Desire Unlimited

The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar

Paul Julian Smith

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781781685310
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

In the last decade, Spanish film auteur Pedro Almodvar has grown from critical darling of the film circuit scene to mainstream success. Frequently comic, often deadly serious, always visually glorious, his recent films range from the Oscar award-winning drama Talk to Her to the 2011 horror film The Skin I Live In. Though they are ambitious and varied, each is a distinctive innovation on the themes that have defined his work.
Desire Unlimited is the classic film-by-film assessment of Almodvar's oeuvre, now updated to include his most recent work. Still the only study of its kind in English, it vigorously confirms its original argument, that beneath Almodovar's genius for comedy and visual pleasure lies a filmmaker whose work deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

PART I

INTRODUCTION: EL DESEO, S.A. (DESIRE LTD)

TRUTH IN TRAVESTY

A young woman returns to a seminary in rural Extremadura dressed as Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman. She has come to announce the death of her brother, aged twenty-four, to the priest who had taken a particular interest in him. When the priest complains of her ‘excessive frivolity’ she replies: ‘I adore frivolity; I could not live without it.’ And surely, she continues, the prostitution she practises is less harmful than the conduct of priests who violate children’s bodies in the name of God? The priest blanches. Two endings: the ‘sister’ reveals s/he is the abused brother in drag, and swishes out, vengeance complete. Or, the priest kills the young ‘woman’, only to discover that it is his beloved student who has returned to him.

An elderly bourgeois lady answers an advertisement in a Madrid newspaper, asking for ‘young, pretty’ secretaries. It is but a cover for the white slave trade; and Doña Julia finds herself working as an exotic dancer in Marrakesh and succumbing, with some delight, to drugs, alcohol, and rough sex. Awakening in the interview room (she has failed to get the secretarial job), she realizes it is but a dream. The next day, however, she walks out on her husband: ‘Having thought about it for forty years, I’ve decided to leave you and live my own life.’ A new life begins for Doña Julia.¹

These unpublished stories are amongst the first works of Pedro Almodóvar, deposited in typescript in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, for the purposes of copyright in 1975. It was the year of Franco’s death and of Almodóvar’s twenty-sixth birthday. ‘The Visit’ and ‘The Advertisement’ announce distinct but related aspects of Almodóvar’s creative enterprise which will continue throughout his career to date. The first is a love of comic confrontation, which is inseparable from serious concerns: the ex-seminarist may be dressed in a crinoline, but his thirst for vengeance is no less deeply felt for all that; indeed the glitzy drag is part of that vengeance on the hypocrisies of a repressive male order. The second is a love of female fantasy, which is always situated in a precise social location: the humour of Doña Julia’s position relies on a recognition of her banal background, of the stultifying boredom of her leisured existence. Both characters make unlikely heroines, who are now recognizable as typically Almodóvarian; both are vehicles for a female identification or projection, which inspires comedy and pathos in equal measure.

One argument of this book will be that the conspicuous frivolity of Almodóvar’s cinema is intimately linked to serious concerns which have often gone unnoticed; and that the frequent dismissal of Almodóvar’s work as ‘zany’ or ‘kitsch’ arises from a disrespect for a register coded as ‘feminine’ and for those men who identify themselves with women’s concerns. To seek truth in travesty is dangerous business and one for which Almodóvar has paid a certain price. Moreover, as we shall see, faced by the horrors of Francoism or (more recently) the po-faced pieties of Socialism, frivolity can be seen in a Spanish context as a political posture whose effects are as potent as they are uncontrollable.

Almodóvar’s nine features to date constitute a body of work which deals in a complex and sophisticated fashion with a number of vital issues: gender, nationality, homosexuality. And each of these issues is clouded by controversy. Thus Almodóvar is known as a ‘woman’s director’ (an often back-handed compliment) who has consistently placed women centre frame in his cinema; yet he has been frequently accused of misogyny, of humiliating and fetishizing those same women. Secondly, he is often cited as the embodiment of post-Franco Spain, the representative of the new nation; yet his films studiously avoid debates such as those on regional independence which most preoccupy that nation, which threaten, indeed, to convulse it. Finally, he is known (outside Spain at least) as a gay-identified man, who appeals to the queer-coded registers of kitsch and camp; yet his filmic career can be read as a progressive disavowal of homosexuality, whether masculine or feminine.

All of these critiques come together in the charge often made by foreign critics that Almodóvar’s work is ‘apolitical’ or ‘ahistorical’. What I hope to show, however, is that such views arise from an ignorance of or indifference to the Spanish context in which that work has been produced. Foreigners cannot expect Almodóvar to subscribe to forms of resistance which evolved in response to the triumph of the British and North American Right in the eighties; and if they are serious about respecting cultural difference they must pay more attention to a nation whose understanding of such issues as gender, nationality, and homosexuality may well be more sophisticated than their own. In his celebration of fluidity and performance, in his hostility to fixed positions of all kinds, Almodóvar anticipates that critique of identity and essence that was later to become so familiar in academic feminist, minority, and queer theory.

If critics and audiences have refused to recognize the seriousness of Almodóvar’s commitment to the analysis of social and psychic concerns (a seriousness which in no way contradicts the brilliance of his comedy), then they have also neglected questions of cinematic technique. An autodidact whose modest beginnings in provincial La Mancha made a film career almost inconceivable, Almodóvar’s features trace a trajectory from the minimalist tabula rasa of Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), with its eccentric framing and contempt for continuity, to the glossy professionalism of Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991), with its gloriously saturated colour photography by Alfredo Mayo. In this book I pay particular attention to mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing, arguing that the idiosyncratic look or feel of Almodóvar’s cinema is constructed from precisely observable filmic means. These means change from one film to another: the neo-realist ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (What Have I Done to Deserve This?, 1984) uses a grungy set and fixed tripod camera to reproduce the ghastly claustrophobia experienced by its characters; the sleek costumes and fluid camera movements of Matador (1986) reinforce the high production values of Almodóvar’s most abstract and stylized murder melodrama. And if technique differs from one film to the next, then filmic means intersect with each other and with Almodóvar’s deliriously complex plots in unpredictable ways. Thus the colour coding of costumes in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988) suggests from the start an alignment between the feuding characters played by Carmen Maura and Rossy de Palma which is confirmed in the narrative only in the final scene. Or again, the disconcertingly lush music for ¡Atame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1990) points to a romantic conclusion to a violent kidnapping well before the characters themselves are assured of such a fortunate result. It thus follows that Almodóvar’s films cannot simply be interrogated for ‘positive images’ and dismissed if they fail to live up to progressive Anglo-American norms. In a cinema of saturation, in which vivid colour and costume compete for attention with outrageous narratives and dialogue, it is vital to examine the context of images or plot points and not to freeze them in censorious isolation. Moreover, the discontinuities of Almodóvar’s technique are not to be dismissed as the result of chance or incompetence; rather they form part of a critique of representation (of the relationship between film as presence and film as language) which is also manifest in a love of the reflexive ironies reminiscent of Sirk (a frequent point of reference), or even Godard.

USES OF ALMODÓVAR

The offices of El Deseo, S.A. are situated in an undistinguished residential street outside central Madrid. They seem far indeed from the glamorous capital which forms the stylized background to films such as La ley del deseo (The Law of Desire, 1987). Their anonymity, even invisibility (there is no identifying sign on the street or in the building itself), seems somewhat uncharacteristic when contrasted with the all-pervasiveness of the Almodóvar ‘trade mark’ and the flagrant visibility of the director and his films. Few visitors could fail to be impressed by the loyalty and industry of Almodóvar’s ‘family’ of co-workers (most particularly his producer-brother Agustín) and by their determination to protect him from the unsympathetic critics (known as ‘detractors’) who have dogged him since the beginning. It would be difficult to underestimate the role of such a collaborative enterprise in the success of films identified, perhaps improperly, by the single name ‘Almodóvar’. One specific advantage of El Deseo is Almodóvar’s ability to shoot each film in sequence, thus following the natural development of character and narrative, an expensive option which would be denied him by other production companies.²

El Deseo has produced three of the top five grossing Spanish films of all time; and it has been the most profitable production company in Spain (often by a considerable margin) in the last four years for which figures are available.³ And this achievement has to be seen in the context of a Spanish cinema in perpetual crisis, with the eighties marking a steep decline in the industry, in all three sectors of production (the falling number of domestic features), distribution (the increasing stranglehold of US-controlled multinationals), and exhibition (the collapse in the number of functioning theatres). In a period when Spanish cinema has become synonymous with tedious repetition to a youthful domestic audience,⁴ it is little short of a miracle that Almodóvar should have achieved such commercial success with the odds so stacked against him. I argue in this book that the Almodóvar ‘phenomenon’ is inexplicable without a detailed knowledge of the history of the Spanish film industry in the eighties. To take a specific example once more, Almodóvar’s second film, Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passion, 1982), could not have been made without the support of exhibitor-turned-producer Alphaville. And the later films profited from generous subsidies from a Spanish government anxious to change Spain’s image abroad.

One secret of Almodóvar’s success has been a determination from the very beginning to devote as much time to promotion as to production. In this book I study the creation of a press ‘persona’ which is the product of a mutual exploitation by Almodóvar and the media. There is little doubt that Almodóvar, with his very photogenic female entourage (the famous ‘chicas’), his love of the modern, so typical of contemporary Spain, and his scandalous hints of sexual heterodoxy, filled a gap in a journalistic world avid for novelty and celebrity. But Almodóvar was also put to other uses outside Spain. For art-house distributors and exhibitors, concerned by the deaths of Fassbinder and Pasolini, the decline of Godard and Fellini, and the unfulfilled promise of new French directors such as Beneix and Besson, Almodóvar was the one true auteur to emerge in the 1980s and a regular source of high-profile new product. For academics in the US (and, to a lesser extent, the UK), Almodóvar was a dream director, equally exploitable for courses on gender, ethnic, or lesbian and gay studies.⁵ Hispanists found a topic which, finally, was attractive to scholars and students in other areas; generalists could flatter themselves that they were taking an interest in a ‘minority’ area, which proved to be more pleasurable than most. More importantly, however, I shall argue that in his love of fantasy and cross-gender identification, Almodóvar coincides with recent psychoanalytically inspired feminist ...