la habitación de al lado (w&d almodóvar, w. sigrid nunez)

Will Almodovar’s latest break the tradition of late twentieth century auteur cineastes going to the US and making a horlicks of it? Thinking Wong Kar Wai, Haneke, even Herzog. Well, not really. The Room Next Door, to give it its English title, is a curious construction. It sets out its stall early on that it’s about death, with some heavy handed dialogue (lost in translation?) as Tilda Swinton’s sepulchral Martha, clearly named for Martha Gellhorn, tells her long lost friend Ingrid that she has terminal cancer. Thereafter the film becomes a meditation of sorts on what makes for a good death. Martha coerces Ingrid into helping her go through this process, which is curiously bloodless. The most passion in the film comes from their shared ex-lover, played by John Turturro with a bullish charm, as he goes off on one about climate change and neo-liberalism. Worthy enough subjects, to be sure, but they feel shoe-horned into the film. And it’s a film of shoe-horns. There’s a gratuitous burning house scene, there’s a trademark flashback scene, which in another Almodóvar film might have been revelatory, but in this one just feels tacked on, because there was some spare budget?, there’s even a fleeting scene set in Iraq, where Martha the war photographer appears, learns that people like to fuck in wartime, then is banished to become sepulchral Martha once again. (The second film this year about a war photographer named after another famous war photographer.) There’s even a quickfire bowling scene, which might be another homage to Turturro’s role in Liebowski.

There’s the kernel of something intriguing about a late stage director musing on what will come his way shortly, and the homage to Joyce and Houston feels poetically on point, but at the same time the film feels uneven, unsure of itself. New York looks pretty, but the line: ‘Pink snow, at least something good has come out of climate change’, which Martha offers early on feels indicative of a film which isn’t entirely sure of its footing. Fortunately Turturro’s later monologue puts us straight, as he makes it clear that climate change is definitely not a good thing.

parallel mothers (w&d almodóvar)

About a year ago, in one of the occasional semi-official quarantines which have peppered our lives to a lesser extent in Montevideo than in other parts of the world, we went on a mini Almodóvar spree, watching four of five of his back catalogue in a row. Some were strong, but others felt as though they were Almodóvar by numbers. Take a man or a woman on the edge of a crisis, introduce a charismatic co-star, see what happens. The very early work is perhaps as notable for the zest and energy that was present in the representation of a Spain emerging from the shadow of dictatorship as for the narratives themselves. Almodóvar was a coordinator of colour and high jinks who loved to be an agent provocateur.

I note all this, which is not to say that there have not been many a classic in the midst of his earlier and middle years, but because what is apparent is that this is a director who is just getting stronger with age. His stories become more humane and are touched by more subtlety as he has gone on. Parallel Mothers is the apotheosis of this. A film which looks at the issues of motherhood, relationships and history, blending them all together in a mezcla which probably shouldn’t work, but actually triumphs.

From a narrative point of view, one of the most interesting elements is what happens in the last twenty minutes. There are moments when Parallel Mothers is pure melodrama, as Cruz works out which partner she’s going to end up with. Just when you think that this decision will be the key dramatic resolution of the film, Almodóvar sidesteps it completely. The key dramatic resolution of this film is of the past with the present. The connection that needs to be resolved between the generations. There is something both subtle, crude and profound about the way in which Janis, Cruz’s character, can have an adulterous affair, then get involved with the real mother of her own child, then go back to the lover, and all this is, in the end, fine. Because there are greater wounds to be healed, and greater tragedies that need coming to terms with. In this, Almodóvar seems akin to the novelists Cercas or Marias, and one understands how profoundly the Spanish Civil War, the children of whose victims are still alive, still exerts its influence over the Spanish psyche.

All of this in a drama which is at once frothy and tragic, which has that Almodóvar flair, but also succeeds in talking about cot death and sexual abuse without ever turning the film into something didactic or heavy handed. His actresses and actors excel, but this cannot help but be because they are representing characters with an indisputable humanity. I read somewhere the other day that the film is on the verge of grossing a million pounds in the UK alone. Almodóvar’s art gets both more complex and more affecting, and the curious thing is that, even in the Anglo Saxon world, this makes for commercial success as well. The film is also testament to the virtues of a less commercial aspect of art, that of permitting the artist to evolve over decades, permitting us to watch how they refine their palette and expand their horizons. 

dolor y gloria (w&d almodóvar)

Sometimes a filmmaker succeeds in occupying a role within their culture which permits them to grow old gracefully, like an artist or a novelist. There’s no need to worry about commercial viability, because there are stars who will line up to take part; the filmmkaker is free to indulge their whimsy or their genius as they see fit, without the interference of script development or production executives. Almodovar has never been near Hollywood, no matter how much his aesthetic contains elements that tally with that other culture. There’s nothing austere about his films, or overly intellectual. They possess a design elan, a delight in colour, music, artifice, which would sit happily across the Atlantic. But he’s never strayed far from Madrid, where he’s allowed to get on with doing what he wants, with budgets that more than meet his needs. The fact that the films are produced by his own production company no doubt facilitates the process.

This allows him to make this kind of film; one which is about a topic that doesn’t get much airing: the ageing of a middle-aged man. Salvador, played by Banderas, is a film director stricken down by illness. His youthful brio has faded. He mopes. Banderas plays this in a splendidly low-key tone. At one point, pace Hamlet, he offers advice to an actor: don’t cry, don’t force the emotion. Which is precisely what Banderas succeeds in doing. He offers a portrait of a man who has everything but at the same time feels as though his life is lacking. He tries heroin, (a slyly subversive twist, for those who might say that Almodovar has lost his punch; how many other directors casually introduce heroin into their films without it being for heightened dramatic purposes?), he visits old friends, he finds a lost lover, he drifts through doctors’ appointments and, above all - he remembers. Age accrues memory and the more we age, the more memory there is to process. Dolor y Gloria articulates this in three ways: firstly through the reconstructed scenes, staring Cruz, from Salvador’s childhood. Secondly in the lucid and brilliant theatre sequence, where the actor who has appropriated Salvador’s memory text, delivers a soliloquy about the lost lover (which the lost lover happens to see), and thirdly in conversation. There’s something almost Beckettian about all this, albeit a gaudy, gay Beckett, who lives in the kind of apartment with the kind of art one imagines would have made Beckett deeply uncomfortable. 

The sum of all these parts is a meandering movie, with characters who appear and then slip away, with a narrative which is tenuous, contrived, charming. It’s a film of quirky moments and high tenderness. It’s ostentatiously and gloriously self-indulgent. It’s as akin to reading a novel as cinema can be, a loose-limbed novel that celebrates the process of ageing and the exquisite library of memory. 

the skin i live in (w&d pedro almodóvar)

The credits of a film are a sure fire way to assess its production values, as well as to gain some kind of an inkling of the director's attention to detail. The credits for Almodóvar's latest last about a quarter of an hour, suggesting no expense was spared. Towards the very end, after the caterers and the music and the acknowledgments and the artwork and Gaultier and so on, there comes a list of the books featured in the film. This list consists of half a dozen or so books. I'd been trying to spot their titles during the film but the shots were always too quick or opaque. So here they were. Included in the list were Alice Munro and, at the top, Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. I've read neither but I appreciate that the director probably has. The books aren't quoted from, so I presume they don't need to be listed in the credits, but they are. This is both attention to detail and a director mapping out the wider cultural context within which the film has been made.

That attention to detail is apparent in every aspect of the film. From the casting (Banderas surprisingly watchable) to the art design (Ledgard's home-operating theatre feels just medical enough to be convincing and sufficiently beautiful to adorn rather than blemish the film). As well as the script. In the Anglo-Saxon world there's a lot of talk about the rules of scriptwriting, the do's and the don'ts. Almodóvar drives a train through all of it. The film evolves into an hour-long flashback. A flashback which is repeated and dissected. Cut up in much the same way Banderas' plastic surgeon restructures bodies. It spins a two hour supertanker narrative out of the most absurd of stories, a narrative which has its own logic and obeys its own rules, coming to a grinding halt not with a bang but a whisper.

This is intelligent movie-making on a grand, theatrical scale, the sort of thing Hollywood used to do, once upon a time, but struggles to get away with today. When you boil down the ingredients what's left at the bottom of the petri dish are absurd, even vulgar notions that should make for a preposterous fiasco. (Gender/ mothers/ men dressed as tigers etc.) But the old masters know what they're doing. Film is a kind of sleight-of-hand. Images are slotted together to build up a universe. Stirred with music and editing. The opening fifteen minutes or so of La Piel Que Habito somehow makes you believe that Banderas is a plastic surgeon who has concocted a hyper-resistant human skin out of pigflesh. And is now using these bizarre skills to go about the Frankenstein process of re-animating his dead wife. Step outside the world which is being conjured for no more than a moment and you'd find yourself shouting: It's balderdash!, or other appropriate expressions. But the skill of the film-making keeps you hooked.

When Almodóvar is on top of his game it's a bit like reading a novel by Huysmans or Blaise Cendras or Edgar Allen Poe. He seduces you into entering a parallel world which seems to occupy its own reality, a reality that you, the audience, can participate in. The novelist has the advantage that  he or she does not have to make you see the world they have concocted. The filmmaker truly has to become a conjurer, brainwashing the audience into accepting everything that's put before their eyes. This doesn't have to mean that the brain ceases to work: in the most skilful application of the craft a filmmaker provokes a kind of conscious brainwashing. It's a fine art, and in La Piel Que Habito, the maestro pulls it off.