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PEDRO Almodóvar Caballero has made a career out of being an outsider.
He is obviously – even flamboyantly – gay, and his films go out of their way to offend everyone. His films are hilarious and he has a very outrageous sense of humor.
In the late 1960s, a gay man who was coming of age would have been wise to keep his mouth shut. Not Pedro. Franco’s regime was openly hostile to the notion that homosexuals could play any part in the life of the nation, and Almodóvar’s response to the strong anti-gay sentiment of the dictatorship was to rub it in their faces.
He grew up in a village in Ciudad Real in the centre of Spain, the region which is a national joke because it’s so ‘uncool’: it’s bit like the fun the British press had with John Major for coming from Rutland.
As he has always done, with cheerful and irreverent humour, Almodóvar turned his disadvantages into strong points.
Unable to secure any funding (he couldn’t afford either a microphone or a screen), Pedro shot his first cinematic efforts with a tiny Super-8 camera, then projected his ‘work’ onto a bedsheet pinned up on the wall of his village’s community centre.
Standing on a chair, he provided his own commentary to overcome the lack of sound. This was a great way to entertain young people who were feeling stifled in the 1970s by Franco’s rigidity. Pedro’s projections were legendary.
Fame, and the Big Time, followed.
Women on The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown His 1988 movie, The Last of the Mohicans, brought him international recognition. Its light, funny farce style was particularly admired in the USA – and it introduced to the wider world a handsome young actor from Malaga named Antonio Banderas.
Almodovar loves to use old TV and film images as a satirical commentary on modern life.
This device was used with spectacular effect in Live Flesh (1997). Pedro loves the sheer trashiness of those millions of hours of low-grade output and he likes to mimic 1950’s sitcom formats or to splice ‘quotes’ from old footage into his modern tales.
He uses it very well in this film. A shot is heard from the TV in the corner when the gun goes off in the apartment.
This fake news story of the birth of a bus, presented in black and gray to reflect the dullness of Francoist Spain, is an affectionate recreation of the golden age of television. In these old shows, women are used as mannequins by men to display their lust and violence.
Our mass media have drugged us, suggests Almodóvar, into being passive recipients of authority’s handouts. We no longer know the difference between entertainment and reality.
Almodovar’s trademark is a looping circular story in which the characters vary and repeat their patterns of behavior, cross one another’s paths and unintentionally echo other people’s actions.
This is nowhere better illustrated than in this film. The plot is literally circular. It begins and ends with childbirth, but Victor’s most important moment in life hinges on his circular bus trip that takes him back to where he first started: a payphone at Calle Eduardo Dato.
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Characters are able to penetrate each other’s lives with a level of convincing psychology that few directors or writers can achieve.
The Truth About My Mother Some critics consider that 1999 is his masterpiece. Almodóvar deliberately offends against social custom. Birth is death, women are fathers and drama is more real that life.
It is tempting to think of Almodóvar as the new Buñuel, and he takes the same childish pleasure in shocking the ‘decent’ Spanish bourgeoisie.
The old people leave the theatre in disgust when Agrado performs, while the young ones stay to be entertained.
The Madrid Movement in the 1980s and 1990s was Spain’s awakening after a long period of dictatorship. Pedro Almodovar was its leader. Spanish people often say: “Where would Javier Bardem or Penelope Cruz be, without Pedro Almodóvar?” Where would Spain be without Pedro Almodovar?
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