Un Film De Almodovar

'Distinctive’ is not an adjective that gets easily attributed to film-makers. There are those who supposedly make gritty realistic movies, others are famous for making poetic epics; we have the visionary stylists and then others who just about make the popcorn worth it. In the 50’s, 60’s and even the 70’s, an Italian maestro making movies that seemed straight out of his fantasies and throwing every formula out of the window introduced the word ‘felliniesque’ to the English dictionary. He spawned a great number of imitators and followers though none of them achieved anything close to his greatness until a baby faced Spaniard burst onto the world cinema scene. Pedro Almodovar's sets were brightly lit with all the colours of a garden in spring. His characters were those you would never meet until you had re-created a crazy story in the corner of a sleazy tabloid or had lived for a period of time in an alternate reality or had taken a seriously wrong turn to the seedy underbelly of your city. His women were beautiful, strong, wilful and independent, the men were usually weak or disgusting and his stories were….. Oh yes they were ‘distinctive’.

My first real interest in Pedro Almodovar was kindled by the Cannes Film Festival of 2006 (I think). That year there were some great samplings for the quality craving taste buds of every movie connoisseur. There was Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Wind that Shakes the Barley among many others. Volver caught my attention when I read the story synopsis. It was an impossible script, an absolutely outlandish plot to the point of being silly and yet everyone was raving about it. I finally got to see the movie only in 2007 and was mesmerized, mostly by the nonchalance with which the characters seemed to accept everything happening around them. There is an accidental murder at the start and unlike most movies it’s just a random plot point; no one seems to care much about it. There are so many under-currents running through the movie - Raimunda (played by Penelope Cruz) and her relationship with her sisters, her aunt, their past and suffering at the hands of their men; in short everything  that goes on in an everyday woman-centric world. The wonderfully rustic Spanish countryside adds its own flavor to the proceedings. There is such a celebration of Spanish culture in the routine happenings that to an outsider it’s fascinating. I was pleasantly surprised to see that someone could make such an engrossing movie showing just the characters instead of simply focusing on the crazy plot point running throughout the movie. A lesser film-maker would definitely have succumbed to that temptation (if you are wondering about the ‘plot point’ I am referring to, then let me assure you, ‘it’s different’ in a way even certain Spanish tomato sauces can never be). There is a song somewhere at the end sung by Penelope which is just pure magic, Volver; it’s the return, its redemption.

As I continued my cinematic love affair with Almodovar I turned my attention to La Mala Educacion (Bad Education) mainly because I wanted to watch the movie that is as personal to Almodovar as 8 and a half was to Fellini. The movie is about a film-maker who looks to stories buried in the corner of tabloids for inspiration. We see flashbacks of him at a catholic school where a close friend of his was abused by the head of the school. One fine day his old friend turns up asking for a role in his movie but the film-maker has doubts as to his true identity. Further along we see that the 'real' friend has turned into a highly disturbed transsexual who is looking for money to get breast implants. There are so many small stories, both real and surreal blended together so seamlessly that I was fascinated with the style. So many layers of storytelling in two hours of movie watching was absolutely unbelievable to me. The movie felt like a collage of scenes put together without any thought to cohesiveness and yet I feel this was the only way a story so haunting, disturbing and touching could ever be interpreted on screen. At this point I was marvelling at the sheer courage of this Spaniard and the utter disregard for anything that even came close to the word cliché. I was worried I might have reached my climax of adulation but then not for nothing is Todo Sobre Mi Madre considered his magnum opus.

How many themes can one movie explore with a just a handful of characters. Loss, grief, betrayal, prejudice, adulation, redemption and above all love. In Todo Sobre Mi Madre we see it all. A mother named Manuela  has just lost her son in a freak accident while running on the road to get the autograph of a stage actress named Huma. Unable to handle the grief she flies back to Barcelona, the city of her youth where she used to be a sex worker. She runs into an old transvestite friend of hers named Agrado in what is probably the seediest, shadiest piece of area ever filmed. Almodovar gives us a scene that is in a nutshell; genius in conception and unparalleled in execution. An open air red light area (that’s the closest I’ll ever come to describing it in five words) where people from every walk of life and I mean literally every walk of life have gathered to satisfy their most carnal of desires. Manuela knows this place because she used to work at this very site in her youth. The friend, Agrado is probably one of the most colourful characters I have ever seen in film and all she wants to do is to get another breast implant(she’s had a few before, not to mention a face lift and other such indulgences). She introduces Manuela to a nun, Rosa played by Penelope Cruz (an Almodovar favourite) who wants to go to some remote corner of the world to do charity work. Pretty soon we find out that the nun is pregnant and also has AIDS passed on to her by the same wretch of a man who had gotten Manuela pregnant. Rosa’s parents have serious reservations (being Catholics of course) and hence Manuela starts to care for Rosa at her home. At the same time she finds employment as the secretary of the stage actress who was responsible for her son’s death. There are scenes here that are so heartfelt, filled with such raw emotion, characters of so much flesh and blood that it reaches a very remote place within you and you resonate with the pain of each and every character. There is a scene towards the end where Agrado gives an extemporaneous performance on stage that sounds so true and so rich in life’s lessons that all of a sudden that disfigured face radiates a serene beauty. That’s the power of an Almodovar movie.

There are movies that have surprised me, those that have sent me into raptures, those that have entertained me thoroughly and those that have inspired me to write stories on my own. But an Almodovar movie has always, without fail, opened up a whole new world to me. Not a world that exists in someone’s fantasy or one that existed in the last century or a different dimension but a world that exists right here in the times we live in, a world that we choose to ignore as we are cocooned in our lives. A world full of prejudices, filled with unmatched suffering, heart breaking pain and pure beauty.

This post is an entry to the Reel-Life Bloggers contest organized by wogma.com and reviewgang.com