25 Years Ago This Month: November 1988

What I've seen

Oliver & Company, inspired by Dickens' Oliver Twist, was Disney's predecessor to their animated musicals renaissance a year later. With songs by Billy Joel, it paved the way for The Little Mermaid and The Lion King. 

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown brought great international success, and a first Oscar nomination, to Pedro Almodóvar.

I always had a soft spot for the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged, a contemporary update of Dickens' A Christmas Carol with Murray as a cold-hearted TV executive who learns the meaning of Christmas through lessons delivered by a ghost played by Carol Kane, Bob Goldthwaite in the Bob Cratchit role. Also with Robert Mitchum, Karen Allen, and Alfre Woodard.

Short Cut Movie Review From My Collection: Volver

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

In Volver, Pedro Almodóvar takes on the ghosts of the past – literal in the case of his female protagonists; metaphorical in terms of his home country. He tackles so many subjects, plot elements, genres, and themes (many of which have formed the basis of his previous work) that the film should winde up crushed under the weight of its own indulgence. But Almodóvar, mixing elements of melodrama, Spanish telenovelas, magical realism, comedy, thriller, and mystery has a fleeting directorial hand, keeping everything so expertly balanced that the film remains equally light in spirit and severe in tone.

Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) is a working class mother, but like any good Almodóvar heroine, she fulfills several roles simultaneously: daughter; sister; wife. One night she is unexpectedly forced to cover up a horrific act in order to protect her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, all the women in her family go through their lives deceiving people in various ways. There’s the ghost of her mother (Carmen Maura) living unnoticed with her aunt; Raimunda’s sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas) covering up the eventual discovery of this strange phantasm (if that’s even what she is), and the long ago crimes committed and concealed that now begin to surface. The ghosts of our past will always come back to haunt us, Almodóvar seems to be saying with this movie that has little room for anything not directly related to the lives of women. Men are given short shrift in their minor roles before being disposed of, sometimes quite literally. Even a dashing young man who flirts with Raimunda, suggesting a romantic subplot, disappears as abruptly as he arrived.

Overall this is one of Almodóvar’s most purely entertaining films, eschewing all the weighty melodrama that made most of his films more difficult to sit through. It is wickedly funny at times and exhibits a beautiful and intimate understanding of Spanish life and superstition in los pueblos.

La ley del deseo [Law of Desire] Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

In the 25 years since Law of Desire Almodóvar has refined his filmmaking and writing styles to the point of near perfection. Looking at this older film you almost have to ignore the occasional stilted dialogue and acting and focus instead on his themes, which were as rich and fulfilling then as they are now.

Almodóvar has always been fond of setting films with films or plays within films and Law of Desire is not different, featuring both. He’s also always pushed the boundaries of acceptability in filmmaking and here he opens with a sexually explicit scene that, it turns out, is being directed by Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) as part of a film that will make him even more of a celebrity. Pablo has a fairly strong habit of engaging in both drugs and promiscuous sex with young men he meets while out in his hometown of Madrid. His regular lover Juan goes away on an extended holiday leaving open the opportunity for Antonio (Antonio Baderas) to take his place and become jealous to the point of making some very poor decisions.

25 Years Ago This Month: April 1987

The Police Academy franchise continued in April 1987 with the fourth installment, subtitled Citizens on Patrol. Each film in the series earned less at the box office than the previous chapter leading me to wonder how they went on to make parts 5, 6, and 7. The only actor who could reasonably be called a star in the entire series is Steve Guttenberg and he bowed out after the third film. Everyone else was famous for nothing other than their roles in this lifeless, flaccid, completely unfunny comedy series. David Spade made his film debut here as one of the titular citizen police officers. Sharon Stone also makes an early film appearance.

La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) Movie Review

With The Skin I Live In, director Pedro Almodóvar has crafted what might be described as an almost perfect mixture of Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock. Those two classic directors have long been big influences on Almodóvar’s films, but I don’t think he has before now drawn the two together and created such a perversion of their work – and I mean that as a compliment.

Matador Movie Review: Pedro Almodóvar with a Light Touch

When Ángel (a very young, pre-Hollywood Antonio Banderas) grabs his beautiful neighbor, Eva, on the street in an attempt to rape her it’s the kind of scene that should be brutal and horrifying. In fact it is at first. That is until his attempted rape turns out to be feeble: he fumbles with a pocket knife with which to threaten the girl; reaches orgasm before penetration; and after seeing Eva bleeding from a small cut after falling to the pavement, he passes out. In the end it’s a comical scene, a boldly staged experiment in Matador, an early Pedro Almodóvar film released in Spain in 1986 and two years later in the United States.

This event only exacerbates the emasculation Ángel was attempting to deny after having his sexuality questioned by his bullfighting instructor, Diego, himself a famous torero. To be a bullfighter in Spain is one of the greatest professions and demonstrations of masculinity. Few professionals are more revered historically than the great toreros. If you believe Ernest Hemingway’s take on the sport in Death in the Afternoon, it is the ultimate test of bravery, masculinity, artistry and skill. So for Angel, a young man who, despite having reached the age of about 21 and having impossibly good looks has never been with a woman, sees bullfighting as his entrance into Spanish manhood.

Incidentally, Eva is Diego’s girlfriend, although Ángel was unaware of this at the time of the assault. Diego himself is a somewhat emasculated figure as well. A formerly great bullfighter now retired after a devastating goring, he can only achieve sexual climax through images and representations of death. And, we learn quite early, through actual death. The film opens with Diego masturbating to a Mario Bava film of pornographic violence against women – one of Bava’s specialties as the antecedent to the American slasher films of the late 70s and 80s.

In an early and somewhat disconnected scene we see María take a man to bed only to stick a hat pin into the back of his neck, killing him, during her own climax. This, not incidentally, is the manner in which a torero kills the bull in the ring – with a single clean motion of the sword between the shoulder blades to pierce the lungs and heart. This murder, in addition to being an obvious inspiration for Basic Instinct, is a mirror of Diego’s own sexual perversion and it’s only a matter of time before these two individuals discover each other as soul mates.

Ángel was raised in an Opus Dei family, a very strict sect of Catholicism, and his tremendous guilt forces him to the police to make a full confession. As Eva refuses to press charges, Ángel then confesses to the unsolved murders of two men committed by María and to those of two young women murdered by Diego and buried on the grounds of his estate. Ángel knows of the dead men because they were well-publicized, but the source of his knowledge of the women and their burial location reveals itself as a plot device as the film (along with Diego and María) reaches its climax – he’s got second sight and is able to follow Diego’s actions. María, an attorney, presents herself to defend Ángel and through this connection meets Diego.

Almodóvar is being ever so playful in this film. He’s channeling Hitchcock (as he is wont to do) via Brian De Palma, but with much lighter tones including the ubiquitous bright red and blue color palette. More than that Almodóvar is also playing with Spanish archetypes through the previously mentioned bullfighter, but also in the investigating police officer. Here is another quintessential masculine figure, but here he is depicted as possibly homosexual, or at least enamored with the nether regions of young men training as bullfighters. He also walks with an unexplained limp quite similar to Diego’s.

Probably the most outwardly comic moment in the film, and one of its best scenes, takes place at a fashion show (Eva works as a model) where the director (played by Almodóvar himself) gets upset with two models shooting heroin in the dressing room rather than the bathroom.

Part of what makes the film work is that the actors allow themselves performances that take the ludicrous plot developments seriously. This undercuts the tongue-in-cheek nature of the story, which itself feels very much like a stunted artist finally breaking free from the clutches of a fascist regime (the film was released in Spain only 11 years after the death of Franco and 8 years after the adoption of the Constitution). Keeping the historical perspective in mind, this is a remarkable effort of a developing artist who would later become one of the world’s most important film makers.

The Flower of My Secret Movie Review: Almodóvar Turns a Corner

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.