Pedro Almodόvar. Without a Label

He has always liked to mix up and get mixed up in cinematic terms. His last film was no exception. It just happens to be the wisest creation of his life. "If there was such a term, I would describe All about My Mother as a screwball drama, a no-holds-barred baroque drama, with heroes who have been pushed to the edge, who have suffered rough deals at the hands of fate. However, it’s not a Grand-Guignol or grotesque drama."

"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire

A manic collector of images and dialogue, Pedro Almodόvar loves the cinema he serves and which serves him in return. The silver screen was his best friend during his solitary childhood, and became his compass as he was growing up. He always liked to explain his life and his films through particular cinematic experiences of his. His love for the art of film and his fellow directors is not limited to a certain genre, language or era. From Italian neorealism of the early works by Pasolini, Visconti and Antonioni, to the American comedies by Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder, and from there to Bunuel’s surrealism and Stanley Donen’s musicals, to film noir, westerns, melodrama, Hitchcock and Hitchcock’s student Brian De Palma, all the way to Speed, Almodόvar can offer you – without too much effort – the cinematic equivalent of a true emotion or event – and the reverse. This disarmingly spontaneous, confessed love of film has left deep traces on his entire oeuvre.

"Cinema is always present in my films" he says. "But I’m not the kind of cinema-loving director who copies other directors. Specific films play an active role in my screenplays. When I use an excerpt from a film, that is not an homage to its director but undisguised theft. It thus becomes a part of my history and takes on an active presence, unlike an homage, which is always something passive. The films I have seen blend in with my own experiences, which automatically become the experiences of my characters." (And though sometimes the latter may take their time before they feel and realize these experiences, the viewer gets the message from the very first moment...)

A man is masturbating in front of a TV set showing naked women dying a horrible death in a sadistic collage of Jesus Franco horror films, in the spirit of the cheap splatter films that flourished in Italy and Spain in the late sixties. From the very first shots of Matador, Almodόvar reveals his thematic arena: the co-existence of sexual pleasure and death. The dynamic lady lawyer and the legendary, crippled bullfighter cannot consumate the sexual act unless they kill their partner. Their first meeting takes place in a movie theater, faced with the last scene of Duel in the Sun by King Vidor. And suddenly they begin to see their future. Like Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck, they will die in each other’s arms, killing each other during their first and last sexual encounter. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pepa (Carmen Maura) dubs Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, in a cynical scene in which false "I love yous" are exchanged. Crawford’s co-star is given a voice by Ivan (Fernando Guillén), who has just left Pepa, having once again lied to her – as he has throughout their relationship. In Kika, a deadly shot from Joseph Losey’s The Prowler, which is being shown on TV, helps Ramon realize that his mother’s murder was staged to look like a suicide. In Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!, the Night of the Living Dead "stands by" the silent immobility of a gagged and tied up Victoria Abril, while in High Heels, the same actress breaks new ground by using Bergman’s Autumn Sonata to explain to her mother that, as much as she tried, she could never step out from under her stifling shadow.

Finally, in Live Flesh, shortly after the opening credits, a man is dragging a shop mannequin up a flight of stairs, when one of its legs breaks off; it’s the black and white scene in Bunuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz which is playing on television, just a few moments before the gunfight that will forever change the life of police officer David: a bullet will get lodged in his spine and he will be left paralysed from the waist down. In any event, though in a different way each time, the film excerpt actively completes the jigsaw puzzle of the story, like a mirror reflecting the distinct daily routine of each of Almodόvar’s heroes and heroines. In only a few inches of celluloid, Almodόvar manages to eloquently shed light on aspects of the past (that did not fit into the film’s two hours) or to interpret behaviours; to attribute motives or to warn us about the future. Either way, these «borrowed» moving images act as a part of the fate of the people on the screen, in a cinematic universe that imitates life, which imitates cinema, which imitates life... According to Almodόvar (he seems to have made up his mind about this long ago), one cannot separate the creator from his creation; art that is inspired by man, man who is inspired by art. In this fruitful give and take between reality and imagination, between personal and public life, All about My Mother keeps the tradition alive, as All about Eve accompanies Esteban’s dinner with his mother and gives the boy an idea for the title of a story he wants to write. At the same time, it "betrays" from the outset Almodovar’s intention to wander through the "stage and backstage" of the female actress. Is that all?

"Because of an indeterminate illness that has struck both leading ladies, the show has been cancelled. But if some of you would like to stay (the rest of you will get your money back), I promise to entertain you with my life’s story..."

Agrado in All about My Mother

If the only thing that separates the spectator from the spectacle is a curtain or a camera, where does the dividing line lie between the person and the actor, and what defines it? And how many times – voluntarily or involuntarily – do we direct ourselves in our personal life in order to satisfy what we perceive as the expectations of our milieu? In All about My Mother, the answers lie somewhere in between. Just as Almodόvar is unable to leave his own cinematic memories out of his films, so do his heroines find it difficult to draw the line between what appears to be and what is, in terms of their existence.

Manuela once played Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and fell in love with the actor who played Kowalski. Eighteen years later, she is no longer an actress, but prefers to act the widow rather than tell her son the truth about his father: the one who was once called Esteban but now answers to the name of Lola and has larger breasts than his son’s mother! Like the lines on her palm, A Streetcar Named Desire leaves indelible marks on Manuela’s life, when her son gets killed outside the theatre, chasing after an autograph of the woman who’s playing Blanche DuBois; the woman who would like to believe is the lover, the companion, the sister and the mother of her drug-addicted co-star. The good-hearted occasional prostitute and former truck driver, as well as the guilt-ridden nun Rosa, complete the new life stage of the mother who is now childless...

Leading ladies in the great drama and the little comedies of their life, five people create watertight compartments for their emotions in the ephemeral yet comforting safety of the routine of the role they have come up with for themselves. Just as the theatre demands that its actors display the same, predetermined reactions, gestures and expressions of emotion every night, so have they learnt to choose the "performance" that is appropriate for each occasion. A particular scene from A Streetcar Named Desire (Stella leaves home with her baby and vows never to return) periodically crosses the trajectory of their life, as if urging them to take that decisive step towards their real self – although it is not certain whether they will find it on or off stage. Sometimes (or is it most times?), our real self resides along the invisible boundaries between the actor and the person; between the real and the desired image we hope to see in the mirror the world holds up to us; between the role society has chosen for us and the one we have chosen for ourselves. This truth is difficult to conceive, and almost impossible to accept, to put into words and live by, unless the performance is cancelled and you have to climb up onto the stage to announce it. Faced with the audience, like Agrado you can tell the truth, at the same time giving the performance of your life.

"They call me Agrado because I have always tried to make other people’s lives more agreeable... Besides agreeable, I am also very authentic... My almond-shaped eyes cost 80 thousand pesetas... I’ve had silicone injected into my lips, my forehead, my cheeks, my legs and my ass... A litre of silicone costs 60 thousand pesetas... You do the math, because I’ve stopped counting... Tits? Two. I’m no freak. 70 thousand pesetas each, although these particular ones have been severely devalued. It’s very expensive being authentic. But we shouldn’t be cheap when it comes to how we look. The more a woman resembles how she dreamed she would be, the more authentic she is." It’s not the first time that Almodόvar plays this game of "disguises," however it’s the first time he does it so well. His previous attempts, though extremely interesting, now appear schematic, less daring and not as guileless. In The Law of Desire, Carmen Maura plays a transsexual, while Bibi Andersen, who is actually a transsexual, plays the mother of a little girl. "Women’s femininity is very relaxed and tranquil," Almodόvar explains. "What interested me was to show a woman expressing that excessive, intense, and exhibitionist femininity of a transsexual. So I asked Carmen to imitate someone imitating a woman. In High Heels, Miguel Bosé is the magistrate with the fake beard (because his mother’s used to seeing him like that), who at night becomes a singer in a drag-show, imitating the singer mother of his admirer, Victoria Abril, whom he finally falls in love with and makes pregnant. For her part, Abril, a woman who has grown up without a mother’s affection and who now lives restrained in the social pretension of her Gucci suits (which she wears like a uniform and never takes off), sees in this man the mother substitute she needs to satisfy her emotional needs. Earlier, she has publicly confessed on TV that she has murdered her husband (who is also her mother’s lover), giving the programme’s director the opportunity to declare that "in the end, everything in this life becomes a spectacle." In Matador, the deadly sexual couple wears its ordinary every-day clothes (she is a lawyer, he is a trainer of bullfighters) like a mask in order to camouflage and protect its real nature, for which only the bullfighter’s uniform is suitable; and that because, as Pedro says, even though bullfighting is a very male world, the bullfighter often takes on the role of the woman in the arena. Wearing his shiny, tight costume, he moves more like a ballerina rather than a man. In the first stage of the ritual, the bullfighter represents temptation: he excites and seduces the bull. Therefore, he takes on a typically female role. In Matador, Assumpta Serna has a very male role from the outset. In her relationships with men, it is she who acts and penetrates, killing them with her hair pin, like a matador. Thus, in the film, there is a continuous interchange between male and female roles. Sometimes the woman is the bullfighter; Other times she is the bull – a perfectly normal phenomenon in Almodόvar’s universe, since the Spanish auteur never tries to separate people into clear categories and varieties.

"If I wanted to I could become an actress. But the only bent I ever had was for looking after my children... looking after you!"

Manuela in All about My Mother

Almodόvar complains that certain critics and members of the public see him as an exclusively "women’s" director – and he’s right to complain. The truth is that though the women may outnumber the men in his oeuvre, his screenwriter’s palette has produced worthy representatives of all genders. Typical examples include the childlike verve and unpolished sensibility of Antonio Banderas in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!; the versatile but pure testosterone of Miguel Bosé in High Heels; the moral fortitude and the catalytic determination of Victor and David in Live Flesh (with Elena as the saddest and most emotionally hesitant among Almodόvar’s characters). The male element has left longlasting marks on his films, except perhaps for All about My Mother. And then again...

A cursory glance might indicate that the new stance of Almodόvar’s creative journey seems narrowly focused on the exaltation of women. But though that may suit me just fine, being a woman myself, such an observation is much too simplistic and facile to be true. The borders of All about My Mother lie much further away than you can imagine. They might not even exist. Because, as you search for male traces on the landscape of this film, you stumble upon two transsexuals, an old man suffering from amnesia, a prematurely deceased adolescent, and a toothless baby. If you start over, turning your attention to any female traces, the result again seems odd, incomplete, muddled, irregular: the same two transsexuals, a pair of lesbian actors who may soon go their separate ways, a dying nun, an uncaring, choleric wife and a lonely mother who is trying to get over the death of her son. In this improbable human jigsaw puzzle, it is easier to discern male properties in the women’s behaviour and female ones in the behaviour of the men, rather than the – normal – opposite. It’s as if the sexes cease to exist separately and co-exist like different aspects of the character of a single person. "I believe that human beings are made up of different characters – male and female, good and bad, martyrs and lunatics." Without losing his sense of humour, Almodόvar clears our gaze and our senses, evolving in the most daring and unpredictable way the game or role reversal, of what appears to be and what actually is. He rids his heroes and heroines of the codes, the restrictions and the expectations of their sex, and lets their feelings communicate freely.

Four people and a baby who are not related come together to form a family; not because they share the joy of sex or the same DNA; not because they got married or because that’s their karma; not because their parents wanted them to or they themselves wanted to become parents; not because they had to; but simply because they feel the need to love and be loved. Their connecting link is a happy mother who "depended on the kindness of strangers": our own mother. Why not?

Athens, September 1999

The above essay was a contribution to the special edition - now out of print - book for Pedro Almodόvar by Kastaniotis Publications, on behalf of Thassaloniki International Film Festival, to coincide with the latter's tribute to the celebrated Spanish filmaker.