IN AND OUT OF LOVE (The films of Pedro Almodóvar)2
Almodóvar’s interest in molten-eyed transvestites and vamping, sequinned drag queens may be the product of more than sexual curiosity. Such men open the floodgates of emotion without shame, and, however wistful and mixed up, they represent hope, as do the tall, restless street hustlers who become not transsexuals but omnisexuals—they have beautiful new breasts, which they show off to anyone who’s interested, but they still have a male organ. They haven’t changed gender—they’ve added one. Almodóvar’s embrace of such men is so affectionate that we think less about perversion than about the manifold carnal possibilities of life—the unwillingness to give up anything. In “Law of Desire,” Carmen Maura plays Tina, an actress who was born a boy. As a child, she ran off with her father and, at his urging, had a sex-change operation. Then he left her, and she became a lesbian and mother—she’s raising her lover’s daughter. Tina could be a joke on all the solemn talk of “gender” in recent years: her identity is not so much unstable as universal. In Almodóvar’s films, identity is not “constructed” by social forces but created by fantasy, will, and humor. Self-generated, his people don’t behave according to traditional stereotypes, but they don’t behave according to liberationist stereotypes, either. What matters to the director is not whether they are straight or gay (the issue is hardly discussed) but what they want and what they do.
In “High Heels,” there is a tall drag queen named Femme Letal (pronounced “Lay-thal,” which sounds a lot more lethal). At the end of her act, a young woman walks backstage to say hello, and, to her astonishment (and ours), Letal, still in lipstick and mascara, jumps her. Gorgeous, hilarious, and highly gymnastic sex follows, and, eventually, a child is born. Fellini made people like Letal into grotesque freaks; Almodóvar unfreaks them. A credit at the end of “All About My Mother” reads, “Dedicated to Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider. . . . To all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act. To all men who act and become women. To all people who want to be mothers. To my mother.” In Almodóvar’s world, you begin with the nurturing images of Hollywood and you end with mom. Just like everyone else, the transvestites and omnisexuals get grouchy, hungry, or tired, and some of them long for children. They leave the audience in remarkably good humor, relieved by the appearance of what the Spanish director Miguel Albaladejo called “the daily ordinariness of the extraordinary.” That doesn’t sound like camp at all.
As a boy, Almodóvar would go to a movie and entertain his family afterward by telling them the story, and making it juicier in the telling. For years, he’s been doing the same thing as a filmmaker. It makes sense, I think, to regard his fourteen completed films as retold movies, as stories relished for spectacle and emotion, pleasure and suffering, with all the boring parts left out—the cumbersome narrative supports, the “motivation.” Almodóvar jumps to the transactional moments: people meet and size each other up; they connect or rebuff each other on the spot. He rarely shoots gauzy, meandering love scenes. The sex is immediate, overwhelming. His is an anti-Freudian cinema: the connection between repression and violence, so important to his predecessor the surrealist Buñuel, has been broken—in Almodóvar’s movies, everyone acts out. And by using multi-sexual characters he expands his narrative freedom. All sorts of linkages suddenly become possible; plots, hinged by changing desire, turn radically in an instant, establish parallel lines, double back on themselves.
Terse and decisive, the films are not full-scale dramatic fictions but fables, in the tradition of work by racy, fast-moving writers like Boccaccio or the creators of “A Thousand and One Nights.” And, like Cervantes, Almodóvar multiplies narratives, laying stories within stories or piling closely related tales on top of one another. In “All About My Mother,” a nurse named Manuela loses her son in a street accident in Madrid when the boy runs after Huma, an actress he adores who has been playing Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The grief-stricken Manuela goes to Barcelona and scours the pickup scene there for the boy’s father, who, it turns out, has gained breasts and become Lola, a transsexual junkie. Manuela can’t find him, but she falls in with two people—a nun who is also pregnant by Lola, and the high-flying Huma, who is now playing Blanche in Barcelona. Like the Thelma Ritter character in “All About Eve” (the reference is explicit), Manuela gets a job taking care of the star. At the same time, onstage, she fills in for Huma’s female lover—who has run off—in the role of Stella, a role she performed years earlier in an amateur production. Both as Stella and in her relationship with Lola, Manuela is a woman sexually enthralled by an overpowering man. In the end, Lola shows up, only to die of aids; the nun dies in childbirth; and Manuela gets a son—the nun’s baby, who has the same name, Esteban, and the same father, Lola, as her dead child.
Nutty as that story is, it parses. If anything, it intentionally over-parses. A movie like “All About My Mother” is an example of Almodóvar’s insistence on the productive artificiality of storytelling. A story is not a version of life but an interpretation of experience; it’s a way of telling, not a way of being, and it reverberates in every direction. Eager to make the audience concentrate on his meaning, this fabulist is extremely disciplined; his imagery may be flamboyant, but he keeps his camera still or gliding gently, and he arranges the visual design around a dominant color or pair of colors (red and black in “Matador,” pale blue in “Talk to Her”). The color unifies the shocks and agitations of the tale, and the music, like Bernard Herrmann’s throbbing scores for Hitchcock, exaggerates the characters’ turmoils in a wash of overcharged strings. Almodóvar hasn’t dropped the traditional narrative logic of temporal sequence, or cause-and-effect action, but the speed and the heated-up emotionalism of his dizzy plots are exhilarating. As you’re watching, you consciously enjoy the pretense that life could be like this.
What strengthens the mocking, overdetermined fables and makes them real movies, not just sizzling erotic cartoons, is the intensity of the performances. Almodóvar may experiment with narrative plausibility, but, at the same time—and this is his great secret—he gets his actors to put real feelings into his loopy stories. His characters may be strange, but they express common emotions—sexual obsession, love, the pain of loss, compassion. Their responses to the bizarre circumstances they find themselves in burst through the flimsy walls of plot. As a jilted lover in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), Carmen Maura skitters on high heels, rushing from one ridiculous confrontation to the next. “Women” is farce, and, physically, Maura gives an expertly stylized performance. But her eyes are alive with outrage. The way Almodóvar turns the plot inside out may be a joke, but the situation of a woman abandoned is not, and Maura holds your emotions even as the pinwheeling movie makes you laugh. Marisa Paredes, another Almodóvar favorite, has a haunted, mask-of-tragedy face, like Joan Crawford or Melina Mercouri. Big-boned, a growler, often rattled yet always generous, Paredes is close to exultation or breakdown; her despair is like blackest night. This is acting in the grand manner, but it’s not ironic, and it’s certainly not camp. Paredes never places quotation marks around her moods. People all over the world have been moved by Almodóvar’s transvestites and roiling women. He’s afraid of nothing, but he’s a generous, playful, warm-spirited director—the last great humanist in cinema.
In “Talk to Her,” the first of Almodóvar’s recent male-centered movies, two men, strangers, attend a Pina Bausch ballet. Onstage, women, their eyes closed, bounce off the walls in anguish, while a man rushes to and fro in front of them, hastily moving chairs out of their way. The two spectators are touched, and they later form a bond, in a clinic where each cares for a comatose woman he idolizes. The ballet, with its themes of isolation and dependency, sets up the narrative in a manner that’s poetically satisfying rather than explicit. Earlier, in his celebrations of female temperament, Almodóvar’s dominant colors were oversaturated and bright, and he loved abrupt shifts of tone, but in “Talk to Her” the colors are soft-hued and blended, the imagery is smooth and harmonious. Past and present flow together, too; everything seems touched with melancholy longing and the power of what’s not stated. The movie has the feeling of a chastened reckoning. Could “Talk to Her” be interpreted as an allegory of the way a gay director imagines his relationship to women—caring for them, even adoring them, but never quite reaching them?
For the moment, Almodóvar has stopped trying to understand women. Male homosexuality is front and center in “Bad Education,” and the mood is one not of longing but of bitter acceptance of the deceptions and manipulations that accompany desire. In Ignacio’s story, we see him grown up, in drag, confronting Father Manolo, and claiming to be his own sister. Almodóvar is still playing with alternate selves, though the play has got more dangerous, the lying more selfish. Gael García Bernal (from “The Motorcycle Diaries”), with his pout and sudden smile, is the male successor to the lying scarlet women who lived at the center of old Hollywood and Almodóvar films. At one time or another in this movie, García Bernal plays the drag queen, a desirable gay cupcake, and a straight young actor. The trying on of selves has suddenly taken on a darker cast; Ignacio is perhaps the first character in Almodóvar’s movies to be judged completely amoral, and the movie asks, Is love possible between men, or is it possible only between innocent boys? Love expressed by women is suffering and theatre; when it’s felt by men, it may be suffering, too, but it’s also a series of manipulations and traps. The truth of what happened to Ignacio and Enrique emerges in pieces: the three narratives, as they expand and correct one another, become mirrors producing endless off-angle reflections. The playful young Almodóvar was a carefree dazzler who settled on one charged emotion at a time. At fifty-three, he still plays, but in a formally complex and sinuous style that embraces ambiguity and regret. In the next stage of his extraordinary career, Almodóvar may become the most bitterly intelligent director since Billy Wilder.
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