The most internationally popular and important Spanish director since Luis Bunuel, Pedro Almodovar fled the stifling Roman Catholicism of his provincial La Mancha at the age of 17 to do battle with the windmills of Madrid. Lacking the money to enter college, he peddled books and made jewelry before settling into a decade-long run as a clerk at the National Telephone Company during which he contributed comic strips and stories to underground magazines like STAR, VIBORA and VIBRACIONES. As the most visible exponent of "la movida" (the cultural ferment in Madrid post-Franco), he would eventually act with the avant-garde theater group Los Goliardos, meeting actors like Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas who would become key players in his movie repertory company. Additionally, he would publish parodic memoirs under the pen name 'Patti Diphusa' (a fictitious international porn star) in LA LUNA and record and perform (in drag) with his own band (Almodovar and McNamara), although not before shooting his first Super-8 shorts, beginning with "Dos Putas, o Historia de Ampor que Termina en Boda" (1974).
While other directors of his generation were making somber films about the Franco years, Almodovar made the conscious intellectual decision to never allude to the specter of the generalisimo, recording instead the vibrant explosion of wild behavior and hedonism expressed in the giddy rush of freedom following the old fascist's death in 1975. In fact, his first mainstream feature "Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom" (1980), shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm, was an instant success, due in large part to the marked absence of Franco's shadow. Almodovar continued to develop his eye-popping colorful style, making affectionately off-the-wall movies chronicling the dark, bawdy and ultimately lonely misadventures of people living on the fringes of society--heroin-shooting nuns in "Dark Habits" (1983); a speed-addicted cleaning woman in "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" (1984); a murderous bullfighter in "Matador" (1986); and lovelorn homosexuals and transsexuals in "Law and Desire" (1987), a film which drew fire for its depiction of unprotected gay sex.
Though openly gay, Almodovar took umbrage at what he considered the pejorative label of "gay filmmaker", arguing that the homosexual sensibility in his films did not make them "gay films", but rather films depicting universal passion to which both homosexuals and heterosexuals could relate. The director successfully transcended these early attempts to classify him, and when people refer to him today as the undisputed leader of the New Spanish Cinema, there is no tag regarding his sexual orientation. Funny, outrageous, sexy, even kinky, his early movies driven by headstrong (and high-strung) heroines earned him a reputation as a fine director of women (a contemporary George Cukor) and culminated in the wackily exuberant farce "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (1988). Almodovar painted the manic Madrid of the 80s as a playground for wit--above all, women's wit--and audiences responded enthusiastically, making it the most successful film in Spanish box-office history, one that won international acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film.
Of all his films to date, "Women" faired the best with Americans, grossing a phenomenal $7 million in the States. Almodovar's attempt at high comedy a la "How to Marry a Millionaire" (1953) resulted in what he called an "absolutely white" movie covering 48 hours in the lives of several women who are so hysterical, they don't have time for sex and drugs. Though seemingly at odds with the uninhibited signature of his earlier work, the lack of oral sex acts and dope that made it in the words of leading lady Maura "a film that our nephews will be allowed to see" also made it more accessible to conservative US audiences. His next film "Atame!/Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" (1990), however, earned an X rating for its one prolonged sex scene, which showed the two lovers only from the waist up and focused primarily on the woman's sexual fulfillment. Perhaps the success of "Women" had made him a target of the MPAA, but the advocacy of William Kunstler on the picture's behalf did not dissuade the ratings board. The X stood, causing the incensed director to compare MPAA's tactics to fascist techniques under Franco.
"Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!", Almodovar's fifth and last movie with Banderas, grossed $4 million in the States but since then his US box office has been in a downward spiral. Americans loved the campy "Women" but responded less enthusiastically to the kidnapping central to "Tie Me Up!". "High Heels" (1991) started out in the helmer's typically irreverent, wacky style but ran out of steam about halfway through, and the lengthy rape scene of "Kika" (1993), which earned the film its NC-17, did not strike US audiences as funny, once again causing the director to decry Americans as puritanical and lacking a sense of humor for their inability to see rape as a laughing matter. "The Flower of My Secret" (1995), while true to Almodovar's typically sympathetic focus on the plight of the contemporary Spanish woman, also revealed a more mature artist at work. Audiences expecting the enfant terrible's familiar, off-beat black humor saw a return to the masterful high comedy of urban life, accompanied by the sad notes of resignation and compromise that signaled a new austerity.
With "Live Flesh" (1998), Almodovar moved beyond his stance of never referring to the Franco years while showing he could fuse visual and sexual anarchy with the most elegant of plots. He also for the first time filmed material which he had not originated, loosely adapting Ruth Rendell's novel into a completely Spanish sensibility. The movie opens with the birth of Victor on a bus in 70s Madrid, its streets bare because of the restrictions of the Franco regime, and comes full circle with the birth of Victor's son 26 years later in the middle of a Madrid street choked with traffic, symbolic of the better life Victor's son will enjoy in a democratic Spain. In an ominous note for Spanish audiences, the voice heard announcing the state of emergency at the picture's beginning belongs to Manuel Fraga Iribane, formerly Franco's minister of information and grand old man of the conservative party ruling Spain today. Almodovar's concerns about that new right-wing government prompted his use of this device to remind viewers that "we are not so far from it (the awful past)."
Though American audiences have not embraced the more political and sober Almodovar, the change of mood has proved popular in Spain, where critics who previously attacked the unevenness of his plotting and superficiality of his characters proclaimed "Live Flesh" a masterpiece, qualifying it with adjectives like consistent and cohesive. No longer the overgrown kid who sprang from the thick of Madrid's anything-goes night life, armed with a hand-held camera, to record the intoxication of Spain's post-Franco freedoms, he has reinvented himself triumphantly as a consummate stylist with a serious touch. The departure from his wildly comedic storylines represents the evolution of a director who needed to tackle fresh and dangerous territory to escape becoming mannered. What interests Almodovar as he enters this period of maturity is a narrative that truthfully reveals his characters' emotions, and the fully-developed masculinity of "Live Flesh" that replaces the crude and flat males of his recent work is just one indication of an auteur beginning to demonstrate complete command of the art form. |
