Be warned. This is an article about death – Spanish death – and there are a
lot of corpses. But there is a happy ending.
As a child in Caceres, a small town in Extremadura, Pedro Almodovar saw
Antonioni’s great film about boredom and alienation, La Notte. “I identified
with that tedium very deeply and very profoundly. He was a forerunner in
addressing the idea of noncommunication between people, especially couples.
It was the same with Ingmar Bergman, they both dealt with that; not only the
silence of it, but the pain of it.” Almodovar is often compared to Bergman.
Both are creators of great female characters. “But the difference is that
Bergman slept with them, and I don’t. That is a difference, a palpable
difference.”
On July 30 this year, both Bergman and Antonioni died. Here are some other
deaths: Fellini, 1993; Truffaut, 1984, Buñuel, 1983; Visconti, 1976;
Rossellini, 1977. The generation of European masters Almodovar absorbed
growing up is gone. European cinema is now a pale shadow of its former self.
For that generation died, cinematically speaking, almost childless. Now the
very idea of a truly European movie master seems quaint or absurd. In fact,
there is only one: Almodovar.
He accepts the compliment with a smile and a charmingly egotistical nod of
affirmation. “It’s difficult to make a movie anywhere in Europe now. There
is a general crisis of creation. French cinema now can’t be compared with
the nouvelle-vague period, British movies with Free Cinema or Italian movies
with neorealism.” But his response is not, like so many others, to flee to
Hollywood. It’s even worse there.
“It’s a general crisis. But, in America, it’s perhaps not a crisis in terms of
creativity, but in terms of quality. The quality of films being made there
is simply not comparable to those before the 1960s. I think US cinema has
become subjugated to what is seen as the target audience. This is more than
just a juvenile audience, I think it’s become infantile. More and more,
these films seem like children’s electronic toys, like Nin-tendo. The sense
of danger that was present in films before 1970 has been lost.”
But he gets upset when I say that many people in Spain think of him as
antiHollywood. He reels off a list of American films he has “quoted” in his
work – All About Eve, Duel in the Sun, Johnny Guitar, Opening Night,
Splendour in the Grass. “I have been formed as much by the American
classical canon as by the European one.” He even took in Doris Day comedies.
“You are,” I suggest, “a mixture of Doris Day and Bergman.” He nods and
smiles, pleased with this idea. High seriousness and comedy come naturally
to him. Withmovies such as What Have I Done to DeserveThis?, Tie Me Up! Tie
Me Down!, All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Volver, Almodovar has become
one of the most distinctive of all cinema stylists, and a Spanish
institution. Like Bergman in Sweden, and unlike anybody in Britain since,
perhaps, Tennyson, he is a national artist, the creative conscience of his
people. What he says and does is big news in Spain. Tourists can even go on
trips round “Almodovar’s Madrid”.
He seems to have been destined for this role. He was born in 1949, in the
province of La Mancha. The hero of Don Quixote – “The book,” the Spanish
like to say, with some glee, “that destroyed a nation” – came from La
Mancha. At eight, Almodovar was sent to a religious boarding school in
Caceres. The whole family joined him there later. The school was pretty
fierce, and Spanish Catholicism is a distinctive creed, but, unlike his
great predecessor, Luis Buñuel, he did not become obsessed with faith.
“We lived in very different periods, but, of course, we belong to the same
family. The ghost of religion is much more present in Buñuel’s films than in
mine, but there is a good reason for this – mainly because religion was far
more rooted in his society than it is in mine.
“One of the things it is important to realise is that the Franco regime was
called NationalCatholicism; the nation was united with Catholicism. Religion
was a great enemy of the people and of liberty, so Buñuel had to fight it
very actively. That phantom was receding by the time I started making films.”
He is, he says, not antireligious but anticlerical. He is angry that the
church in Spain still preaches politics from the pulpit. But, as his films
repeatedly make clear, he is in love with the strange, idolatrous hybrid
that is the faith of the people.
“I admire very much their practical Catholicism. They don’t pay any attention
to the pope, and they don’t think about God. They do it in a very personal
way. There is a sense of idolatry, which the papacy doesn’t really like.
Spanish people believe in images. They relate their images to their own
lives. It’s a very practical application of religion.”
So, in the beautiful opening scene of Volver we see women assiduously washing
the graves of their relatives. It is the objects, the images, that anchor
their lives.
“It is part of the relationship some Spanish people have with death. I would
like to have that in my own life ... They think about death in a very
natural way. It’s part of living. The dead people don’t seem to be
completely dead at all.” At 17, against the wishes of his family, he went to
live in Madrid. Probably his homo-sexuality – well, it was bisexuality then
– had much to do with this move. He has always been insistent on being seen
not as a gay director, but as a director who happens to be gay. But the big
point is, whatever his sexuality, he is perhaps the finest director of women
and creator of female characters the cinema has ever known. He has a regular
cast of actresses known as “ las mujeres de Almodovar” – the
women of Almodovar. Women of my acquaintance watch his movies in a state of
rapturous recognition. And he is particularly delighted when I say that
Marge Simpson is an Almodovar woman. “I love that series, but I haven’t seen
the film yet.”
Madrid was like coming home. “Ever since I was a teenager, it was clear in my
mind that I was off to Madrid. I didn’t belong to the world in which I had
grown up. I knew that I wasn’t going to develop in this small town. For me,
Madrid was freedom. I could be anonymous. I became a hippie the moment I
arrived.” Spain, of course, was still a fascist country, and Almodovar’s
personal liberation had to happen within the confines of Franco’s police
state. But he was at least free to go to the movies. In Madrid he taught
himself cinema. He had to – Franco had closed the national film school.
Finally, in 1975, the miserable old Generalisimo died. The machinery of the
police state lingered for a while. But there was really only one way for the
people to go. Spain marched towards the light, and, in 1980, Almodovar
released his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Women on the
Heap. It’s a messy, desperately low-budget punk movie, but it announced his
style – an offbeat, faintly surreal quality – and his themes – women,
polymorphous sexuality and the psychological and social underworld. His
later films may be more sober, more naturalistic, but, in principle, the
Almodovar announced in Pepi is the Almodovar we have today. He notes his
later maturity, his gravitas, though he is puzzled by it.
“It’s been an evolution, a natural response to the passing of time, not
something I’ve consciously decided. If I’d made a conscious decision, I’d
probably have gone for a style that was lighter. It’s given my work a new
gravity, a new profundity. My life is weightier than it was before.
Everything that is good for my films is bad for my life. But I can’t avoid
it.”
Why is it bad for his life? “I’m very aware of the fact of being aged, of all
the limitations, and I’m much more conscious about time. It has to do with
the preoccupation with death, but not just with death itself. It’s about
reaching the end of things, about things reaching their natural end, about
limitations. It is very close to me
In 1999, Almodovar’s mother, Francisca Caballero, died. He was extremely close
to her, and mentions the death as if it happened yesterday. It is
unquestionably this event that overshadows his later films. He rejects any
idea of cinema as therapy, but even he cannot deny that All About My Mother
and Volver – in which an apparently dead mother returns to life – are
directly autobiographical in their overpowering focus on the meaning and
terrible poignancy of motherhood.
“I don’t, as a rule, do cinema as therapy, but there are minor exceptions. The
great issue for me at the moment is death, especially after the death of my
mother, and in Volver I am clearly dealing with that – trying to have some
sort of reconciliation with death, because I find it hard to live with.” He
keeps returning to this, circling it as if trying to find a weakness that
will allay his anxiety. He envies those who can cope – the Spanish
idolaters, or even the savagely anticlerical Buñuel. “He laughed in the face
of death.”
When Carmen Maura, the actress who plays the mother in Volver, seems to come
back from the grave, he says his direction of the scene involved a
combination of Bergman and Buñuel: straight, deadpan, realistic, “no
fireworks”. He was attempting to normalise death, to make it look like life.
In Spain, he points out, a lot of people believe in ghosts and light a
candle at night to guide their loved ones home.
It is the extraordinarily intimate power of All About My Mother that has led
to it being turned into a play – written by Samuel Adamson and directed by
Tom Cairns – at the Old Vic. Almodovar is evidently nervous about this.
“I was very involved with the play in the early stages, when Daniel Sparrow
[the producer] approached me and we had to find a writer. But then I had
little to do with it – I wanted them to have the freedom to realise it in
any way they wanted. It’s strange for me, the way these characters are alive
on stage in a different language and a different culture and a different
medium. I felt very strange the first time I saw it; the second time, I felt
better.”
But why this film in particular? “They found it was good material for the
stage. And the movie is about women in the theatre. The theatre is a
protagonist. Many sequences in the film happen on the stage or around the
stage. It’s about women and actresses, and women who have the capacity to be
actresses.”
His real nerves, though, are about whether the play will work for people who
haven’t seen the film. “You have to listen to the audience breathe, how they
sound. You can feel if they are hooked by the plot. My impression is that
they were following it, they were very, very hooked.” There’s a famous line
in both the film and the play. It captures, poignantly, the struggle for
identity that is the underlying theme of all Almodovar’s work. It’s spoken
by the transvestite Agrado, played on stage by Mark Gatiss. He says: “The
more you become what you have dreamt for yourself, the more authentic you
are.” I ask Almodovar if he believes this. “It works very well for that
character. But I can’t say it works for everyone. Some things you dream may
be crazy or a lie. It’s not something you can apply to humanity in general,
it functions in a repressed society where you have to hide part of your
identity.”
It has been a strange interview. Almodovar has a chubby, boyish face. His hair
is now dyed, and he wears white trainers, jeans and a black-and-white
striped shirt. He doesn’t look his age – but then, when younger, he looked
older. He speaks English, but with a heavy accent, and he keeps lapsing,
apparently without knowing it, into Spanish. An interpreter is required, and
she seems to act his words on his behalf. He speaks quickly, evenly and
calmly; she is demonstrative, almost operatic in her delivery. She is like
one of his heroines, an actress.
What is clear is that he’s a troubled man, confident about his gift, but
insecure about almost everything else, most importantly about his inability
to come to terms with death. But, as he says, what’s good for his work seems
to be bad for him, so we should be grateful he’s not entirely at peace. Like
Bergman, perhaps like any great artist, he produces beauty from within
personal unease. That’s the happy ending I promised. The movies. What could
be happier?
Pedro's protégés
In the early days, Almodovar had a virtual rep company: Carmen Maura, Cecilia
Roth, Julieta Serrano and a struggling stage actor from Andalusia, Antonio
Banderas. Banderas’s first screen role was as a gay Islamic terrorist,
in Labyrinth of Passion; his next was another gay role, in Law of Desire. He
played a young man trying to escape Opus Dei’s clutches in Matador; then
Carlos the stutterer in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a role
that gave him a more international audience. He left for Hollywood – and
English lessons.
Almodovar’s next muses included Rossy de Palma, whose profile has been likened
to a cubist Picasso portrait, and Victoria Abril, the award-winning sexpot
from High Heels and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Abril is said to have inspired Penelope
Cruz(left)to start acting. Cruz appeared first in Live Flesh, then in
All About My Mother, as a pregnant nun.
But it was in last year’s Volver that she made her biggest impact, as a wily
grafter fighting to keep her family together.
Almodovar also gave a leg-up to Javier Bardem, whose bravura
performance as a paraplegic cop in Live Flesh prefigured his quadriplegic
role in The Sea Inside. The Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal also
found new audiences in Bad Education, as an abused young man masquerading as
his gender-realigned brother – what else?
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