The Spanish Punk Who Conquered the World

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The New York Sun

Ask most Americans to name a Spanish director and they can’t get past “A” for Almodóvar. Since 1980, Spain’s most famous Pedro has turned out a new movie every other year, and all of them have been events.

“Labyrinth of Passion” (1982) launched Antonio Banderas’s career. “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988) was a breakout arthouse hit. “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1990) sparked an American controversy that ushered in the NC-17 rating. He’s practically Ellis Island for Spanish talent going abroad: Mr. Banderas, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz all had their passports stamped in his movies, and he’s produced early films from directors like Guillermo del Toro (“Hellboy”) and Alex de la Iglesia (“El Crimen Perfecto”).

Even in America, a country where foreign movies can’t catch a break, Almodovar is a critical and a popular success. His films regularly gross about $10 million at the box office — an avalanche of money in foreign film distribution — and he has two Oscars, for “All About My Mother” (1999) and “Talk to Her” (2002). As a big sloppy kiss of appreciation and a promotional stunt for his upcoming movie, “Volver,” Sony Pictures Classics is re-releasing eight Almodóvar films in a touring retrospective called “Viva Pedro” (August 11 at the Lincoln Plaza) and, commercial motives aside, it represents an unusual chance for people around the country to see an artist age before their eyes.

For most directors, age kills. Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, and Francis Ford Coppola have all seen their legends fade with time. But maturity becomes Pedro Almodóvar.

Almodóvar’s early career was mostly a poke in General Francisco Franco’s eye. He was a country mouse who left everything behind in 1966 at age 16 to move to Madrid and attend film school — only to discover that Franco had already closed it. He scratched out a living selling junk in a flea market before landing a position at Telefonica, Spain’s national phone company. For 12 years he was an administrative assistant by day and a member of the punk underground by night.

By the time Franco died in 1975, La Movida Madrilena, a cultural eruption reveling in newfound freedom, had exploded with Almodóvar at its epicenter. His first film “Pepi, Luci, Bom…” (1980) was an energetic attack on conservative values, celebrating a checklist of unacceptable elements: sex, violence, transvestites, and corrupt cops.

For 10 years Almodóvar was a purveyor of outrageous women’s pictures, generously laced with camp, color-coded to within an inch of their lives, and featuring enormous helpings of sex, murder, and gender confusion.”Matador”(1986) opens with a retired bullfighter masturbating to death scenes from slasher films and charts a romance between two serial killers. Here, bullfighting is no different from serial killing, a spectator sport where everyone buys a ticket by turning on the nightly news, and Almodóvar gleefully exposes the dirty little secret that death excites us.

After pulling out all the stops with the madcap rape film “Kika” (1993), which shocked a million op-ed writers, Almodóvar decided to shock his fans with “The Flower of My Secret” (1995). Selling shock is a bad business because eventually you run out of taboos to bust, and so Almodóvar did an end run around expectations and started taking his characters seriously, abandoning critiques of culture for an exploration of emotions.It was as if his brain had split in two, both sides with their roots in the 1970s — one side was all La Movida, pushing the boundaries and challenging hypocrisy; the other became fascinated the lives of the middle-class secretaries he sat next to for 12 years at Telefonica.

“Viva Pedro” unfairly puts these two parts of the director’s career next to each other, and it’s a one-sided fight. “Matador” feels self-conscious and overly cerebral next to “Talk to Her,” about two men with comatose lovers, one of whom is a bullfighter.”Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” feels contrived and shrill, squeaking where it should roar, especially compared with his other estrogen-fest, “All About My Mother,” whose cast of transvestite junkies, pregnant nuns, and streetwalking hookers are accorded a dignity that makes them more than conversation-stopping punch lines.

“The Flower of My Secret” is generally regarded as subpar Almodóvar, but it’s a far better movie now than it was in 1995. The story of a middle-aged woman’s world falling apart, the film ends without a victory, but with the simple assurance that where there’s life, there’s hope. It’s a clichéd sentiment, and one that most cineástes will reject out of hand because it’s more than a little mawkish, but Almodóvar delivers it with utter conviction. Douglas Sirk did this kind of thing in the 1950s, and while he’s now regarded as a genius, three of cinema’s baddest boys (John Waters, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Almodóvar) have always worshipped him as their idol because they know that nothing is more transgressive than taking the emotional lives of women seriously.

Some fans see Almodóvar’s maturity as selling out, but he still shocks by making absorbing films whose biggest special effect is a woman crying.In a moviegoing world where spectacle has become routine and where a $200 million movie elicits shrugs of “It was all right,” we’ve been trained not to expect very much from our movies. Lowered expectations are practically a convention of movie-going these days, which makes Pedro Almodóvar the most unconventional director in the world.

“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” is showing Friday at Lincoln Plaza (Broadway between 62nd and 63rd streets, 212-757-0359).


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