Profile | Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar once informed an interviewer that the word ‘camp’ does not exist in his native Spain. It’s a term that international critics used to describe his early films, while lauding the director and applauding the nerve of his risky vision.
In some quarters the plaudits were so elaborate they too carried a touch of camp: ‘In terms of dramatic creativity there are three Spanish icons Cervantes, Lorca and Almodóvar.’ Following the breakthrough success of the Oscar-nominated ‘Women On The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown’ in 1988, the verb ‘Almodóvarian’ was coined to summarise the signature style of his films: sardonic comedy, melodrama, shock tactics and garish sets. The heightened style was inspired by the golden age of technicolour that captivated him as a child, with a touch of the Memphis group’s design output when it came to those sets. Homosexuality was obligatory; transexuals a staple from his early short ‘Sex Goes, Sex Comes’ (1980). ‘In the ‘80s, when my movies were particularly rich in gay and transgender characters, it was something that hadn't appeared in Spanish movies before,’ he recalled, long after the dust had settled on that decade. ‘I made a point to include these characters, because they were part of my life. I tried to treat them with the same naturalness that I would bring to a housewife or any other character.’
The director acknowledged there was a stagy melodrama to his screenplays, and perhaps a ‘gay’ sensibility, but ultimately they were an amalgam of much that was personal to him: ‘There are certain Spanish problems that bother me a lot, that I would love to make a movie about, such as historical memory. But I'm incapable of imposing themes. Instead, the subjects come to me, and I express them.’ The films reference the directors he admired as an adolescent, and that inspired him as an adult auteur. They are stacked with anecdotes and memories that he transposed to fictional scenes on screen. These components, along with the prominent roles he gave to female actors, and the attachment he made to the recurring theme of ‘family’ whatever form it takes, finished a poor second when it came to the reviews, no matter how good, and how plentiful the praise that rained down on the director. ‘There’s an element of cinematic Tourette’s syndrome to those early films,’ a critic wrote when commenting on titles such as ‘Tie Me Up!Tie Me Down!’ (1989) and ‘Law Of Desire’ (1987), with every scene a ‘taboo-busting rush of sex and violence’. In these projects, he was responding to, and rebelling against the country of his youth, under the Franco regime, years after the dictator’s death in 1975. Spain soon embraced democracy. Consumerism and subversion colonised cities such as Madrid, reaching the rural outpost of Castilla–La Mancha, where Almodóvar was born in 1949.
Something like change was in the air in the 1960s. General Franco allowed foreign influence from foreign parts to enter his fiefdom, when tourism began to have a positive financial impact, but not necessarily a cultural one in the minds of the authorities. The paltry freedoms Franco agreed to failed to extend to the arts and the law. The film school Pedro Almodóvar hoped to attend was closed, due to the revolutionary nature of the students and their output, with ‘communism’ emerging as a trend among the dissident young along with a burgeoning counterculture. In 1970, The Law of Danger and Social Rehabilitation provided police with the powers to clamp down on overt or covert homosexuality and imprison its practitioners. When Franco died five years later, the country was free of its dictator, restrictions in irreligion were lifted, ultimately having an impact on the country’s fervent Catholicism. Rebellion and insurrection continued to gather pace, notably in Madrid, which was christened ‘the capital of the century’, and described by Rolling Stone magazine as ‘a city reborn to run’.
Those outside influences had been instrumental in bringing about this shift, particularly the British punk movement - the Sex Pistols made their debut in London, the week before Franco’s death - and all that erupted in music and fashion in its wake. Having moved to Madrid years earlier, Pedro Almodóvar tapped into similar outsider moments that impacted on previous generations. The films of Andy Warhol and John Waters were an influence, along with Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’( 1966) and Nicholas Roeg’s ‘Performance’ (1970). In the early 1970s, following a trip to London as pop’s glam moment took hold, he fell for David Bowie and Roxy Music. In later years he insisted that the movement of performers, artists and fashion designers that spearheaded the rebellion and the insurrection in Madrid, may have been inspired by those developments abroad, but it remained a particularly Spanish experience: La Movida Madrileña. Almodóvar became the film maker identified with the movement, and the one most representative of the changes occurring: ‘Franco had to die so that I could live.’
Next year it will be fifty years since the punk phenomenon emerged in England, and General Franco died. In that time Pedro Almodóvar has progressed from making Super-8 features that were knowingly derivative, to establishing a style that earned his output the verb ‘Almodóvarian’, and an abundance of awards. Gradually, he moved on from the ghetto of camp and kitsch to fully reach maturity with ‘Pain & Glory’(2019) in which a film director struggles with writer’s block, illness, mortality and the prospect of the big finish arriving sooner rather than later, long after his years of youthful hedonism have passed. (A flirtation with heroin, and the return of an old lover, does not bring them back.) In ‘Parallel Mothers’ (2021), he got to address one of the big Spanish themes he previously alluded to by grafting historical memory, heritage and the civil war onto a contemporary story with a recurring motif in his films - motherhood. He cites the making of ‘All About My Mother’ (1999) as the point he began to mature as a film maker. It’s dedicated to his own mother, who died shortly before it was released. The relationships between the strong, struggling women in his films are often inspired by all that he witnessed back in Calzada de Calatrava, on the doorsteps of his neighbourhood.
While Almodóvar, along with his work and its content has matured, the themes he once adopted, once considered shocking and subversive, have not fared as well. The LGBT movement and its accompanying calling cards of Pride marches and rainbow flags, along with the transgender lobby, have moved beyond camp to travesty. The activists to the fore of the events that define these factions are lost, stuck, championing a victimhood that is at odds with the institutions and corporations fighting their corner, and penalising those critical of the lobby’s tactics. Almodóvar progressed from making these topics paramount in his films, for which he has received some criticism. It’s not that he has become old and rich and ditched them, it’s that Spanish society, Europe and America have, for the most part embraced them, and at the least, accommodated them. The director was never politicising ‘The Transgender Problem’ but allowing it a legitimacy: ‘Popular culture is awash now with gender bending characters and so it becomes more and more difficult to find the transgression that was so easily found after 40 years of National Catholic dictatorship.’
It is the presence of these themes that date aspects of his recently published debut collection of short stories, ‘The Last Dream’(Vintage). Largely because the book includes pieces he wrote in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of these became sequences in his later films, and read more like notes to self or ideas in progress. Literature is not necessarily a calling, but for Almodóvar words and writing were important from an early age, leading him to entertain the notion that he might become a writer. He needed fiction for the reason that many readers do, especially those cast as outsiders: ‘to make life easier and more liveable’. In interviews he has talked of ‘contar historias’ (making stories). In the story ‘A Bad Novel’ he elaborates on an ambition that is evident elsewhere in the collection: ‘I’ve always dreamed of writing a bad novel. Early on, when I was young my dream was to become a writer, to write a great novel.’ Further down the page, he continues: 'I have to confess that the first sentence in this piece isn’t completely true, but I couldn’t bear to cut it. I did not always dream of writing a bad novel. It has taken me a long time and quite a few films to admit that, as a novelist, I wouldn’t be up to the task.’
The more prominent he became as a director, the more he insisted he would never write an autobiography. He has actively thwarted any attempts by other directors to bring his story to the screen. Perhaps because much of his own experience is evident in his films, with certain characters representing aspects of himself: ‘I want to write a story so the first thing I ask myself is what I am going to write, what subject is worthy of my efforts. And, I have to say, I have a great idea: I’ll write about myself.’ The segments in ‘The Last Dream’ written as memoir, are superior to the fictional pieces. More for the story they tell, and the emotion they deliver, than a distinctive writing style. ‘It’s not that this story makes me a great writer, I’m not,’ he said of the piece that gives the book its title - a response to the death of his mother. ‘But in those four or five pages, I mean, if I were capable of writing that way — all the time, without my mother dying because that only happens once — there might have been a novel in me.’
The story details plans for her funeral: ‘She decided how the service would be and what dress she would wear. She’d heard that the morticians had a habit of binding the corpse’s feet so that they didn’t splay out in the casket and stipulated that, if this should happen, her children should immediately untie her. She didn’t want her feet bound; she planned to run free.’ The sequence, almost word for word, features in ‘Pain And Glory’, when the Antonio Banderas character visits his mother, reflecting on the formative years in the neighbourhood he had long since abandoned to the distant past. Almodóvar said at the time: ‘What I am expressing in that scene is not the strangeness in my mother’s eyes when she looked at me, but in the eyes of other villagers looking at me as if I were an unusual being and at school as if saying: “You are not a normal person”.’ The strangeness may have been a combination of the ‘queerness’ - in the wider sense of the word - that set him apart, and the creativity that was as natural to it as his sexuality. He believed his parents were people living in the 19th century, while he was a 21st century boy. Yet, it was ultimately these figures, that landscape and those experiences that would inform his work as a director, as much as the freedoms that he discovered in Madrid in the prelude to the 1980s.
‘If I could have looked ahead and seen myself now, I don’t think my view of myself would be positive,’ he trevealed in a recent interview. ‘I wouldn’t like what I’ve turned into. I’d look over and think: ‘Who’s that lonely solitary old man?’ In this century he admits to be more insecure and afraid, more melancholy and austere. But this is in part due to age and the prospect of his own mortality. (The subject of his first full-length English language ‘The Room Next Door’, is euthanasia.) Now aged 75, the lead up to the big finish could see the light fading on his creativity, and his role as a film maker, which is possibly why he has chosen to finally publish his collection of writing at this time. Just in case the end should come sooner rather than later. Despite his work having evolved, Pedro Almodóvar’s fear at this stage of the game is that he has not. Which seems to be an admirable approach by an odd outsider, to that final chapter: ‘I haven’t developed any other facets of my life. So I’ve now reached the point where film is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Cinema is the only thing I have.’