÓVAR FILMOGRAPHY
| 1974 |
Two Whores, or a Love Story That Ends in a Wedding (Dos Putas, o, historia de amor que termina en boda) (short) |
|
The Fall of Sodom (La caída de Sódoma) (short) |
| 1977 |
Sex Comes and Goes (Sexo va, sexo viene) (short) |
| 1980 |
Pepi, Lucy, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Loci, Bom y otras chicas del montón) |
| 1982 |
Labyrinth of Passion (Laberinto de pasiones) |
| 1983 |
Dark Habits (Entre tinieblas) |
| 1984 |
What Have I Done to Deserve This? (¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!) |
| 1986 |
Matador |
| 1987 |
Law of Desire (La ley de deseo) |
| 1988 |
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) |
| 1990 |
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!) |
| 1991 |
High Heels (Tacones lejanos) |
| 1993 |
Kika |
| 1995 |
The Flower of My Secret (La flor de mi secreto) |
| 1997 |
Live Flesh (Carne trémula) |
| 1999 |
All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) |
| 2002 |
Talk to Her (Hable con ella) |
| 2004 |
Bad Education (La mala educación) |
| 2006 |
Volver |
| 2009 |
Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos) |
| 2011 |
The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) |
| 2013 |
I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros) |
| 2015 |
Silencio (in production) |