Photo via YouTube

September 25, 1949- Pedro Almodóvar:

‘‘You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.”

Almodóvar is one of cinema’s considerably celebrated contemporary filmmakers. I am loco for his saturated color palettes, eclectic sets, exquisite cinematography and bold, playful costuming, and mid-century modern design. Almodóvar’s work over the past four decades includes 22 feature films, earning him two Academy Awards.

His newest film, Parallel Mothers, has been making the late summer film festival rounds, winning awards and accolades. It stars Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Milena Smit, and Almodóvar’s longtime muse Penélope Cruz. From the bits that I have read about the film, it is a swapped-at-birth melodrama, full of mix-ups and moral quandaries, with a bit of farce.

His Oscars are for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay for the comedy All About My Mother (1999) and the drama Talk To Her (2002), plus he has six BAFTA Awards, six European Film Awards, two Golden Globes, and six Goya Awards (the Spanish version of the Oscars).

Almodóvar achieved international attention with his pitch-black comedy Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and went on to further success with films such as the dark romantic comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), the melodrama High Heels (1991) and the romantic thriller Live Flesh (1997). In 2020, the first year of the worldwide pandemic, he gave us The Human Voice, a short film based on the play of the same name by Jean Cocteau. It stars Tilda Swinton and is Almodóvar’s first movie acted in English.

Probably his best work is Pain And Glory (Dolor y Gloria) (2019) starring Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz. It premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where Banderas won the award for Best Actor and Alberto Iglesias won for Best Score. Pain And Glory was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, with Banderas also being nominated for Best Actor (his first). It was on most critics 10 Best List for 2019 and was chosen by Time magazine as the Best Film of the year.

Almodóvar remains committed to portraying and celebrating gay relationships in all their complexity. Defined by their sexual orientation yet not restrained by it, his gay characters are more passionate and complicated than the Hollywood stereotypes of hysterical sidekick, sensitive understanding best friend, or flamboyant hairdresser.

I’m So Excited (2012), focused on a group of gay flight attendants, and it is a bit of a mess, but it is très gay and suitably demented. It is rather fun to watch a screwball comedy set on a transatlantic jetliner, with mile-high blow jobs and dancing flight attendants lip-synching to The Pointer Sisters, plus cameos by Banderas and Cruz.

Since the late 1980s, Almodóvar has been notorious for film inspired by low life and high melodrama, lurid, lightheartedly shocking, irrepressibly poly-sexual stories of porn stars, punks, serial killers and renegade nuns. Now, 20 films later he is recognized as a European classicist, with his films since the mid-1990s, including The Skin I Live In (2011) and Volver (2006), mostly moving away from pure outrage, shock and perversity. Instead, Almodóvar has come to show an emotional complexity, stylistic elegance and a distinctly high-art restraint in his work.

Almodóvar is a champion of the mistreated and marginalized. It’s a role he excels in, although he is wary of being typecast because of his sexuality. Still, those 1980s films are classics of Queer Cinema, although Almodóvar has always refused to be categorized specifically as a gay filmmaker:

“Did people ask Hitchcock if he made fat films? No one talks about the heterosexual President of the United States, so why should they call me a gay director?”

By pushing boundaries and ripping apart clichés, Almodóvar has brought real clout to Gay Rights causes in Europe. Much loved in his own country, his films have helped Spain become a more tolerant and liberal nation after decades of repression and fascism. But, his anti-clerical comedy Dark Habits (1983) would probably not be  made today in our “politically correct” era.

“I don’t like nostalgia as a feeling but it’s true that tolerance, beauty, freedom are what defined the 1980s and it’s not what defines this decade in Spain. The films I made at that time, I had no trouble making, nobody got offended, yet they’re quite provocative.”

Almodóvar is reluctant to reveal much about his private life. He recently wrote:

“I don’t want to complain… but I have a lot of migraines, I don’t hear with one ear and I’m photophobic. I don’t go to award ceremonies because the lights mean having a migraine the whole evening. I like to stay at home. Sometimes solitude comes from something specific, like the fact that I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t hear well. I don’t want to be a drag for other people, so I stay at home. It’s as simple as that.”

Since 2002, he has shared his life with photographer Fernando Iglesias, who sometimes plays small roles in his films.

“Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.“