Almodóvar mini-binge

Since seeing Almodóvar's new movie, Broken Embraces on New Year's Day, I've gone on a mini-binge of his movies. First up with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 1988), because it is explicitly referenced in the new movie, which is in part about the making of a movie called Girls and Suitcases that seems to be a variant on Almodóvar's own seventh feature. I wanted to see how the original was different. Although it was Almodóvar's break-out international hit, I've never been particularly fond of it myself. This time, however, I found it wonderfully absurd and warm-hearted. Of all things, I found myself identifying with Carmen Maura's Pepa, who has been abandoned by her lover, Ivan, for another woman (and who is herself the Other Woman for Ivan's wife), and who yearns for his return even though she knows he's weak and undependable. There's a little bit of The Man I Love in this story too, as she solves the problems of her desperate friends while reeling from blows to her own heart. It's a candy-colored farce and a plangent melodrama at the same time -- an Almodóvar specialty that I've called screwball soap opera in the past.

Next up was Matador (1986), which is perhaps Almodóvar's masterpiece of amour fou and love-death, although coming to it from his later work, the low budget is very noticeable. The central metaphor is the bullfight -- a sport in which the aesthetic climax is the matador's killing of the bull. This metaphor is explored in sexual terms from various angles, and at it's core this is the love story of two death-obsessed people. The sex is nearly pornographic. Almodóvar is still in bad boy mode at this early point in his career. Some of the provocations are so tangled it's hard to know whether to laugh or cringe, as in an attempted rape that ends shamefully in a premature ejaculation. Antonio Banderas plays a sensitive boy, dominated by his hyper-religious mother, who is apparently psychic. Again, the absurdities and coincidences pile up madly until they tip over into catharsis. (See my previous post for some images from the movie.)

These two movies form something of a trilogy with The Law of Desire (La ley del deseo, 1987), which I want to watch next, but in the meantime I went back and saw Broken Embraces for a second time. I came away from my first viewing pretty sure that the movie would have a different impact the second time around, with the final revelations in mind, and it was true. As I said to Ron in e-mail, I think this movie and Volver (2006) may represent a new stage for Almodóvar, in which he masters the slow build. There's a lot going on in these films that initially seems unrelated, but over time everything connects and grows and becomes transparent. There's no longer that sense of absurdity and farcical artificiality of his early films. Broken Embraces is a deeply melancholy film that on one level is about the loss of the love of your life, but it's also about the complicated wellsprings of creativity and about art as a response to life, love, and loss. At this point it may qualify as my favorite film of 2009, although I haven't caught up with everything I want to see from 2009 yet, let alone the things I don't know I want to see.