Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
CONTENTS
01
WELCOME Welcome Introduction Schedule
05
PEDRO ALMODÓVAR Biography Interview
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Nov 22-24
03/04
Eduring Bloom 2781 24th St, San Francisco
Table of Contents
12
FEATURED FILMS Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown All About My Mother Volver Broken Embrace The Flower of My Secret
42
LOCATION & ACTIVITY The Brava Theater Nearby
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
Brava Theater Center
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Nov 22-24v Eduring Bloom 2781 24th St, San Francisco
Welcome
WELCOME TO A FILM FESTIVAL OF PEDRO ALMODOVAR Even though Spain is the third country to approve gay marriege in 2005, it has not been always as open minded about sexuality as it is now days. With 40 years of dictatorship, the traditional conventions such as women being the partner of men with minimum rights, and the Catholic church like predominant religion through the country, it was not easy to express your sexual identity in public. There was fear. This films of Pedro Almodovar are a clear example of breaking the social concerns and opening the mind to an inexperienced freedom.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
EVENT SCHEDULE Wednesday, Nov 22 06:00pm
Opening Night Film & Party
PRESENTED BY HARRAH’S RESORT SOCAL _ 201, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
10:00am
Open Lecture
“ENDURING BLOOM”—OPENING LECTURE 201, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
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Schedule
Thursday,Nov 23 02:00pm
featured films
Friday,Nov 24 02:00pm
featured films
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
BROKEN EMBRACE
101, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
211, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
04:00pm
04:00pm
panel
panel
EMOTIONS AND REASONS
EMOTIONS AND REASONS
101, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
101, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
06:00pm
06:00pm
featured films
featured films
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER
VOLVER
101, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
101, FLOOR 1, BRAVA THEATRE CENTER
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
Brava Theater Center
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Nov 22-24 Eduring Bloom 2781 24th St, San Francisco
Director
Pedro Almodovar
PEDRO ALMODÓVAR “CINEMA CAN FILL IN THE EMPT Y SPACES OF YOUR LIFE AND YOUR LONELINESS.” Pedro Almodóvar (b. 1949) made his exuberant entry onto the film scene in 1980, riding a post-Franco countercultural wave in Spain and establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices in cinema. Almodóvar’s work contributed to the creation of a new Spanish cultural and social order, and through his production company, El Deseo (founded in 1986 with his brother, Agustín), he has made some of the most globally influential films of the past three decades. His genre-defying work mixes camp, melodrama, and humor to explore themes of transgression, desire, and identity. Almodóvar has constructed a colorful universe inhabited by offbeat characters, fluid sexual and gender identities, and complex and singular women. His allinclusive, anything-goes spirit, which celebrates all
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
ARTISTRY OF DIRECTOR "Almodóvar has consolidated his own, very recognizable universe, forged by repeating themes and stylistic features”, wrote Gerard A. Cassadó in Fotogramas, Spanish film magazine, in which the writer identified nine key features which recur in Almodóvar’s films: homosexuality; sexual perversion; female heroines; sacrilegious Catholicism; lipsyncing; familial cameos; excessive kitsch and camp; narrative interludes; and intertextuality. wJune Thomas from Slate magazine also recognised that illegal drug use, letter-writing, spying, stalking, prostitution, rape, incest, transsexuality, vomiting, movie-making, recent inmates, car accidents and women urinating on screen are frequent motifs recurring in his work.Almodóvar has also been distinguished for his use of bold colours and inventive camera angles, as well
as using “cinematic references, genre touchstones, and images that serve the same function as songs in a musical, to express what cannot be said”. Elaborate décor and the relevance of fashion in his films are additionally important aspects informing the design of Almodóvar’s mise-en-scène. Music is also a key feature; from pop songs to boleros to original compositions by Alberto Iglesias. While some criticise Almodóvar for obsessively returning to the same themes and stylistic features, others have applauded him for having “the creativity to remake them afresh every time he comes back to them”. Internationally, Almodóvar has been hailed as an auteur by film critics, who have coined the term “Almodóvariano” (which would translate as Almodóvarian) to define his unique style.Almodóvar has taken influences
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from various filmmakers, including figures in North American cinema, particularly old Hollywood directors George Cukor and Billy Wilder, and the underground, transgressive cinema of John Waters and Andy Warhol. The influence of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and the stylistic appropriations of Alfred Hitchcock are also present in his work. He also takes inspiration from figures in the history of Spanish cinema, including directors Luis García Berlanga, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Edgar Neville as well as dramatists Miguel Mihura and Enrique Jardiel Poncela;many also hail Almodóvar as “the most celebrated Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel”.Other foreign influences include filmmakers Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini and Fritz Lang.
References to film and allusions to theatre, literature, dance, painting, television and advertising “are central to the world that Almodóvar constructs on screen”. Film critic José Arroyo noted that Almodóvar “borrows indiscriminately from film history”.Almodóvar has acknowledged that “cinema is always present in my films certain films play an active part in my scripts. When I insert an extract from a film, it isn’t a homage but outright theft. It’s part of the story I’m telling, and becomes an active presence rather than a homage which is always something passive. I absorb the films I’ve seen into my own experience, which immediately becomes the experience of my characters”. ent artists and genres in his work; sometimes works have been referenced diagetically or evoked through less direct methods.Almodóvar has additionally
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
"I don’t want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it’s to show one emotion."
+ SYNOSIS CONTINUE
made self-references to films within his own oeuvre.Working with some of Spain’s best-known actresses including Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes and Penélope Cruz, Almodóvar has become famous for his female-centric films and “sympathetic portrayals of women”.[He was heavily influenced by classic Hollywood films in which everything happens around a female main character, and aims to continue in that tradition. Almodóvar has frequently spoken about how he was surrounded by powerful women in his childhood: “Women were very happy, worked hard and always spoke. They handed me the first sensations and
forged my character. The woman represented everything to me, the man was absent and represented authority. I never identified with the male figure: maternity inspires me more than paternity”.[88] His portrayal of women in his films have been admired by most critics, but some representations have led to accusations of misogyny.[89] A critic from Popmatters wrote that what “many of the women in Almodóvar’s films do have in common, despite their characterization as victim or martyr or heroine, is that they are survivors”, noting that Almodóvar is interested in depicting women overcoming tragedies and adversities and the power
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Director
Pedro Almodovar
of close female relationships.[89] Ryan Vlastelica from AVClub wrote: “Many of his characters track a Byzantine plot to a cathartic reunion, a meeting where all can be understood, if not forgiven. They seek redemption”.[73] Almodóvar stated that he does not usually write roles for specific actors, but after casting a film, he custom-tailors the characters to suit the actors;[90] he believes his role as a director is a “mirror for the actors - a mirror that can’t lie”.
in a post-Franco Spain,[87] others are concerned with how their essence might be dismissed as “another quirky image from a somewhat exotic and colorful culture” to a casual foreigner.[76] Almodóvar has however acknowledged: “My films are very Spanish, but on the other hand they are capriciously personal. You cannot measure Spain by my films”.[93] Almodóvar is generally better received by critics outside of Spain, particularly in France and the USA.
Critics believe Almodóvar has redefined perceptions of Spanish cinema and Spain. [91] Many typical images and symbols of Spain, such as bullfighting, gazpacho and flamenco, have been featured in his films; the majority of his films have also been shot in Madrid.[92] Spanish people have been divided in their opinion of Almodóvar’s work: while some believe that “Almodóvar has renegotiated what it means to be Spanish and reappropriated its ideals”
Asked to explain the success of his films, Almodóvar says that they are very entertaining: “It’s important not to forget that films are made to entertain. That’s the key”.[20] He has also been noted for his tendency to shock audiences in his films by featuring outrageous situations or characters, which have served a political or commercial purpose to “tell viewers that if the people on the screen could endure these terrible travails and still com-
Shattered Shattered lives lives reclaim reclaim self self identities identities in in the the films films of of Pedro Pedro almodovar almodovar
Noted for being one of the most internationally successful Spanish filmmakers, Almodรณvar and his films have gained worldwide interest and developed a cult following. He has won two Academy Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, six European Film Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, nine Goya Awards and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1997, Almodรณvar received the French Legion of Honour, followed by the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1999. He was elected a Foreign Honorary
FILMOGRAPHY
Brava Brava Theater Theater Center Center
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and received an honorary doctoral degree in 2009 from Harvard University in addition to an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford in 2016 for his contribution to the arts. In 2013, he received an honorary European Film Academy Achievement in World Cinema Award
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Featured Films
1980
Pepi, Luci, Bom
1982
Labyrinth of Passion
1983
Dark Habits
1986 Matador 1987
Law of Desire
1988
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
1990
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
1991
High Heels
1993 Kika 1995
The Flower of My Secret
1997
Live Flesh
1999
All About My Mother
2002
Talk to Her
2004
Bad Education
2006 Volver 2009
Broken Embraces
2011
The Skin I Live In
2013
I'm So Excited
2016 Julieta
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
Brava Theater Center
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Nov 22-24v Eduring Bloom 2781 24th St, San Francisco
Featured Film
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
SYNOSIS
CAST CARMEN MAURA AS PEPA MARCOS ANTONIO BANDERAS AS CARLOS JULIETA SERRANO AS LUCÍA ROSSY DE PALMA AS MARISA MARÍA BARRANCO AS CANDELA FERNANDO GUILLÉN AS IVÁN KITI MANVER AS PAULINA MORALES ANA LEZA AS ANA CHUS LAMPREAVE AS PORTERA TESTIGA DE JEHOVÁ
The film centers on Manuela, an Argentine nurse who oversees donor organ transplants in Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid and single mother to Esteban, a teenager who wants to be a writer. On his seventeenth birthday, Esteban is hit by a car and killed while chasing after actress Huma Rojo for her autograph following a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she portrays Blanche DuBois. Manuela has to agree with her colleagues at work that her son’s heart be transplanted to a man in A Coruña. After travelling after her son’s heart, Manuela quits her job and journeys to Barcelona, where she hopes to find her son’s father, Lola, a transvestite she kept secret from her son, just as she never told Lola they had a son. In Barcelona, Manuela reunites with her old friend Agrado, a warm and witty transsexual prostitute. She also meets and becomes deeply involved with several characters: Rosa, a young nun who works in a shelter for battered prostitutes, but is pregnant by Lola and is HIV positive; Huma Rojo, the actress her son had admired;
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
+ SYNOSIS CONTINUE and the drug-addicted Nina Cruz, Huma’s co-star and lover. Her life becomes entwined with theirs as she cares for Rosa during her pregnancy and works for Huma as her personal assistant and even acts in the play as an understudy for Nina during one of her drug abuse crises. On her way to the hospital, Rosa asks the taxi to stop at a park where she spots her father’s dog, Sapic, and then her own father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s; he does not recognize Rosa and asks for her age and height, but Sapic is cleverer and knows Rosa. Rosa dies giving birth to her son, and Lola and Manuela finally reunite at Rosa’s funeral. Lola (whose name used to be Esteban), who is dying from AIDS, talks about how she always wanted a son, and Manuela tells her about her own Esteban and how he died in an accident. Manuela then adopts Esteban, Rosa’s child, and stays with him at Rosa’s parents’ house. The father does not understand who Manuela is, and Rosa’s mother says it’s the new cook, who is living there with her son. Rosa’s father then asks Manuela her age and height. Manuela introduces Esteban (Rosa’s son) to Lola and
Brava Theater Center
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Nov 22-24 Eduring Bloom 2781 24th St, San Francisco
Featured Film
Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown
AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS UNITED STATES ACADEMY AWARDS NOMINATED: BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS NOMINATED: BEST FOREIGN
gives her a picture of their own Esteban. Rosa’s mother spots them from the street and then confronts Manuela about letting strangers see the baby. Manuela tells her that Lola is Esteban’s father; Rosa’s mother is appalled and says: “That is the monster that killed my daughter?!”
LANGUAGE FILM NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW WON: BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM NEW YORK FILM CRITICS WON: BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Manuela flees back to Madrid with Esteban; she cannot take living at Rosa’s house any longer, since the grandmother is afraid that she will contract AIDS from the baby. She writes a letter to Huma and Agrado saying that she is leaving and once again is sorry for not saying goodbye, like she did years before. Two years later, Manuela returns with Esteban to an AIDS convention, telling Huma and Agrado, who now run a stage show together, that Esteban had been a miracle by not inheriting the virus. She then says she is returning to stay with Esteban’s grandparents. When Manuela asks Huma about Nina, Huma becomes melancholic and leaves. Agrado tells Manuela that Nina went back to her town, got married, and had a fat, ugly baby boy. Huma then rejoins the conversation briefly before exiting the dressing room to go perform.
FILM RUNNER-UP: BEST ACTRESS (CARMEN MAURA) UNITED KINGDOM BAFTA AWARDS (UK) NOMINATED: BEST FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE OVERSEAS DAVID DI DONATELLO AWARDS (ITALY) WON: BEST FOREIGN DIRECTION (PEDRO ALMODÓVAR) EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS WON: BEST ACTRESS – LEADING ROLE (CARMEN MAURA) WON: BEST YOUNG FILM (PEDRO ALMODÓVAR)
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
REVIEW BY VINCENT CANBY LEAD: It hasn't been Pepa's day, or even week. Ivan, her longtime lover and a male-chauvinist rat, walks out on her, leaving only a bland message on her answering machine. Planning suicide, Pepa spikes a blenderful of garden-fresh gazpacho with sleeping pills, but forgets to drink it. It hasn't been Pepa's day, or even week. Ivan, her longtime lover and a male-chauvinist rat, walks out on her, leaving only a bland message on her answering machine. Planning suicide, Pepa spikes a blenderful of garden-fresh gazpacho with sleeping pills, but forgets to drink it. Pepa's suicide quickly takes on the aspects of a dental check-up: It keeps getting sidetracked. Saying she really shouldn't smoke, Pepa lights a cigarette and sets her bed ablaze. Her best friend, Candela, who has been having a blissful affair with a man she didn't realize was a Shiite terrorist, comes
by looking for refuge from the police. The first couple to look at Pepa's apartment, which she has put on the market, are Carlos, Ivan's grown son, whom Pepa had never known about, and Marisa, Carlos's toothy girlfriend. When Pepa seeks legal advice, the lawyer happens to be Ivan's newest mistress. These are only some of the delirious ingredients in this most entertaining, deliberately benign new Spanish farce, ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.'' The director is Pedro Almodovar, better known here for his deliberately scandalous dark comedies (''Matador,'' ''Law of Desire'' and ''What Have I Done to Deserve This?'') in which anything goes, provided that it may offend somebody's sensibility. In ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,'' Mr. Almodovar sets out to charm rather than shock. That he succeeds should not come as a surprise. The common denominator of all Almo-
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Featured Film
Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown
Though feminist in its sympathies, ''Women on the Verge'' is far from being a tract of any sort. The characters Mr. Almodovar has written and directed keep asserting idiosyncrasies that do not allow them, or the film, to be so humorlessly categorized.The pace sometimes flags, and there are scenes in which the comic potential appears to be lost only because the camera is in the wrong place. Farce isn't easy to pull off, but Mr. Almodovar is well on his way to mastering this most difficult of all screen genres.
dovar films, even the one that winds up in an ecstatic murder-suicide pact, is their great good humor. ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'' will be shown tonight at 7:45 at Alice Tully Hall and at 9 in Avery Fisher Hall to begin the 26th New York Film Festival. In what may be one of the most cheering programming decisions in the festival's quarter-century, tonight's show begins with ''Night of the Living Duck.'' This is an all-new Merrie Melodies cartoon in which Daffy Duck, who has too long played second fiddle to Disney's Donald, makes a memorable Lincoln Center debut, the first Hollywood cartoon character to be so honored. In his brisk eight minutes on screen, Daffy sets a pace for priceless nuttiness that is impossible for any feature to follow with complete security. However, Mr. Almodovar is not a film maker who can be easily upstaged by a
near-classic cartoon. At its best, ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'' has much of the cheeringly mad intensity of animated shorts produced in Hollywood before the television era. This is exemplified in Carmen Maura's grand performance as Pepa. Miss Maura, who looks a bit like Jeanne Moreau, is to Mr. Almodovar's cinema what Anna Magnani once was to Roberto Rossellini's. This comparision would come to mind even if the director hadn't said publicly that the inspiration for ''Women on the Verge'' was Jean Cocteau's short, one-character play ''The Human Voice,'' which was acted by Miss Magnani in the Rossellini screen adaptation. Though Mr. Almodovar apparently adores ''The Human Voice,'' or did at one time, his new film is a fiendishly funny sendup of Cocteau's fustian portrait of a desperate woman who, abandoned by her lover, uses the telephone as a blunt instrument just by talking into it.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
AWARDS GOYA AWARD NOMINATIONS MARISA PAREDES WON BEST ACTRESS AT THE KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, THE ACE AWARDS AND THE SANT JORDI AWARDS NOMINATED: BEST ART DIRECTION (FÉLIX MURCIA) GOYA AWARDS (SPAIN) WON: BEST ACTRESS – LEADING ROLE (CARMEN MAURA) WON: BEST ACTRESS – SUPPORTING ROLE (MARÍA BARRANCO) WON: BEST EDITING (JOSÉ SALCEDO) WON: BEST FILM
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Featured Film
THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET
SYNOSIS
CAST MARISA PAREDES- LEO MACÍAS JUAN ECHANOVE - ÁNGEL CARME ELÍAS - BETTY ROSSY DE PALMA - ROSA
Marisa Paredes is Leocadia ("Leo") Macías, a woman writing popular romance novels under the pen name Amanda Gris. Unlike her romantic ("pink") novels, her own love life is troubled. Leo has a difficult relationship with her husband Paco (Imanol Arias), a military officer stationed in Brussels and later in Bosnia, who is distant both physically and emotionally. The film starts with Leo writing about the feeling of having lost her lover, a feeling that she compares to the pain of a tight pair of boots that she can't take off. Almodovar took for this first part of the film strong plot elements from Dorothy Parker's short story The Lovely Leave[3]
CHUS LAMPREAVE - MADRE DE LEO KITI MANVER - MANUELA JOAQUÍN CORTÉS - ANTONIO MANUELA VARGAS - BLANCA IMANOL ARIAS - PACO GLORIA MUÑOZ - ALICIA
Leo begins to change the direction of her writing, wanting to focus more on darker themes such as pain and loss, and can no longer write her Amanda Gris novels. However, her publishers demand sentimental happy endings, at least until her contract is up. She begins to re-evaluate her life through her relationship with her publishers, her husband, her best friend Betty (Carme Elías), her "crab-faced" sister Rosa (Rossy de Palma) and her bickering elderly mother (Chus Lampreave). Only her maid (played by flamenco dancer Manuela Vargas) appears steadfast. She also meets Ángel (Juan Echanove),
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
CRITICAL RECEPTION In The Flower of my Secret, the plot of Leo's new, gritty, novel is stolen and used as the basis of a film screenplay The Freezer. In a coup of life imitating art, a decade later it formed the basis of Almodóvar's own 2006 film Volver. Another sub-plot scene from The Flower of my Secret, the student doctors being taught how to persuade a grieving mother to allow her son's organs to be used in transplant, was used as the starting point of Almodóvar's 1999 film All About My Mother.
+ SYNOSIS CONTINUE a newspaper editor who quickly falls for Leo and her writing.
based on this same plot, "Volver", released eleven years later in 2006.)
After having signed a contract with the newspaper El País, Leo tells Ángel that she can't write romances anymore, and that she has written a dark ("black") novel about a young mother whose daughter kills her husband because he tried to rape her. After that, the corpse of the dead man is hidden in a refrigerator. Although Leo throws this story out, she later learns that someone is turning it into a movie. (In fact, Almodóvar himself created a movie
After the inevitable disintegration of her marriage and then learning that her best friend was her husband's lover, Leo takes and survives an overdose, then goes with her mother to the village of Almagro to rest and recover. There she receives a call from her publishers, who are apparently delighted by the two manuscripts they have received from her — romances Leo never wrote or submitted. She returns to Madrid and learns that Ángel is her
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Eduring Bloom 2781 24th St, San Francisco
Featured Film
The Flower of My Secret
ARE THE HEROINES OF PEDRO ALMODÓVAR 'S FILMS OF TEN, IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, STANDINS FOR HIM? THAT'S A COMMON ENOUGH CRITICAL THEORY, AND IF THERE'S TRUTH IN IT, THEN HIS “ THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET” SUGGESTS INTRIGUING POSSIBILITIES. THE SPANISH DIRECTOR'S NEW FILM TELLS THE STORY OF LEO, A WOMAN WHO WRITES TRASHY BUT WILDLY POPUL AR ROMANTIC NOVELS UNDER A PSEUDONYM. THEY PAY WELL, BUT SHE DESPISES THEM--HATES THEM SO MUCH SHE ADOPTS ANOTHER PSEUDONYM IN ORDER TO WRITE AN ARTICLE AT TACKING THEM.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
REVIEW BY CARYN JAMES Pedro Almodovar seems to have been under a black cloud for the past few years, turning out movies like the relentlessly mean-spirited "Kika" and the often bitter "High Heels." What a relief that he has finally cheered up. In his new film, "The Flower of My Secret," he returns to the mordant but sympathetic comedy of his early, best work. Though the new film is not as antic as "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," it is funny and free of the nasty undertone that has made him seem tired and tiresome lately. The film will be shown at the New York Film Festival tonight at 9 and tomorrow at 11 A.M., and will open in theaters in March. At the center of the story is a middle-aged woman named Leo (Marisa Paredes, the mother in "High Heels"), who can't accept the fact that her marriage is about to end. A hugely popular romance writer who hides behind the pen name Amanda Gris, Leo finds herself blocked professionally and in her personal life. When she puts on a pair of boots that
her husband, Paco, gave her two years before, and finds that she can't get them off, she runs to see her best friend, Betty, for help. Everyone except Leo herself can see that she's in seriously bad shape. Where Mr. Almodovar brutally mocked television in "Kika" and "High Heels," in "The Flower of My Secret" he indulges his sentimental streak, while creating minor characters and dialogue far sharper and wittier than anything Amanda Gris might have invented. When Leo begins to work for a newspaper under her real name, she writes a savagely negative review of Amanda Gris. She also meets Angel, an editor who falls for her at once. The film shrewdly sets the handsome and emotionally ruthless Paco (Imanol Arias), an army general working with NATO, against the paunchy and adoring Angel (Juan Echanove), who quotes sentimental movies, from "Casablanca" to "Rich and Famous." Much of "The Flower of My Secret" relies on delicious small touches that convey a dark sense of
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Featured Film
The Flower of My Secret
the absurd. Betty (Carmen Elias) teaches medical students how to persuade relatives of the brain-dead to donate their loved ones' organs. Leo's put-upon sister (Rossy de Palma) and complaining aged mother (Chus Lampreave) have family squabbles so funny and perfectly pitched that these two characters could carry a film of their own. And even when Paco walks out, leaving Leo in suicidal despair, Mr. Almodovar sustains a hopeful tone. In the manner of the best sentimental romances, Angel becomes Leo's true friend and guardian angel. In the manner of shrewd, unsentimental movies, Leo does not instantly know what's good for her. The audience will be many steps ahead of Leo in knowing what went wrong with her marriage, but her willful ignorance and desperate hope only make her more endearing. Ms. Paredes is the most humane of Mr. Almodovar's regular actresses.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
Brava Theater Center
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Featured Film
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER
SYNOSIS The film centers on Manuela, an Argentine nurse who oversees donor organ transplants in Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid and single mother to Esteban, a teenager who wants to be a writer.
CAST CECILIA ROTH AS MANUELA MARISA PAREDES AS HUMA ROJO ANTONIA SAN JUAN AS AGRADO PENÉLOPE CRUZ AS ROSA CANDELA PEÑA AS NINA CRUZ ROSA MARIA SARDÀ AS ROSA'S MOTHER FERNANDO FERNÁN GÓMEZ AS ROSA'S FATHER ELOY AZORIN AS ESTEBAN TONI CANTÓ AS LOLA SAPIC AS SAPIC
On his seventeenth birthday, Esteban is hit by a car and killed while chasing after actress Huma Rojo for her autograph following a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she portrays Blanche DuBois. Manuela has to agree with her colleagues at work that her son's heart be transplanted to a man in A Coruña. After travelling after her son's heart, Manuela quits her job and journeys to Barcelona, where she hopes to find her son's father, Lola, a transvestite she kept secret from her son, just as she never told Lola they had a son. In Barcelona, Manuela reunites with her old friend Agrado, a warm and witty transsexual prostitute. She also meets and becomes deeply involved with several characters: Rosa, a young nun who works in a shelter for battered prostitutes, but is pregnant by Lola and is HIV positive; Huma Rojo, the actress her son had admired; and the drug-addicted Nina Cruz, Huma's co-star and lover. Her life becomes entwined with theirs as she cares for Rosa during her pregnancy and works for Huma as
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
CRITICAL RECEPTION Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "You don't know where to position yourself while you're watching a film like All About My Mother, and that's part of the appeal: Do you take it seriously, like the characters do, or do you notice the bright colors and flashy art decoration, the cheerful homages to Tennessee Williams and All About Eve, and see it as a parody? .
+ SYNOSIS CONTINUE her personal assistant and even acts in the play as an understudy for Nina during one of her drug abuse crises. On her way to the hospital, Rosa asks the taxi to stop at a park where she spots her father's dog, Sapic, and then her own father, who suffers from Alzheimer's; he does not recognize Rosa and asks for her age and height, but Sapic is cleverer and knows Rosa. Rosa dies giving birth to her son, and Lola and Manuela finally reunite at Rosa's funeral. Lola (whose name used to be Esteban), who is dying from AIDS, talks about how she always wanted a son, and Manuela tells her about her own Esteban and how he died in an accident.
Manuela then adopts Esteban, Rosa's child, and stays with him at Rosa's parents' house. The father does not understand who Manuela is, and Rosa's mother says it's the new cook, who is living there with her son. Rosa's father then asks Manuela her age and height. Manuela introduces Esteban (Rosa's son) to Lola and gives her a picture of their own Esteban. Rosa's mother spots them from the street and then confronts Manuela about letting strangers see the baby. Manuela tells her that Lola is Esteban's father; Rosa's mother is appalled and says: "That is the monster that killed my daughter?!"
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Manuela flees back to Madrid with Esteban; she cannot take living at Rosa's house any longer, since the grandmother is afraid that she will contract AIDS from the baby. She writes a letter to Huma and Agrado saying that she is leaving and once again is sorry for not saying goodbye, like she did years before. Two years later, Manuela returns with Esteban to an AIDS convention, telling Huma and Agrado, who now run a stage show together, that Esteban had been a miracle by not inheriting the virus. She then says she is returning to stay with Esteban's grandparents. When Manuela asks Huma about Nina, Huma becomes melancholic and leaves. Agrado tells Manuela that
Nina went back to her town, got married, and had a fat, ugly baby boy. Huma then rejoins the conversation briefly before exiting the dressing room to go perform.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
REVIEW BY CARYN JAMES
Pedro Almodovar's new film, All About My Mother, has arrived: after a British premiere last weekend at the Edinburgh Film Festival, it receives its full UK release today. And it is preceded by a squall of controversy. There were many who thought it should have won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year; it was a favourite of critics and cinemagoers alike - the "choice of the Croisette". So when this accomplished and distinctive movie was awarded no substantial prize by the judges, there was anger and astonishment. But not from me. I was agnostic about All About My Mother when I saw it in Cannes, and I still am. But there is no doubting the extraordinary effect it has on audiences. When I caught up with it again here, people were leaving the screening with faces irradiated with bliss. They were hardly able to speak for emotion. And I predict that it will continue to have this phenomenal effect.
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All About My Mother If we are invited to draw a parallel between the discrimination and hardship suffered by transsexuals, and those suffered by women generally, then this is surely an unequal pairing. Could it be that Almodovar is offering the transsexuals in a metaphoric sense - as a dramatisation of women's yearning to escape stereotypical sexual identities? Or of a longing to communicate directly with men, free of socio-sexual tension?
The rest of us, the immune, are left with the uncomfortable feeling that this was two films melded into one. The first is an intelligent and affecting movie about women's experience of love, companionship and loss - and the second is a bizarre, shrill, freakish high-camp operetta whose apparent claim to an ultimate moral and emotional seriousness is ill-founded. All About My Mother is about Manuela (Cecilia Roth), an administrator who works in the transplant unit of a Madrid hospital. Her talents for acting are given expression in the role-playing videos set up by the hospital for its junior doctors, who have to learn how tactfully to ask bereaved relatives for permission to remove their loved ones' organs; Manuela plays the grieving mother or wife or daughter. She lives with her son, Esteban, whose 18th birthday treat is to be taken to a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire,
starring a famous actress, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). But running to get her autograph, Esteban is knocked over and killed - and, with scalding irony, Manuela has to have the transplant conversation with the consultants for real. Agonised, she decides to travel to Barcelona to confront Esteban's father - the father whose life she kept secret from her late son. And at this point Almodovar apparently considers he has kept the lid on his trademark flourishes long enough. Because Esteban's father turns out to be a fugitive transsexual prostitute called Lola, and Manuela has to track to him down by making contact with another transsexual, a witty and amiable friend called Agrado, and an improbably beautiful young nun, Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz). Who Lola turns out to have impregnated. And whose mother makes a living forging Chagalls. This weird mĂŠnage focuses once again on Huma Roja, whose touring production of Streetcar has reached
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
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VOLVER
SYNOSIS Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Soledad (Lola Dueñas) are sisters who grew up in Alcanfor de las Infantas, a small village in La Mancha, but now both live in Madrid. Their parents died in a tragic fire three years prior to the beginning of the film.
CAST PENÉLOPE CRUZ CARMEN MAURA BLANCA PORTILLO LOLA DUEÑAS CHUS LAMPREAVE ANTONIO DE LA TORRE MARÍA ISABEL DÍAZ CARLOS BLANCO NEUS SANZ LEANDRO RIVERA YOLANDA RAMOS
Sole returns to the village for the funeral of her elderly and dementia-stricken Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave). Aunt Paula's neighbour Agustina (Blanca Portillo) confesses to Sole that she has heard Paula talking to the ghost of Sole's mother Irene (Carmen Maura). Sole encounters the ghost herself, and when she returns to Madrid, she discovers that the ghost has stowed away in the trunk of her car. Irene has brought luggage, intending to stay with her daughter for a while, and Sole, though frightened, agrees to let her mother stay with her: Sole operates a hair salon in her apartment, and Irene will assist her, posing as a Russian woman to hide her true identity. Sole tries to determine why her mother's ghost has returned to Earth, asking her if she left anything undone in her life. Irene says that she does have issues to resolve, relating to the questions of why Raimunda hates her and why she is afraid to reveal herself to Raimunda.Meanwhile Raimunda and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) have a different death to cope with.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
+ SYNOSIS CONTINUE Paula's father Paco (Antonio de la Torre) attempts to rape her, claiming that he is not really her father, and Paula stabs him in self-defense. Raimunda quickly hides the corpse in the deep-freezer of a nearby restaurant with an absent owner. The restaurant owner, Emilio (Carlos Blanco), is out of town and entrusted Raimunda with the keys so that she can show it to prospective tenants. When members of a film crew happen upon the restaurant, Raimunda strikes a deal to cater for them, and suddenly finds herself back in the restaurant business. Raimunda reveals to Paula that Paco was not, in fact, her biological father, and promises to tell her the whole story at a later time. Agustina is diagnosed with terminal cancer and must go to Madrid for medical treatment. Raimunda visits her in the hospital. Agustina asks Raimunda if she has seen her mother's ghost. Agustina hopes that the ghost will be able to tell her about the fate of her own
mother, who disappeared three years ago without a trace. Raimunda undertakes the task of disposing of Paco's remains: she leaves Paula with Sole, rents a van and transports the freezer to a convenient spot by the river JĂşcar, 180 kilometres away. While staying in Sole's apartment, Paula meets her grandmother's ghost and grows close to her. The next night, Agustina comes to the restaurant to renew her request to Raimunda to ask her mother's ghost about her own mother's whereabouts. She reveals two startling secrets: that Raimunda's father and Agustina's mother were having an affair and that Agustina's mother disappeared on the same day that Raimunda's parents died. Sole finally confesses to Raimunda that she has seen their mother's ghost and that the ghost is, in fact, watching television in the next room with Paula. Irene admits that she did not, in fact, die in the fire, and reveals the whole truth. We
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Volver Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "You don't know where to position yourself while you're watching a film like All About My Mother, and that's part of the appeal: Do you take it seriously, like the characters do, or do you notice the bright colors and flashy art decoration, the cheerful homages to Tennessee Williams and All About Eve, and see it as a parody? .
learn that the reason for Raimunda and Irene's estrangement is that Raimunda's father sexually abused her, resulting in the birth of Paula; thus Paula is Raimunda's daughter and also her sister. Raimunda had been angry with her mother for never noticing and ending this abuse. Irene tells Raimunda that she had never understood Raimunda's anger and distance until her Aunt Paula told her about what her husband had done to her daughter, and Irene became furious with herself when she found out. Irene explains that she found her husband in bed with another woman and started the fire that killed them both. The ashes that had been presumed to be Irene's were, in fact, the ashes of Agustina's mother, the woman with whom Irene's husband was having an affair. After the fire, Irene wandered for several days in the countryside, until she decided that she wanted to turn herself in. But first, she wanted to say goodbye to her sister Paula,
who had lost the ability to look after herself and with whom Irene had been living prior to setting the fire that killed her husband. Paula, who was living in the past due to her senility, welcomed Irene home as if nothing had happened, and Irene stayed, caring for her sister and expecting that the police would come soon to arrest her. Due to the superstitious and closed nature of the community, however, the police never came and the residents, who are accustomed to tales of the dead returning, explained the rare sightings of Irene as "un fantasma", a ghost. The family reunites at Aunt Paula's house. Irene reveals her presence to Agustina, who believes her to be a ghost. Irene pledges to stay in the village and care for Agustina as her cancer worsens, saying to Raimunda that it was the least that she could do after killing Agustina's mother. In the last scene Raimunda visits her mother at Agustina's house.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma'am. And one can't be stingy with these things because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being.
REVIEW BY CARYN JAMES With its overwhelming richness, its colour and warmth, Pedro Almodóvar's new movie is set to capture your heart. Volver seemed guilelessly wonderful when I first saw it earlier this year in Cannes. Now it looks even better. The picture's ingenuities and contrivances just seem to float out of the screen, like psychedelic moodshapes. I found myself floating right along with them. His last two films, Bad Education and Talk To Her, were impressive, though I never quite felt the unconditional rapture of the true Almodóvar believer. This new film, being more modest in its scope, and somehow less obviously extravagant, achieves more with its rhetorical flourishes and narrative display. There is something so playful and gorgeous about it, and certainly something gorgeous about Penélope Cruz: although the film is notable in that romantic love is quite irrelevant. Cruz's beauty appears in an altogether different love-context: that of a mother's passionate love for her daughter. Volver, (in English, Coming Home
or Coming Back), is a gripping melodrama inspired by the trash TV that is a soundtrack to its characters' lives. Penélope Cruz is Raimunda, a hard-working woman with a teenage daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), and a feckless, layabout husband. With her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) she tends to the graves of her parents, and visits her ailing Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), who is heartrendingly in the final stages of dementia. Raimunda's family life shatters with one terrible act of violence, and there is a secret about her late mother Irene (Carmen Maura) that surfaces when Irene returns from beyond the grave to make contact with her astonished daughters. So Volver is a ghost story. Or is it? As the movie drifts along the periphery of the supernatural, I went into a trance, which Almodóvar induces with a master's confidence. All the movie's secrets are rolled out in a narrative design that is exuberant and elegant. Its cinematography and art direction, by José Luis Alcaine and Salvador
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Parra, give everything an intensity that, like previous Almodóvar films, has the feel of a Douglas Sirk film. Almodóvar has something of Sirk's passionate empathy with women, mixed with a gay sensibility–though the film is unlike Sirk's in that men are entirely marginal. In its vividness and intense, almost neurotic sensitivity to colour, it also looks like a Hitchcock thriller.
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
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BROKEN EMBRACE
SYNOSIS
CAST PENÉLOPE CRUZ AS MAGDALENA "LENA" RIVAS BLANCA PORTILLO AS JUDIT LLUÍS HOMAR AS MATEO BLANCO / HARRY CAINE LOLA DUEÑAS AS LECTORA DE LABIOS ÁNGELA MOLINA AS MRS. RIVAS ROSSY DE PALMA AS JULIETA JOSÉ LUIS GÓMEZ AS ERNESTO MARTEL TAMAR NOVAS AS DIEGO RUBÉN OCHANDIANO AS RAY X / ERNESTO MARTEL, JR. CHUS LAMPREAVE AS PORTERA KITI MÁNVER AS MADAME MYLENE MARIOLA FUENTES AS EDURNE CARMEN MACHI AS CHON KIRA MIRÓ AS MODELO
"Harry Caine" is a blind writer who shares his life with his agent Judit and her adult son, Diego. Slowly, events in the present begin to bring back memories of the past. Harry hears that millionaire Ernesto Martel has died; a young filmmaker, Ray X, appears and turns out to be Martel's son, Ernesto, Jr. After Diego is hospitalized for an accidental drug overdose in a Madrid nightclub, Harry collects Diego from the hospital and looks after him to avoid worrying his traveling mother. The main storyline is told in flashback as Harry reluctantly tells Diego a tragic tale of fate, jealousy, abuse of power, betrayal, and guilt. The first flashback is to 1992, which introduces Magdalena "Lena" Rivero, Martel's beautiful young secretary, an aspiring actress. She becomes close to Martel, a millionaire financier, in order to find the money to help meet her dying father's medical bills. By 1994, she has become Martel's mistress. At this time, Harry is still living under his real name, Mateo Blanco, a well-respected film director. Martel is excessively possessive of Lena, but she is determined to become an actress and manages to win the main role in Blanco's film Chicas y maletas (Girls and Suitcases) by bringing Martel in as financier/producer. (The fictional film is similar to Almodóvar's 1988 release,
Shattered lives reclaim self identities in the films of Pedro almodovar
The film was accepted into the main selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the prestigious Palme d'Or,[10] Almodóvar's third to do so, and fourth to screen at the festival. Broken Embraces was nominated for the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Almodóvar's sixth film to be nominated in this category. It was also nominated for the Satellite Award for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as the Satellite Award for Best Actress for Penélope Cruz's performance.
+ SYNOSIS CONTINUE Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, except that the Shiite terrorists have been replaced by a cocaine dealer; several of the cast of the previous film appear in the fictional one.) Martel spies on Lena and Mateo by sending his inhibited, effeminate gay son, Ernesto, Jr., to videotape the production of the film, ostensibly for a "making of" feature, then hiring a lip-reader to interpret the conversations. Martel, seething with jealousy, screens the videos as the lip-reader narrates the furtive whispers of Lena and Mateo's passionate affair. Furious, Martel confronts Lena, and when she threatens to leave him he pushes her down the stairs. But when she survives the fall, he relents and nurses her back to health. The filming completed, Lena and Blanco escape Martel's hold and go on holiday to Lanzarote. Lena takes a job as a hotel receptionist to pass the time. When she and Blanco read in El País that Chicas y maletas has received a terrible critical reception, likely the end of Blanco's directing career, they determine to start over together far from Madrid. Fate intervenes when Blanco is seriously injured and Lena is killed in a car accident, which ironically is immortalized by Ernesto Jr., who has
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been trailing them with his camcorder. Mateo loses his sight permanently. Judit, his long-time production assistant, and an 8-year-old Diego arrive to help Blanco pick up the pieces and return to Madrid, where he eventually writes screenplays in braille under the pseudonym Harry Caine, represented by his agent, Judit. The story picks up where it began in 2008: Harry shares his birthday in a bar with Judit and Diego. Judit becomes drunk on gin and, stricken with guilt, confesses to Harry that she sold out to Martel in 1994 because of her fury at Harry for abandoning the film to run away with Lena; she also tells him of her involvement in providing Martel the phone number of the hotel in Lanzarote where Lena and Mateo were hiding. She confirms that Martel sabotaged the release of Chicas y maletas by using the worst take from each scene in order to destroy Mateo's reputation. Though believed lost, the original reels of Chicas y maletas and Ernesto Jr.'s camcorder footage are recovered: Judit had ignored Martel's order to destroy them and instead hid them away. Mateo and Diego re-edit the film for its long-delayed release as the director envisioned it.resolve, relating to the questions of
Shattered lives reclaim self identities
Brava Theater Center
in the films of Pedro almodovar
REVIEW BY PETER BRADSHAW The sensual pleasures of Pedro Almodóvar's lush new meta-melodrama are the more intense for being fleeting. After the movie is over and the trance has lifted, it is difficult to recall just what was so entrancing or even what the film was about. Like Oscar Wilde's famous cigarette, it is a perfect type of pleasure which leaves one not unsatisfied exactly but with a feeling that its substance has vanished into the air like smoke. In the way of so many Almodóvar films, Broken Embraces is built on a system of dual narrative with father/son and gay/ straight opposites. Lluís Homar plays a blind screenwriter in present-day Madrid with the assumed name "Harry Caine"; while still sighted, he was once a distinguished movie director working under his real name, Mateo Blanco. He hears news of the death of Ernesto Martel, a controversial Chilean financier who bankrolled his last movie as a director, and flashbacks take us to this heady period in the 1990s
when in return for the plutocrat's lavish funding, Mateo cast Martel's mistress in the lead role, and had a passionate affair with her. This is the bewitching Lena, short of course for Magdalena, played by Penélope Cruz, whose beauty here reaches a swooningly hyper-real state, a camp mirage of Hollywood loveliness, especially in the scene in which she tries on various costumes and styles in the dressing room mirror, experimenting with a platinum-blonde Marilyn look. "Don't smile …" gasps the ecstatic director, "… the wig is false enough!" Meanwhile Martel, played with tailored elegance by José Luis Gómez, orders his moody son to spy on the couple with his videocamera under the pretence of preparing a "making of" documentary. This is Ray, a sulky gay man played by Rubén Ochandiano, looking in the 90s like someone David Walliams might portray in a TV comedy called Little Spain. These flashbacks disclose dark secrets. Why is
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Broken Embrace If we are invited to draw a parallel between the discrimination and hardship suffered by transsexuals, and those suffered by women generally, then this is surely an unequal pairing. Could it be that Almodovar is offering the transsexuals in a metaphoric sense - as a dramatisation of women's yearning to escape stereotypical sexual identities? Or of a longing to communicate directly with men, free of socio-sexual tension?
Mateo blind? And what happened to Lena herself? The sheer, gorgeous style of Broken Embraces is what is so seductive; with his cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Almodóvar conjures a vivid, rich palette of colours, which have the texture of something by Alfred Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk, but his handling of the material is so confident and distinctive that it goes beyond pastiche. And with his editor, José Salcedo, he moves back and forth between the past and the present with a miraculous fluidity, and these seamless transitions are what induce the film's pleasurably dizzy, woozy quality, a subtle molestation of the audience's inner ear. Pundits have complained that Broken Embraces just retreads the director's old ideas; I see it more as variations on a theme – familiar, but still engrossing. If the "mature" period of Almodóvar's career is levelling out, it is still producing intensely intelligent and watchable films, although observers are entitled to notice
that Almodóvar is keen to stress the sexual attractiveness and prowess of older men. Broken Embraces is a film in which the director demonstrates a continuing, virtuoso fluency in a cinematic language that he himself invented. It's an embrace I want to submit to.