TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/013089/01308900.069

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.4 KB | 146 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 68

Pedro on the Verge of a Nervy Breakthrough


Almodovar hits it big with his steamy melodramas

By Richard Corliss


    Dark Habits: a chanteuse brings her boyfriend to her Madrid
apartment, where he ODs on heroin and dies. What Have I Done to
Deserve This?: an illiterate woman has quickie sex with a
muscular student in the shower stall of the kendo academy where
she scrubs floors. Matador: a beyond-gorgeous woman picks up a
stranger, makes violent love, then stabs him to death with her
hatpin. Law of Desire: a young stud is directed through some
steamy autoeroticism by an unseen older man. Shock the
bourgeoisie? The opening scenes in Pedro Almodovar's films seem
designed to shock the Borgias. And that's just for appetizers.
The one aesthetic commandment of this Spanish writer-director
might read: Begin in delirium, then floor it till the closing
credits.

    In  post-Franco Spain, whose artistic class has been
liberated into hedonism, a figure like Almodovar can serve as
both court jester and king. He was so proclaimed last week when
the Spanish newsmagazine Cambio 16 named him Man of the Year:
"Our best representative in a world in which Spain is in
fashion." And now the 37-year-old man from La Mancha is world
cinema's flavor of the month. His latest film, the relatively
benign Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is a solid
international hit. The comedy has earned $2.5 million in just
ten weeks of limited U.S. release, and threatens to become a
breakout foreign hit like La Cage aux Folles. Imitation, it has
often been said, is the sincerest form of Hollywood. So movie
moguls are now hot to remake Women on the Verge, with perhaps
Jane Fonda, Sally Field or Goldie Hawn playing the main role --
taken in the original by Almodovar's house superstar Carmen
Maura -- of a TV actress whose lover has just moved out. This
week Almodovar goes to Los Angeles in hopes of picking up a
Golden Globe statuette. Women on the Verge has already won the
Felix, Europe's highest movie prize. And on Academy Award
night, Felix may find an odd-couple mate: an Oscar for best
foreign film.

    How quickly one progresses these days from anonymity to
notoriety to fame. And how perfectly Almodovar and his films are
suited to this chic spotlight. He is a poor country boy made
good: he came to Madrid at 17, fronted a rock band, wrote a
porno photo-novel, and for a decade worked for the state phone
company, where he wrote the scripts for his first two pictures.
He had no fear of leaping from phones to films: "When I wanted
to become a director, I became a director." And his films have
all the exuberance of somebody who wants to tell everything --
every one of the heart's dirty little secrets -- to his coterie
audience. At the core, these are high-gloss melodramas with
high comedy along the edges. They move like Roger Rabbit on
speed, and so do the horny, drug-hyped, tortured, ironic,
cartoonish creatures of his imagination.

    Almodovar says his movies are about the "five essential
themes: death, liberty, equality, beauty and, of course, love."
Scanning Dark Habits (1983), one finds not love but revenge. It
is your basic anticlerical Latin comedy: Reform School Girls
set in a convent. The film can be seen as Almodovar's payback
for a Catholic education "full of hypocrisy -- you can't learn
by being terrorized." But the convent's mother superior isn't
kidding when she tells the chanteuse, "My only sin is to love
you too much," for that is the only sin and salvation of any
Almodovar heroine.

    "My movies are autobiographical," says Almodovar, "but only
in the essentials, not in individual anecdotes." In the
subversive sitcom What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1985), "I
wanted to talk about my family, and about the horrendous family
life of the barrios." Mom (Maura) sniffs glue, pops pills and
burns the chicken. Dad sings German songs -- reason enough for
her to kill the dull brute with a ham bone. By this time the
viewer may feel like put-upon Mom or bashed-in Dad, so
assiduously has Almodovar cataloged his atrocities. But the
filmmaker had more cunning indiscretions in store.

    With Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987), Almodovar
displayed his brazen assurance of style and vaulted from comic
realism to soap-operatic mannerism. Matador is a contemporary
vampire story: an ex-bullfighter and a woman lawyer, believing
that death is the ultimate climax, impale each victim on the
cold steel of their lust. Law of Desire draws a bent triangle: a
gay movie director, his transsexual sister (Maura) and her
adopted child's rightful mother (played by a Spanish drag
queen). Revelations of murder, incest, suicide and lotsa hot
sex follow, but the tone remains knowing, tender. As Matador is
about desire, Law is about caring; the first picture is a
morgue shot, the latter a cardiogram. The film is as heartfelt
as the tears that seep from behind its hero's red plastic
sunglasses.

    Law of Desire and other Almodovar films take many cues from
homoerotic cinema, from the fascination with lust and death that
animated certain films of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, John
Waters and R.W. Fassbinder. But Almodovar also looks back in
glamour to '50s Hollywood, when Rock Hudson could comfort a
dying Jane Wyman in one film, then woo perky Doris Day in
another. Thus his pictures are both bleakly comic and defiantly
romantic, hipper than tomorrow and nostalgic for a pre-AIDS era
when love's most toxic complication was a broken heart. "To
classify movies is to impoverish them," he says. "Law of Desire
was about a gay couple. But passion is the subject. I was
trying to tell a love story."

    In Women on the Verge, Almodovar tried to make a mainstream
farce and succeeded beyond the dreams of, say, Billy Wilder -- a
Hollywood filmmaker he admires for "revealing a sordid society
through the most delicious light comedies." Women doesn't meet
that standard; it's more like The Big Chill with a bitter taste.
But it does have a plot right out of some beloved old screwball
comedy. When the disconsolate Pepa (Maura) tosses a couple dozen
downers into her gazpacho cocktail, she triggers a plot device
that ricochets happily through the film.

    Pepa's posh apartment is like the stateroom in A Night at
the Opera. Strange people just keep piling in. In the course of a
long day, Pepa runs into her lover's ex-wife, his new mistress,
his son and the lad's fiancee. Plus a couple of doped-up cops
and a Jehovah's Witness concierge. The film is devious enough
to have speared every foreign-language prize from U.S. critics
and obvious enough that Hollywood is genuflecting at Almodovar's
door. "Pedro is going to become a major director," says Orion
Pictures' Mike Medavoy, "either in Hollywood or wherever he
decides to work."

    Almodovar is in no hurry to move to Hollywood. "For now, I'm
afraid," he says. "I'm not used to sharing decisions. But when
I discover the story I want to tell in English, I will do so."
That should be no problem for a self-confessed child with a huge
imagination. "Cinema you can learn by yourself," he says. "But
the stories must come from inside you. When I am writing
something, I have the feeling that I am really reading
something, and that I have to keep on writing to find out what
is going to happen next."

    Hollywood can't wait either.

-- Margot Hornblower/Madrid