The Essentials: The Films Of Pedro Almodóvar

“All About My Mother” (1999)
Pedro Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother” is not an easy film to watch. One of his best films, ‘Mother’ is also one of Almodóvar’s most painful. Early in the film, Manuela (Cecilia Roth) loses her only son, Esteban (Eloy Azorin), when he is hit by a car while chasing after actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) for an autograph. Once she is able to sufficiently compose herself, Manuela travels to Barcelona to tell Esteban’s father what happened. For 17 years, Manuela hid from Esteban the truth about his father, but we, the audience, are brought along on Manuela’s visit to her past as a kind of substitute for the young man who never knew his father. Almodóvar’s heartbreaking story begins with Manuela as the central character, but she quickly falls into a supporting role alongside the many women with whom she comes into contact. A natural caregiver, Manuela helps one of her old friends, a transvestite prostitute named Agrado (Antonia San Juan) get her life out of the gutter; she becomes a surrogate mother to Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a nun who is pregnant and too embarrassed to tell her real mother; and, even though it pains her every second, she becomes an assistant to Huma Rojo. The film is at once comedic and tragic. Though his style is intrusive at first, Almodóvar rarely interferes with the story, practically disappearing in the second half of the film and letting the story tell itself. In his absence, he leaves myriad metaphors and imagery which can be read many different ways. Most notably, the splashes of red throughout reflect both the passion and violence experienced by every character. His actors are all superb, especially Roth, and every new revelation in the story is a surprise but perfectly weaved into the overall fabric of the film. [A]

“Talk to Her” (2002)
For this film, which turned out to be one of his most popular worldwide especially in America, Almodóvar won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Achievement in Directing — both remarkable achievements for a foreign-language film. It success must reflect the amazing skill with which the director coaxes universally recognisable emotions and responses from an unusually specific set up: “Talk to Her” follows the dual stories of two now-comatose women, Alicia (Leonor Watling) and Lydia (Rosario Flores), and the two men who love them, Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti). Lydia is a bullfighter whose relationship with Marco isn’t going as well as he hoped, while Benigno takes care of Alicia as her nurse and fantasizes about her when he can’t be with her. Here, Almodóvar once again balances melodrama with black comedy, but despite all the craziness going on — there’s an extremely long segment, for example, where Benigno re-imagines a psychosexual silent film for a sleeping Alicia — the real heft of this film is firmly, and touchingly, grounded in real-life emotions like loneliness and love. The intimacy between a man and a woman, even across borders of consciousness, is beautifully drawn, despite the fact that perhaps these relationships are among the most dysfunctional relationships in the history of film. We ache for Benigno as he longs for Alicia despite her condition, and really feel the effect of certain revelations about Lydia on Marco. Perhaps what’s most impressive is that, long championed for creating unforgettable portraits of women, here Almodóvar makes our hearts break for these two male protagonists. Small wonder Time Magazine included it in their Top 100 Movies of All Time list. [A]

“Bad Education” (2004)
In between two of his very best, “Talk to Her” and “Volver,” Almodóvar made arguably one of his most personal pictures, the meta-noir “Bad Education,” which was chosen as the first Spanish film to open Cannes. The film was well-received at the time, but on reflection, in the context of his subsequent work, it feels like a rather minor picture in his ouevre. Not that it’s lacking in ambition. If anything, the layered story, of a film producer (Fele Martinez) approached by a man (Gael García Bernal) claiming to be his childhood friend, and first love Ignacio, with a short story that delves into Ignacio’s abuse by a priest at their boarding school (a synopsis that barely scratches the surface), has a surfeit of it, the tricksy levels of narrative dulling any potential emotional impact the tale could have, and the film noir plot contrivances don’t help. But minor Almodóvar is still more interesting than major films by most directors. The depiction of gay life in immediately-post-Franco Spain is deeply felt, as its investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, although the director is careful not to paint Father Manolo (an excellent performance by Daniel Giménez Cacho) as a monster. There’s something firmly Fassbinderian about the structure, making it as difficult a film as the director has ever made — as such, it’s even more remarkable that it performed so well as it did at the box office, although in the U.S. it had to be edited down from an NC-17 rating from the MPAA to get there. But judged against some of his other masterpieces, it can’t help but feel a little hollow by comparison. [C+]

“Volver” (2006)
Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz have had one of those incredibly fruitful director-actor relationships that viewers love to see, and more than most it seems to have been pretty symbiotic and mutually beneficial — the director has benefited from Cruz’s higher profile of late, but Cruz has never forgotten that she owes a lot of the cachet to the roles the director has given her. In many ways, the part of Raimunda in “Volver” is the apotheosis of this relationship; never has Cruz been better, with Almodóvar or any other director, than she is here. A story spanning grand themes of sickness and death and forgiveness, yet bursting at the seams with life and sex and food as well, the plot follows Raimunda and her sister Soledad (Lola Duenas) as they return to the small village where they grew up for their aunt’s funeral, and Soledad encounters the ghost of their mother Irene (Carmen Maura, finally reuniting with the director after 18 years) and brings her home to live in Madrid. While Raimunda’s life takes a (melo)dramatic after a terrible incident between her lazy, abusive husband and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) Soledad tries to keep their mother’s ghost a secret, but all the various tangled strands begin to unravel. It’s a wonderful showcase for Cruz’s acting, and though the storyline itself sometimes becomes convoluted and confusing, (it just has so much to say!) Almodóvar juggles everything like a pro, and in fact turns in one of his most stylistically restrained and mature films. Perhaps because of this, “Volver” turns out to be one of his most accessible films in terms of allowing us to understand and connect with the characters. And as the culmination of the director’s career-long fascination with women and female relationships, “Volver” is everything we could hope for, boasting a pulsating heartbeat in every scene, and brought to life by an abundance of terrific actresses all on top form. [A+]

“Broken Embraces” (2009)
Proving that the knot is always much more fun than having the untangled string, this colorful neo-noir unloads various character details and mysterious relationships in its first 15 minutes, jumping back and forth between two time periods to make things even more confusing. Blind screenwriter Harry Caine (formerly filmmaker Mateo Blanco until an accident took his eyesight, both are played by Lluís Homar) is courted by a director to compose a script based on his recently deceased millionaire father Ernesto Martel. He declines, suggesting something heavier than disinterest, and eventually reveals his tortured past. During his Mateo days, the protagonist had a deep romance with actress Lena (the always ravishing Penélope Cruz) whose life ended tragically in the same hit and run that took our hero’s sight. As a thriller it’s engaging and creative (one subplot involves Martel viewing silent video footage of the couple taken by a spy — and as he watches it, a lip reader recaps their private dialogues) but once the puzzle completes, the filmmaker opts to ruminate on Harry’s lost love. Here Almodóvar misses the mark: this kind of emotional audience commitment can’t come so late in the game, and the results are much less interesting and rather empty. We won’t go so far to call it maudlin as the seasoned vet is careful not to overdo things, but it does lack the power contained in the first half. [B-]