Seeing as how I’ve lived in Spain for some 4 years now I thought it time I take a look at a Pedro Almodóvar film that I never got around to seeing. The Flower of My Secret (La flor de mi secreto) marks Almodóvar’s shift from his comic beginnings to the more serious drama he’s now so well known for. However, the film has its share of great comic moments including a mother-daughter relationship at once frightening and hysterical.
As usual, the typical Almodóvar flourishes are there: the abundant use of bright reds and blues; the 1950s style Hollywood melodrama; riffs on the meaning of identity; use of reflective surfaces within the frame; strong female protagonists. This film arrives at a point in his career where Almodóvar was going through a new learning process as he transitioned to more dramatic narratives. And you can often see the machinations at work in this film.
The story centers on Leo (Marisa Paredes), a middle-aged woman whose military husband, Paco, is stationed in far-off Brussels. Although they are seemingly like teenage lovebirds on the phone, there are underlying problems that surface quite quickly when they see each other. Leo, who makes lucrative living secretly writing trashy romance novels under the pseudonym Amanda Gris, is no longer satisfied with her life such as it is. She hates the trash she writes and takes a job writing a literary column under a second pen name in order to tear apart her previous work. It is through this new job she meets the affable editor of the newspaper El País, who has an immediate attraction to her even if she still can’t let go Paco, who is finished with her. Meanwhile her sister and her mother, who is slowly going blind, live together under circumstances that could charitably be described as ‘difficult’ and her best friend, Betty (Carme Elias), is carrying on a secret affair with Paco.
You can really see Almodóvar developing the themes that would come to dominate his next films, although at this early stage he was still a bit ham-handed about it. Leo’s dissatisfaction with her current life, itself already divided into two identities (Leo and Amanda), manifests itself by bringing out a third identity through which to criticize the second. The fascination with identity and character as well as the blurred lines between fiction and reality are interesting and worth exploring, but he doesn’t take it far enough in this earlier work. What’s more, he overuses mirrors as a symbolic image both in terms of reflecting a character’s image (identity) back at her or by diffusing the image through a pane of glass so she appears separated into multiple images. These themes eventually came to fruition in his most recent work Broken Embraces (Abrazos rotos).
Another theme that would become the focus of his later film Volver (and interestingly enough, Leo describes the storyline for one of her books as identical to that of Volver) is the power and image of the pueblo, or village, in Spanish culture. Most Spaniards are not far removed from the villages where they were born and raised and continue to return frequently (in some cases every weekend). For Almodóvar in The Flower of My Secret, the pueblo has a kind of restorative effect, a place to relax and to heal. It’s the place where Leo’s mother wants to return as her blindness grows worse. This idea would develop more fully into the sort of magical realism exhibited by the pueblo in Volver.
The Flower of My Secret is not the best example of Almodóvar’s work nor is it fully realized, but it’s a lighter place to start for the uninitiated or perhaps a breath of fresh air after his recent films of such deep weight.
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