How Spanish is Pedro Almodovar - Essay Example

How Spanish is Pedro Almodovar Introduction Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, a Spanish director, producer and a screen is internationally acclaimed for his movies that are based on complex themes like sexual freedom (mainly concerning the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people or LGBT), and cultural and moral identities of Spain. Almodóvar interweaves these themes with a strong blend of melodrama, tongue-in-cheek humour, and songs that hint of a pop culture, with bright, glossy colours. A look at his movies will show us that the basic leitmotifs portrayed in them are centred upon families, passionate desires, and search for identities. His movies are quite well known, and Almodóvar cuts a figure of international repute in the world of films and stardom. There is no doubt that Almodóvar is one of the most successful and internationally acclaimed Spanish director of his era, however there has been persistent questions as to whether Pedro Almodóvar’s movies really represent the true spirit of Spain. In this article I will closely examine Almodóvar’s first five movies and analyse them to find out truly how Spanish is Almodovar, and whether his movies can be called a true representation of the real Spain. Discussion Pedro Almodóvar’s career as a film director started during the early seventies, at a time when Francisco Franco, the notorious Spanish dictator’s rule was coming to an end. Under Franco Spain had acquired an extremely conservative, male dominated Christian nationalist outlook. Franco’s men borrowed these conservative elements from the Spanish rural customs, and purporting them as the “authentic” Spanish norms from a traditional past, coerced the civil population to follow them. It was under such stifling and conservative norms that Pedro Almodóvar grew up, and it was only after Franco’s death in 1975 that Spain again moved towards attaining free and fair democracy. After Franco’s death there were relaxations in the stringent regulations, owing to which Spain saw a huge transition; and during the late seventies and early eighties the Spanish youth went through a major cultural transformation (Allinson, 2001, 13). The American pop culture (a mixture of the 1960s New York underground culture, along with the 1970s punk culture) took roots in this formerly conservative country, and soon Madrid became the hotbed for this Cultural Revolution, known as la movida madrilène. This pop-punk culture spread like fire to almost all the forms of ‘arts’, like: fashion, film, photography, and music. Thus, this age became synonymous with an image of the rebellious Spanish youth that decided to break all the barriers of conservatism and tradition and experiment on drugs, sex, alternative identities and the pursuit of pleasure (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, 1998, 8). Almodóvar was a product of this movement and it is this rebellious streak that we notice in his early films. With Franco’s death there was a questioning of all the traditional and patriarchal norms, and Almodóvar as director challenged the so called social and moral ethics. He especially defied the set traditional norms that defined sex and gender roles in the society, and this defiance is clearly evident in his early films. A glance at his first full length feature film that was made in 1980 “Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón” (Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap), will show us that this movie defied all Franco-era cinematic and sexual anathema. Through this film Almodóvar wanted to create a sort of shock wave that would affect the ‘prudish’ society, and advocate for the freedom of expression (Torres, 2004, 113). The movie was made with a very small budget and was more like a series of sketches; in fact, this movie was an adaption of his photo-novel General Erections in a magazine called El Vibora. In this movie we find that the three title characters play the main protagonists: Pepi, a rape victim seeks revenge on her assailant who is a tainted police officer; Luci, a masochistic housewife who appears timid on the surface; while Bom is lesbian punk singer; and there is a portrayal of a strong friendship between the three women. This movie with all its technical faults and errors was as Almodóvar tells us “a film full of defects”; however the movie managed to catch and reflect the true spirit of the wild 70’s and 80s. It brought alive the sense of freedom in terms of both sexual and cultural abandonment, and the film with its explicit scenes (the famous golden shower), and its kitschy humour gave it a cult status and shot Almodóvar into the limelight. Thus Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón, with all its defects, however shows us that Almodóvar did indeed faithfully portray the wild sense of freedom that was so prevalent in the 70s and 80s Spain, right after the end of the Franco era. His second feature film Laberinto de Pasiones or ‘Labyrinth of Passions’ which was produced in 1982, was another cult movie. This ‘screwball comedy’ deals with the theme of multiple identities and has two sex starved characters, Sexilia and Ray, in the lead protagonists’ role. This movie though outrageous in it themes that explore love and sex, represented a true picture of Spain, especially Madrid, which was the main centre of la movida madrilène during the 1980s and is a sort of “glorification of Madrid” (Vidal, 1988, 39). The movie reflects the era which was exploring its new found sexual freedom, as it lay like a transition period, between the previous ‘repressed’ Franco-era, and the later period that was more mature and more conscious of the repercussions of a possible AIDS infection through sexual promiscuities. In 1942 Gerald Brenan had used the term ‘labyrinth’ to describe the complex Spanish history, and in 1982 Almodóvar used the same term “to describe life in a Spanish capital suddenly liberated from decades of dictatorship, suddenly freed from the weight of recent Spanish history” (Allinson, 2001, 3). His third film Entre Tinieblas or ‘Dark Habits’ in 1983, was a transition to a movie that portrayed sombre melodramatic notes combined with elements of humour. In this story a singer who runs away from certain legal problems takes refuge in a convent, where she finds each nun experimenting with a different sin. This movie which shows the Mother Superior as a drug addict and a lesbian, is a direct frontal attack on the religious institutions of Spain, and allegorically refers to their moral degeneration. “Dark habits follow in a long line of Spanish satiric novels and films that poke fun at the church and its less-than-perfect institutions” (Taléns, 277). Thus this movie with its dark sombre mood, also deals with a subject that was quite relevant to Spain, and Almodóvar simply represented this true picture through a movie, to spread awareness of the moral degeneration that set in the Spanish religious institutions. The next movie, ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? or, ‘What Have I Done to Deserve this?’ in 1984, speaks about the traditional Spanish housewife entangled amidst the nets of the patriarchal society, and shows the effects of consumerism that was affecting the Spanish society during the 80s. This movie can indeed be referred to as a sort of social commentary on the plight of the housewives in Spain during the 70s and 80s (Vidal, 1988, 100). However, this movie is unique in the sense that it brings back the ethos of the traditional Spanish folklore culture, which is evident in the voice of Miguel de Molina, a well known singer of the 1940s, whose voice echoes nostalgically in the movie, lamenting “How beautiful were the songs in my day”, thus serving also as a grim reminder of his repressed childhood under Franco’s regime. “For Almodóvar, that folkloric ethos would come to mean not only nostalgia but also the persistence of a culture of anachronism” (DLugo, 2006, 3). Matador, which was released in 1984, showed a progression into a stage where we find Almodóvar exploring more deeply into the subject of desire, and the associated dark laws that tend to rule them. This movie deals with death and explores on the subject of pleasure that is derived from killing. The lead protagonists are María (who is a lawyer), and Diego (who is a bull fighting instructor), and they derive their pleasure from killing. It is portrayal where Almodóvar creates a sort of bridge between sexual desire and the pleasure derived from killings. It emulates the art and the stages seen in a popular sport of Spain, which is the bull fighting, thus again touching another clichéd Andalusian folklore. From the above discourse one point stands out very clearly, and that is, Almodóvar in his early movies made a true representation of Spain; a country as he had witnessed during the tumultuous years. Sometimes his movies reflected the era of his childhood, conservative and oppressed under Franco; sometimes they took up the cause of the repressed 70s Spanish housewife, suffocating under a patriarchal society; and sometimes reflecting the era of wild freedom he experienced in Madrid during the exhilarating late 70s and 80s. It was in 1983, while his movie Dark Habits was being screened at the Miami and Venice film festivals, that the international community upheld Almodóvar to be a representative of Spain and the true Spanish sprit. Though this image of representing Spain was quite unintentional, however there was no denying the fact that his early movies (especially the first five as discussed in the article) quite truly represented the spirit of Spain during 70s and 80s, just after the death of Franco. Later in his career, after 1995, we notice a subtle change in his film narrating style, when we find that he starts portraying women as the central characters. His note in his later movies also becomes much softer, and emotions are held under control, as we see in Carne tremula or Live Flesh in1997 and Todo sobre mi madre or All About My Mother in1999. The film that marked his transition was La flor de mi secreto (1995) which showed that Almodóvar was moving away from the path of reflecting hedonistic pleasures, to showing more subtle emotions and portraying the process of evolvement in a person’s life, while concentrating more on women as the central character, in his movies. Thus, after truly representing Spain during its formative years after the death of Franco in his early films, Almodóvar has now moved on to explore more complex themes that deal with subtle emotions, the process of evolvement and attaining maturity, and women. Before his conscious efforts to move into a direction where he can explore new dimensions, Almodóvar’s films mostly centred around Madrid and the la movida madrilène culture during the 70s and 80s, that marked the transition of Spain into a democratic country. Thus, one can say that “his style has gradually evolved to the point that when we speak of ‘a film by Almodóvar’, though it rooted in a specific Spanish cultural reality, it is also designed to circulate internationally” (D’lugo, 2). It is indeed that we find Almodóvar truly represents Spain, and his films quite honestly portray the Spanish culture and norms of his generation (1970s-80s Spain). Conclusion: Almodóvar’s cinematic journey thus led him from the “periphery to the centre of the Spanish culture, eventually leading him to occupy the improbable position of representing not only Spanish cinema but Spain itself to the outside world” (ibid). Almodóvar was one of the first few rebels who successfully rammed a hole through the walls of conservatism, tradition, and the male dominating Spanish society of the 70s and 80s; bringing in the fresh whiff of freedom, which liberated not only the minds and souls of the Spanish youth, but also freed their bodies, desires, and their heretofore hidden sexualities. His early movies indeed form a true representation of 70s-80s Spain, shown through the portals of cinematography, which honestly captures the transitory period that later gave birth to the modern, democratic Spain which we see today. Bibliography Allinson, M. 2001. A Spanish Labryinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 3. DLugo,M. 2006. Pedro Almodóvar. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 3. Jordan, B., & Morgan-Tamosunas, R. 1998. Contemporary Spanish Cinema. New York: Manchester University Press, 8. Taléns, J. 1998. Modes of representation in Spanish cinema. Minnesota: U of Minnesota Press, 277. Torres, M. 2004. “Interview with Pedro Almodóvar: The Flower of My Secret”, In Pedro Almodóvar Interviews: Conversations with Filmmakers Series. Ed. Willoquet Maricondi, Paula. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi, 110- 118. Vidal, N. 1988. The Films of Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Instituto de la Cinematografia y los Artes Audiovisuales, Ministerio de Cultura. Read More