Todo sobre mi madre / All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Antonia San Juan, Cecilia Roth and Penélope Cruz

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Cecilia Roth, Antonia San Juan, Penélope Cruz, Marisa Paredes, Candela Pena, Rosa María Sardà, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Eloy Azorín, Toni Cantó.

Synopsis: After watching a stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire as a treat for her son's birthday, Manuela (Roth) watches in horror as her only child (Azorín) is killed in a hit and run while chasing after his favourite actress (Paredes) for an autograph. In a state of shock, Manuela leaves Madrid to return to Barcelona (after a long absence) in search of her former husband (Cantó) to tell him about their son. Along the way she meets old friends and makes new ones...

Along with Women on the Verge… this is the film I usually suggest when someone asks me where they should start with Almodóvar –I think it is among the most accessible of his films, but without losing any of the elements that make his films so distinctive.

Carne trémula / Live Flesh (Pedro Almodóvar, 1997)

Francesca Neri and Javier Bardem

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar, Ray Loriga, and Jorge Guerricaechevarria (based on a novel by Ruth Rendell)

Cast: Javier Bardem, Francesca Neri, Liberto Rabal, Ángela Molina, José Sancho, Penélope Cruz, Pilar Bardem, Alex Angulo.

Synopsis: During a confrontation between two policemen (Bardem and Sancho) and a youth, Victor (Rabal), in Elena's (Neri) apartment, a gun goes off and one of the policemen, David (Bardem), is shot, leaving him paralysed from the waist down. By the time Victor is released from prison, David and Elena have married and the former policeman is representing Spain in basketball at the Paralympics. But Victor feels he has been wronged and swears revenge...

The Inspector Wexford TV series was never like this! Almodóvar uses the Ruth Rendell novel as a starting point but then takes the initial situation (the shooting of a policeman) in his own inimitable direction. This seems to be another of his lesser-known films in the UK, probably in part because it is somewhat difficult to track down (it appears to currently be OOP, but secondhand copies can be found on ebay and Amazon). My longer post on the film is here.

La flor de mi secreto / The Flower of My Secret (Pedro Almodóvar, 1995)

Marisa Paredes and Imanol Arias

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Marisa Paredes, Juan Echanove, Imanol Arias, Chus Lampreave, Rossy De Palma.

Synopsis: Leo (Paredes) secretly writes bestselling romance novels under the pseudonym Amanda Gris, but as her marriage to Paco (Arias) falls apart (he is in Brussels working for NATO) she finds herself unable to write and her fiction takes a darker turn, much to the annoyance of her publisher (who threatens to sue). Hoping to be taken seriously as a writer, and wanting to leave her romance novels behind, Leo approaches Angel (Echanove) -the arts editor at El País- about writing criticism for the paper. Her first job? Reviewing the new Amanda Gris anthology. She decides to commit commercial suicide and attacks the book with gusto. Everything comes to a head when Paco comes home on leave…

The film marks the beginning of a more ‘serious’ phase in Almodóvar’s career. Aside from Marisa Paredes’s powerfully pain-stricken performance, it is probably most interesting for containing elements that would go on the shape the plots of All About My Mother and Volver. The organ donation scenes (specifically the training course for doctors, which features a nurse called Manuela ‘playing’ the mother in the role play) recur in All About My Mother, and the plot of the much darker novel (‘The Freezer’) that is rejected by the Amanda Gris publishers includes plot points that appear in Volver (the freezer of the title is where the main character hides her husband’s body in the restaurant next door).

Kika (Pedro Almodóvar, 1993)

Victoria Abril

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Verónica Forqué, Victoria Abril, Peter Coyote, Alex Casanovas, Rossy De Palma.

Synopsis: Make-up artist Kika (Forqué) lives with her photographer boyfriend Ramón (Casanovas) who remains obsessed with his mother’s suicide some years earlier. Ramón’s ex-stepfather (and Kika’s ex-lover), Nicholas (an American writer (Coyote)), returns to Madrid after two years of travelling and moves into the studio above their apartment. Andrea (Abril) is a former psychologist (and Ramón’s ex) who now presents a garish reality TV show, El peor del día (The Worst of the Day), which broadcasts real footage of horrific crimes. Meanwhile, an escaped rapist seeks assistance from his sister (De Palma), who happens to be Kika’s housekeeper…

A.k.a. the first Almodóvar film I ever saw. Despite it being disliked by many people, and despite my own ‘issues’ with the film (namely the rape scene), I do hold it in some affection simply because it was my introduction to the director. It gives a scathing critique of ‘reality’ television and is a difficult film to like, perhaps not surprisingly given that Almodóvar has said that it is about ‘the sickness of big cities’ (Strauss 2006: 123). But Verónica Forqué gives a wonderful performance as the ever-optimistic Kika (and was memorably described in Sight & Sound as ‘a curious combination of Judy Holliday and Barbara Windsor’ by Paul Julian Smith (1994: 8)), and Victoria Abril also looks like she’s having fun as the deeply malevolent Andrea Caracortada (‘Scarface’). 

Machos in Madrid: Carne trémula / Live Flesh (Pedro Almodóvar, 1997)

Javier Bardem and José Sancho

       Paul Julian Smith states that, along with Almodóvar’s previous film (The Flower of My Secret (1995)), Live Flesh signals the start of a more mature phase of the director’s career (2003: 150), although it maintains several of his predominant interests, including the subversion of gender stereotypes (Smith 1998: 8). Live Flesh is effectively a treatise on machismo and the damage that it inflicts on both men and women, articulated through the generic guise of a thriller. It was the first of Almodóvar’s films to focus exclusively on masculinity and its incarnations (although women are the cause of much that goes on in the film), and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas argues that this focus on male characters ‘exposes some of the contradictions inherent in traditional notions of masculinity’ (2002: 190). 

     Steve Marsh posits that the film is also the first of Almodóvar’s films to use men as something more than ciphers and that not only are they imbued with history, but they are also constructed by it (2004: 54): ‘While this is indisputably Almodóvar’s male movie, its exploration of heterosexual masculinity is intimately linked to the political configurations of the time and space of the city of Madrid’ (58). Almodóvar is part of Madrid’s cultural heritage, having been a major figure in la movida in the 1980s, and all of his films (including Live Flesh) had been set in Madrid. However, Almodóvar had always been a chronicler of the here and now, refusing to focus on the past, and his films were famous for avoiding direct references to Franco or the dictatorship; what marks out Live Flesh is that it is the last of his films (to date) to be set exclusively in Madrid (his next film, All About My Mother (1999), was his first to be set outside of Madrid (it mainly takes place in Barcelona) and his subsequent films have been made in a variety of locations), and the first in which Spain’s past reverberates through the narrative. History, masculinity, the city of Madrid, and Spain itself, become encapsulated in the lives of the three male characters (Sancho (José Sancho), David (Javier Bardem), and Víctor (Liberto Rabal)). 

Tacones lejanos / High Heels (Pedro Almodóvar, 1991)

Miguel Bosé

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes, Miguel Bosé, Feodor Atkine, Miriam Díaz Aroca.

Synopsis: After more than fifteen years abroad, singer Becky del Paramo (Paredes) returns home to Spain to find her daughter, Rebeca (Abril), grown-up and married to one of Becky’s former lovers (Atkine). In her mother’s absence, Rebeca has taken to watching the performances of Femme Letal (Bosé), a drag artiste who imitates Becky’s musical performances from the 1960s. When all of these elements come together, murder follows…

A.k.a. the first Spanish film that I attempted to watch without subtitles. It didn’t go very well because I’d only had three Spanish lessons at that point, and surprisingly enough cross-dressing and murder investigations hadn’t featured in the vocab lists, but I did make some very detailed notes about the costumes! Shortly afterwards I did manage to find a copy with subtitles, so all became clear –it is virtually impossible to follow the plot if you can’t understand what is being said. I’d forgotten how much I liked it and also how strong the performances by the three central actors (Abril, Paredes, and Bosé –the latter of whom actually plays three different roles within the film, which was one of the things that confused me during the without-subtitles viewing) are. I was going to write a longer post about it for Almodóvar Month, but I’ve decided to use it for an ‘Anatomy of a Scene’ post at some point in the future instead. This seems to be one of Almodóvar’s lesser-known films, which is a shame because it is one of my favourites –check it out!

¡Átame! / Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1990)

Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, Loles León, Francisco (Paco) Rabal.

Synopsis: Freshly released from the mental hospital, Ricky (Banderas) wants to settle down, get married and have kids. He has decided that his future wife will be Marina (Abril), an ex-porn star, now serious actress (with a drug habit), who is working on a horror film for renowned director Máximo Espejo (Rabal). So he kidnaps her, ties her to the bed, and announces his intentions…

Released with little fuss in Spain (where it was favourably received by the critics and was among the biggest domestic hits of the year (Smith 2000: 108)), this film became notorious on its release in the US and led to the creation of the NC-17 certificate (the MPAA originally gave the film an X rating, which was usually applied to hard-core pornography). I’ve clearly become de-sensitised to sexual content because I struggle to see what the fuss was about (is the plot actually that different to Beauty and the Beast?). I think your perception of the film depends on whether you take the world on screen to be ‘reality’ or a heightened, Almodóvarian representation. I’m trying to keep these summaries short, so there isn’t really the space to discuss it here, but I don’t think that the film is intended to be taken as literally as some people have done. One to be written about in the future, when I’ve got more time and space to discuss it.

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios / Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)

Julieta Serrano

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Carmen Maura, Maria Barranco, Julieta Serrano, Antonio Banderas, Rossy De Palma, Kiti Manver, Fernando Guillen, Chus Lampreave.

Synopsis: Ivan (Guillen) has left Pepa (Maura). As she alternately tries to track him down around Madrid and waits for his call at home, a range of people (including her friend Candela (Barranco), on the run from the police for harbouring Shi’ite terrorists, the son she never knew Ivan had (Banderas), and Ivan’s unhinged wife (Serrano)) drop by her apartment to further complicate her life. With added Mambo Taxi.

This was Almodóvar’s breakout international hit and the film that, along with All About My Mother, seems to have found his broadest audience –certainly in my own experience, this is a film that most people have heard of, even if they haven’t seen it. It is a comedy but that label barely covers all that it contains –screwball tragic-comedy might be nearer the mark- because while it is undeniably funny, it also contains heartfelt and believable emotion. If you’ve never seen an Almodóvar film, this is a good place to start.

Reading Almodóvar, Part Two:

Part Two: Authors I - Z

Reading Almodóvar, Part One:

Like my lists of books on Spanish cinema, this is something of a cross between an annotated bibliography and a recommended reading list. This is not intended to be a definitive list –there are an abundance of other books and articles on Almodóvar and his films– but rather a list of texts that I have happened upon while researching Almodóvar, and / or Spanish cinema more generally. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the arguments or interpretations set forth by these authors, but I do think that their views are worth considering. The first Almodóvar film that I saw was Kika (1993), and this list contains a bias towards things written after that point (and about films made after that point as well). Likewise, there is a bias towards texts written in either English or Spanish, but given Almodóvar’s status in France there is also a wealth of material in French out there, if you care to look for it –particularly Cahiers du cinema, Positif, and Premiere (the French version). Most of the French magazines have websites where you can buy back issues (if you can’t get access to them through a library).
If I have embedded a link in the title, it will take you either to the abstract or the article itself –a great deal of material is now available online. Where that isn’t the case I will try to include enough information that you should be able to track it down via another route –if you can’t access the articles online, people in the UK will be able to get copies through the British Library or the BFI Library. In the case of reviews, I have just indicated which film is discussed.