The Spanish directors films are famed for their insane plots, bright colors, and high emotionsand a radical queer sensibility, even when the protagonists are straight.">
Is there anyone like Pedro Almodvar?
For those who know his workand for a sometimes-experimental queer Spanish director, thats more people than youd expecthe is a rara avis: an artist whose work has grown over the decades, who has known both commercial and critical success, and whose 20 films run the gamut from hysterical slapstick (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) to serious family drama (All About My Mother).
Now, the Museum of Modern Arts film department, which has previously premiered several of Almodvars films, is hosting a retrospective of his 35 year career.
At the festivals kickoff, the New York premiere of Almodvars new film, Julieta (which goes on general release December 21), the adoring crowd was peppered with downtown art celebrities and even a few politicians.
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The co-curator of the festival, Rajendra Roy, aptly noted that you may think you are the only one who loves Almodvar as much as you do. You are wrong.
I first discovered Almodvar in 1988, with Women on the Verge, which came eight years into Almodvars feature-directorial career but which was his commercial breakthrough in the United States. It was probably a good introduction; as a 17-year-old closeted kid in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, Im not sure I couldve handled the nymphomaniacs, gay nuns, gay terrorists, and fetishists of some of Almodvars earlier films.
Just seeing a transgender woman taken seriously on film was a revelation to me back then, even if we called them something else.
What stands out to me most, nearly thirty years later, is the vibrancy of the film: the bright color palette, the wacky plot, even the title, which gives you a hint of what youre in for. But I think its humanity provides the real throughline in Almodvars work, especially viewed in a retrospective like MOMAs.
Over the years, Almodvar has mellowed. His more recent films mostly dont have the frenetic pace, the wild camerawork, and the joy in perversity of his earlier work. (His previous film, Im So Excited, was an exception, for better or for worse.)
The filmmaker even apologized to the MOMA audience before the screening, saying Im sorry this is a serious film There is a lot of sadness in all the main characters.
But what hasnt changed is the humanity with which Almodvar imbues his characters. Julieta is told mostly in retrospect, as the title character, a broken woman in late middle age, reflects on how she lost the great loves of her life, her husband and her daughter. The story is tragic, but Julieta is not quite a tragic heroine. She is trapped by grief and guilt, both a victim of circumstance and an accomplice in her own predicament. But while there is pathos in the film, Julieta is not pathetic either. She emerges as thoroughly human.
That is true, too, in the great majority of Almodvars films, whether they are sensational or subdued on the surface. Almodvars mostly female leads have been novelists and cosmetologists, everywomen and necrophiliacs, but they have all (even the necrophiliacs) been drawn humanely, rather than as caricatures. Even the criminals and terrorists who populate his films are usually treated with empathy.
Remember, Almodvar came of age during a time of double repression: Francos fascist Spain,
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and the particular repressions visited on LGBT people during that time and beyond. Influenced by the surrealist Luis Buuel, Almodvar began with absurdist scenarios depicted in outrageous ways.
Yet as a flamboyantly out director, gay artistically as well as personally, Almodvar also knew marginalization and repression. Almodvar never stoops to sentimentality; he doesnt give us a Movie of the Week dramatizing the harms of homophobia. Instead, he invites us into the lives of freaks, normalizing them only insofar as we see they are actual people.
This empathy, I think, has increased over time, even as the frequency of queer characters has decreased in Almodvars films. Some of Almodvars early work approaches the more avant garde stylings of Bruce La Bruce and other radical queer filmmakers, whose satiric gaze extends to the act of filmmaking itself. (The two also share an obsession with the intertwining of sex and violence.)
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But as time went by, and Almodvar tiptoed into the mainstreamhe helped launch the careers of Penlope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, and Javier Bardem, and they have continued to appear in Almodvars films even after becoming famousa different cinematic tactic emerged: storytelling that focuses on the emotional and erotic bonds that bind people together across social boundaries.
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Queer concerns continue to appear in these later films. In Julieta, religious homophobia plays a subtle but essential role in the plot. In Bad Education, priestly pedophilia is central (and treated seriously, not camp at all). But more often than not, the same humanism once extended to porn stars and transvestites is now extended to characters facing mortality (or transcending it, as in Volver) and regret.
None of these characters get it right. None can quite perform the social roles assigned to them. Almodvars queer sensibility hasnt disappeared; its expanded.
Its hard to think of another filmmaker who has evolved in quite this way. Plenty of filmmakers go from maverick to mainstream, especially in this weird age of superhero franchises being helmed by indie directors.
But its hard to name too many living directors who have deepened their core sensibility and maintained such a high level of artistic integrity even as they have matured and evolved. Woody Allen, perhaps, though his most fully realized films now lie decades in the past. Darren Aronofsky; the Coen brothers; Wim Wenders, for a time; Kathryn Bigelow; Scorsese. Its a rare feat.
There are still glimmers of Almodvars flashy style in Julieta. The ambiguous opening image couldve been red fabric, a flower, or a vulva (it turned out to be a dress). The lifelike way in which shocking events happen in the film, often suddenly and without foreshadowing, echoes his earlier work.
But Im not nostalgic for the early days. Julieta and other recent films like it are their own delights, even if I walked out of MOMA this week full of sadness and despair. Thank you for making me feel this way, Pedro Almodvar. Thank you for continuing to open my heart.
Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/02/pedro-almodovar-has-madetwenty-films-and-is-still-making-great-ones.html
Pedro Almodvar Has Made Twenty Films and Is Still Making Great Ones
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