Pedro Almodóvar: World Directors 9781844571499, 9781844571505, 9781838711696, 9781838717568

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Almodóvar’s Cinema in Context
1. The Aesthetics of Bad Taste
2. Memory, Identity and Style
3. Figures of Desire: The Melodrama of Longing
4. The Body and the Nation
Conclusion: Bad Bodies, Good Hearts
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

WORLD DIRECTORS SERIES

Film retains its capacity to beguile, entertain and open up windows onto other cultures like no other medium. Nurtured by the growth of film festivals worldwide and by cinephiles from all continents, a new generation of directors has emerged in this environment over the last few decades. This new series aims to present and discuss the work of the leading directors from across the world on whom little has been written and whose exciting work merits discussion in an increasingly globalised film culture. Many of these directors have proved to be ambassadors for their national film cultures as well as critics of the societies they represent, dramatising in their work the dilemmas of art that are both national and international, of local relevance and universal appeal. Written by leading film critics and scholars, each book contains an analysis of the director’s works, filmography, bibliography and illustrations. The series will feature film-makers from all continents (including North America), assessing their impact on the art form and their contribution to film culture.

Other Titles in the Series Shyam Benegal Jane Campion Youssef Chahine Yash Chopra Atom Egoyan Emir Kusturica Lars von Trier Forthcoming: Mike Leigh Baz Luhrmann Terrence Malick Kitano Takeshi

WORLD DIRECTORS

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

A Mamá y Papá again . . . for more than forty years of comedy, drama and happy endings. And in loving memory of Humberto Acevedo-Lorenzo (1938–2005) and Maximina Muñoz-Ríos (1936–2006).

First published in 2007 by the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN The British Film Institute’s purpose is to champion moving image culture in all its richness and diversity across the UK, for the benefit of as wide an audience as possible, and to create and encourage debate. Copyright © Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz 2007 Reprinted 2008 Cover image: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988), El Deseo/Laurenfilm, S.A. Set by Fakenham Photosetting Ltd, Fakenham, Norfolk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978–1–84457–150–5 (pbk) ISBN 978–1–84457–149–9 (hbk) eISBN 978–1–83871–755–1 ePDF 978–1–83871–756–8

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction: Almodóvar’s Cinema in Context 1 The Aesthetics of Bad Taste 2 Memory, Identity and Style 3 Figures of Desire: The Melodrama of Longing 4 The Body and the Nation Conclusion: Bad Bodies, Good Hearts

1 8 63 135 204 285

Notes Bibliography Filmography Index

290 300 303 311

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am in debt to my editors at the British Film Institute, Rebecca Barden, Sophia Contento and Sarah Watt for their patience, guidance and faith in me. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers engaged by the BFI for their useful comments. They helped make this a better book; all remaining errors and omissions are my fault alone. Thanks go as well to the University of Colorado’s College of Arts & Sciences and the Council for Research and Creative Work, for travel and research grants that took me to Madrid and London to conduct vital research. The University of Colorado Film Studies Programme, my home, and especially Professors Suranjan Ganguly and Daniel Boord, gave me time and many resources without which I could not have gone ahead. I am especially grateful to the students in my Spanish cinema classes at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at New York University in Madrid for their receptiveness to these ideas and their valuable comments and criticism. Many, many thanks go to Ingrid Christensen for invaluable research assistance, and to Yael Chatav for critical help at crucial times. And my most heartfelt appreciation goes to Ella M. Chichester, Amanda L. Petersen, José M. Del Pino and especially Paul Gordon; persons on whose intelligence, guidance and friendship I have relied upon in ways that I will never be able to repay.

INTRODUCTION Almodóvar’s Cinema in Context Pedro Almodóvar was born in the town of Calzada de Calatrava, La Mancha, in 1951 and is the most important figure in Spanish cinema since Luis Buñuel.1 In his feature-making career of more than twenty-five years and sixteen films Almodóvar has articulated a changing yet coherent vision of Spain and ‘Spanishness’ that has earned him international prestige, shelves full of awards (from Cannes, to the Goyas, to the Academy Awards), unconditional fans and virulent criticism. In the process he may have alienated a portion of the Spanish public, while consistently gaining ground as an ambassador for Spanish cinema abroad, as the international success of All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), Bad Education (2004) and Volver (2006) suggests.2 Almodóvar’s films are irreverent and self-reflexive: excessive explorations of identity, sexuality, repression and desire, sprinkled with rich allusions to different genres (classic Hollywood melodrama, screwball comedy, musicals, thrillers) and assorted media intersections (television commercials, magazine advertisements, popular songs, kitsch art). The mélange of genre conventions (which peaked in the comedy/melodrama/ musical/thriller High Heels, 1991) and the pastiche quality of Almodóvar’s aesthetics, mise en scène and narratives help to define the director’s sense of narrative structure and visual style. Almodóvar’s films from Labyrinth of Passion (1982) to Kika (1993), Live Flesh (1997) and All About My Mother seem to be stories in search of a format, always on the verge of spinning out of control, but finally held together by their own aesthetic, generic and formal rules. The search itself for a satisfactory formal identity and the films’ dependency on intertextuality, camp appropriations of ‘Spanishness’ and generic instability are among their defining characteristics. By shaping his films as ingenious celebrations of formal, generic and sexual identity crises, Almodóvar addresses and explores Spain’s own national identity

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crisis in the cultural and political transition period following the end of General Franco’s regime (1939–75) and the beginning of political freedoms and democratic rule in the 1980s. The critical and commercial success of All About My Mother and Talk to Her in American theatres and at the Academy Awards in 2000 and 2003 respectively has helped renew critical interest in the films of Pedro Almodóvar in the US and the UK. The director’s gen(d)er-bending style has defined the identity of Spanish cinema since his début film Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980), and especially outside of Spain after the international success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988).3 As Marvin D’Lugo has argued, ‘Almodóvar’s cinema represents . . . an unequivocal stylistic rupture with nearly every Spanish filmic tradition that precedes it.’4 In his recent book, Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar (‘A Cannibal in Madrid: Camp Sensibility and the Recycling of History in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar’), Alejandro Yarza argues that Almodóvar’s films re-appropriate and recycle the cultural markers of Spain perpetuated (and perpetrated) by Fascist iconography under Franco’s rule.5 In his films of the 1980s (Pepi, Luci, Bom, Labyrinth of Passion, Dark Habits [1983], Matador [1986]), Almodóvar revised and reinvented the Francoist and Republican-era images of a nation of toreadors, flamenco dancers and Catholicism, revealing and deconstructing its ideological function of cultural homogenisation. Films like The Law of Desire (1987) and What Have I Done to Deserve This!? (1984) present the theme of rebellion against parental figures and patriarchal order, violating the image of the overwhelming, powerful, all-knowing and yet benevolent father figure celebrated for decades in Spanish cinema. Pedro Almodóvar’s films challenge that representation by introducing ‘unorthodox’, dysfunctional family units where fathers are absent, as in The Law of Desire and High Heels, or useless, as in What Have I Done to Deserve This!? and Kika. These films propose new, alternative familial and social models that seem appropriate to the heterogeneous, changing, ‘transitional’ Spain of the 1980s.6 Marsha Kinder argues that Almodóvar makes traditionally marginal characters and plot situations principal or central (drug addicts, homosexuals, transvestites, terrorists), unmasking in the

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transitional period the manufactured centralised national identity seen in Francoist cinema while proposing a revision of Spain’s cultural identity in the recent past.7 Almodóvar’s films of the transition arguably served a therapeutic function at home, while revealing the new body of Spain to international audiences, since they dominated Spanish film exports abroad from 1982 to 1989.8 In his films of this ‘transition’ period, adds Yarza, Almodóvar ‘presents . . . signs of cultural anxiety derived from the national identity crisis resulting from Spain’s process of integration into Europe’.9 In other words, Almodóvar and other artists of the period were concerned with how to rescue these cultural signs from their association with the nation’s identity under the regime. After four decades of a dominant trend in national cinema focused on articulating a false sense of identity based on invented or abducted symbols of the national (for example, the flamenco-filled movies known as españolada), Almodóvar’s films reclaim these symbols and emphasise them as a masquerade that at once hides and defines the national. Marvin D’Lugo has argued that in Almodóvar’s films of the 1980s, the city of Madrid itself symbolises the space of tolerance and ‘openness’ of the transitional post-Francoist Spain. Almodóvar’s visual and narrative fabrication of the city (its people, landmarks, movement, neighbourhoods, attitudes) serves not only to ‘construct a new past’ but also to revise the meaning of the social and political institutions (‘the family, the Church, the police’) of the Franco regime.10 There are recurring themes in Almodóvar’s films through which these questions of ‘cultural anxiety’ are raised. Among them are the stories of transvestites and transsexual characters and the obsessive attempts of many characters to rebuild or reconstitute the family. In Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, The Law of Desire, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels and Kika, central and marginal characters show ‘transitional’, transvestite, transsexual and even ‘cyborg’ characteristics (for example ‘Andrea Caracortada’, played by Victoria Abril in Kika), which emphasise the human body as one of the locales of negotiation, tension and trauma, suggesting the body itself as a sign of the ‘social contradictions’ of a country involved in a process of profound cultural transition. There is a correlation between the generic excesses and the challenging of conventional sexual and physical roles,

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played by transvestites and transsexuals in Almodóvar’s films. Alejandro Yarza states that ‘the transvestite is the indicator of a crisis of the conventional sexual and cinematic taxonomic systems’, a ‘monster’ that, along with Almodóvar’s generic cross-references to different genres, exemplifies the nation’s ‘cultural anxiety’.11 Pedro Almodóvar has been probably the most prominent and popular Spanish film-maker outside of Spain since his breakthrough films of the 1980s, especially The Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Almodóvar’s films are recognisably excessive, full of colourful characters, vertiginous plotlines, rich inter-generic allusions and complex media intersections, and yet their own ‘instability’ seems to emerge time and again as their most stable feature. Critics and historians of Spanish national cinema in general and Almodóvar in particular have pointed out how national identity in the cinema after 1980 has been reflexive of the crisis in which the country found itself after the end of General Francisco Franco’s regime in 1975 and the beginning of re-democratisation in the early 1980s. In the 1970s Franco and his regime aged, declined and eventually died together. After the 1973 assassination of Franco’s heir apparent Carrero Blanco, allegedly by a squad of the Basque separatist terrorist organisation ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatsuna), and Franco’s own death in autumn 1975, the supposed restitution of the monarchy with King Juan Carlos led paradoxically to decisive steps toward democratic rule. After forty years of repression of any and all cultural practices that were not sanctioned by the State, in the transitional period between Fascist dictatorship and modern democracy, Spanish popular art was reborn with a vengeance, appropriating and revising the past cultural markers of Fascism and republicanism (the reduction of Spanish cultural identity to the kitsch aesthetics of bullfighting, flamenco dancing, Catholic imagery), and reinventing itself as signifying change, tolerance, political and sexual liberation, artistic freedom, and in some circles, hedonistic excess. Almodóvar emerged as an artist in the cusp of this transitional period, becoming representative of the cinema of this ‘new Spanish mentality’; young, free and scandalous because it was now allowed but also because it was a way to reclaim some sense of cultural identity.12 In 1967, after migrat-

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ing to the city from his life in the provinces, first in Calzada de Calatrava (Ciudad Real, La Mancha) and later in Cáceres (Extremadura), the young Pedro began a job at Spanish Telefónica in 1969, sold crafts and joined an amateur theatre group where he met some of his eventual collaborators. In that period, he wrote comic strips (including the original version of ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón’), made Super-8 short films, wrote songs and performed with his musical partner, Fanny McNamara (Fabio de Miguel), developed a magazine column (under the pseudonym ‘Patty Diphusa’) published by La luna and was a significant figure of Madrid’s artistic ‘punk’ avant-garde of the 1970s, ‘la movida’ (‘the shake’ or ‘the movement’). A haphazard combination of professional rebels and real artists, ‘la movida’ is now considered significant in the transitional period, allowing many young people of Almodóvar’s generation to explore their sense of expression and identity in ways that were all but forbidden, either legally or socially, before the end of Franco’s regime. The ‘movement’ allowed Almodóvar his first contacts with his raw creative talent, and his many interests (music, comics, Super-8, satire, photonovellas) found their first mature expression in Almodóvar’s first feature-length film, Pepi, Luci, Bom released in 1980. Rather consistently since then Almodóvar’s films celebrate the expressions of ‘cultural anxiety’, generic instability, ‘marginality’, the revision of social and political institutions and eventually the return to a pastoral, country setting as a symbol of stability.13 These themes suggest the problematic transition into democracy and reintegration into the European community as symptomatic of the nation’s new identity, troubled but open, paradoxically stabilising as unstable. In many ways, Almodóvar’s provincial upbringing in La Mancha and Extremadura, his repressive Catholic ‘bad’ education, his admiration for classical Hollywood cinema and his adoption of Madrid, ‘the most fun city in the world’, as the centre of his universe have all cemented into his film-making style and narrative interests. Almodóvar is both equally the self-described Spanish ‘Andy Warhol’ of the 1980s, leader of the punk avant-garde, and the provincial boy who sang as a soloist in the church choir and who continually longs to recreate his family and return to the village.14 But there is arguably no contradiction: as Almodóvar reminds us constantly in his films, paradox is

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at the heart of the Spanish cultural identity of the last three decades. While some critics have called his early films and plotlines ‘indescribable’ they also all amount to a sense of style and aesthetics that can truly now be called ‘Almodóvarian’. Among the signs and symptoms of Spain’s and Spanish cinema’s ‘new mentality’ and its own re-invention as a site of convergence of diverse cultural practices, was the appropriation and adaptation to Spanish contexts of discursive and stylistic models from high, low and popular culture from abroad, including Hollywood and European cinemas. In the 1980s Almodóvar and a few other directors (Vicente Aranda, Víctor Erice, Eloy de la Iglesia, Bigas Luna) managed to break through into ‘specialised’ international film audiences and, writes Marsha Kinder ‘Almodóvar was celebrated as a cross between Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk and David Lynch’.15 Almodóvar’s films are full of cinematic allusions to and quotations from formative figures of international, Hollywood and independent cinema including Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, John Cassavetes and Alfred Hitchcock. But these appropriations, allusions, intertextual references and citations serve to cement Almodóvar’s own style as something in a constant state of transition, transformation and maturation, arguably analogous to Spain’s own cultural heterogeneity after the end of Franco’s regime. In reference to Almodóvar’s most popular film of the 1990s, All About My Mother, I have argued elsewhere that the film finally settles into a definably melodramatic format, neutralising the genre schizophrenia of earlier films (like the thriller/melodrama/musical High Heels) in what results in ‘an understanding of identity as something ambiguous (sexually, culturally) and problematic, yet ultimately functional’.16 Even earlier on, however, in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar’s use of Hitchcock’s films as intertextual discourse was showing signs of a generically hybrid quality (in Women between the thriller, screwball comedy and melodrama). In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, his most popular film of the 1980s and the definitive breakthrough into the international market, and later in All About My Mother, intertextuality itself signifies the process of building and rebuilding, inventing and reinventing an identity

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that is occasionally defined by its own instability. In the course of the following pages, I will examine and explore the beauty and logic of Almodóvar’s ‘instability’, and its perfect evolution from the raw and ludicrous (Pepi, Luci, Bom; Labyrinth of Passion) to the stylish (High Heels; The Flower of My Secret), from the passionate (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; Matador) to the uncomfortably self-reflexive and narcissistic (The Law of Desire; Bad Education). Ultimately, the essence of Almodóvar’s aesthetics has always been there: the desire to make logic out of chaos, and to rebuild the family and the nation out of its own fragmentation and the trauma of the past.

One The Aesthetics of Bad Taste ‘In this country, with so much democracy, I don’t know where we are going to end . . .’

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) Pedro Almodóvar’s exploration of identity, sexuality and politics in Spain began with the outrageous, underground midnight show hit Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) which translates better as “. . . and other ordinary girls”. The movie’s plot was based on one of Almodóvar’s own comic books about Madrid’s self-proclaimed punk avant-garde movement, ‘la movida’. Influenced by 1960s’ British youth culture, la movida was a coincidence of interests in punk fashion and music, in conspicuous consumption of drugs and alcohol (aided by laws allowing private and public consumption of soft drugs), and the opening and popularisation of many venues, recording labels and radio stations catering to the wants and tastes of youth and its music. Described by Mark Allinson as a youth culture ‘frenzy’, la movida was based on the possibility of heretofore repressed means of expression in music and fashion, that eventually led to the adoption of its ‘playfully transgressive’ practices by photography, painting, theatre and films.1 Thus, the period between 1980 and 1984 saw the rise of punk bands such as Radio Futura, Tos (Cough) and Alaska y Los Pegamoides, and the musical act of Almodóvar and McNamara, later seen in Labyrinth of Passion. As Allinson concludes, The early films of Pedro Almodóvar are products of this artisan culture of production . . . . But they are also a mirror of their times, portraying an era in which everyone had multiple creative projects, lots of free time, no responsibilities and few political convictions, as well as generous helpings of sex, alcohol and drugs.2

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However, even this early in his feature-making career Almodóvar’s themes appear to be firmly in place: the fictional universe that traverses his films from Pepi, Luci, Bom to Bad Education and Volver has shifted in form and in structure, but is consistent, even logical in its content. Almodóvar’s first feature film opens with a credit sequence in which we see hand-drawn ‘likenesses’ of the principal characters that express the director’s early attempt at elaborating a true aesthetics of bad taste, based on Almodóvar’s own comics. Almodóvar’s characters and dramatic situations are introduced as caricatures: exaggerating features, narrative plausibility and emphasising marginality. From its opening shot Pepi, Luci, Bom reveals its deceptively simple yet irreverent approach to making meaning and to film-making itself. The first image is a badly framed and over-exposed shot of an ordinary apartment building which jerkily tilts down into the same room from which it is being shot, in the process revealing a large number of marijuana plants by the sill. The take continues as the camera moves into the bedroom to show Pepi (Carmen Maura) lying on a rug as she glues magazine pictures into a scrapbook. Pepi listens to a loud women’s rock-and-roll band (Little Nell) while flipping through a movie magazine: a picture of Christopher Reeve as Superman in mid-flight catching her attention. The shot, with all its apparent clumsiness and simplicity is surprisingly interesting; it establishes the strident visual style of the movie, introduces the protagonist and presents Almodóvar’s first media intersections in the forms of the Little Nell song and the magazine pictures of an American movie star. A man ringing the doorbell and knocking at the door impatiently interrupts Pepi. When she opens the door the man, who is in street clothes, flashes a police badge, turning her smile into a look of concern. The policeman (Félix Rotaeta) lives across the patio and is angry about the clearly visible marijuana plants. An incongruous high-angle shot of Pepi displays her naivety. ‘Lonely, aren’t they?’, she asks with a flashy smile. This shot is then juxtaposed with the reverse shot of the policeman from a low angle, their power relation literalised. Angered by her evasiveness, he barks out: ‘Do you think I suck my thumb?’ Pepi lifts her skirt, exposes her crotch and asks: ‘Speaking of sucking what do you think of this little rabbit stew?’ Pepi (who is eighteen years old) and the policeman agree to the exchange of sexual

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favours if she moves her plants away from the window. But the deal soon sours. Pepi only agrees to anal intercourse because ‘I’m still a virgin and I don’t want to lose my honour just yet’. But the man refuses and violently penetrates her vaginally, while they both still have their clothes on. She screams and unsuccessfully tries to fight off the rapist-policeman, to no avail. Thus, five minutes into his feature-making career Almodóvar introduces rape to his repertoire of narrative tools: the trauma of sexual violence paired with a masculine figure of authority. In Almodóvar’s films sexual violence is often treated as an allegory of Franco’s repressive regime and state apparatus. While one can argue that Almodóvar’s characters act as if Franco had never existed, in 1980, when Pepi was released, Spain’s young democracy was historically too close to the preceding forty years of a Fascist regime. Pepi’s rage about her rape, like the sexual violence traumas of so many characters in Almodóvar’s films, appears at the beginning and at the centre of Pepi’s narrative arc as a character; it conditions and mediates all her actions in the movie. The second sequence of the movie opens with a hand-drawn cartoon intertitle, accompanied by Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Capriccio Español’ in the soundtrack, stating, ‘Pepi was thirsting with revenge’. Although playful and funny, the title page, setting up the comic book motif, is significant in establishing the themes of authority and sexual violence at the centre of the story, and the character’s recovery from that trauma as the narrative pretext. The pattern established in Almodóvar’s first feature of treating traumatic sexual encounters, abuse and repressive authority figures as partially analogous to Spain’s troubled past under Franco evolves visibly throughout his career, as we will see in the rest of this book, but the essential elements remain constant in Labyrinth of Passion, Dark Habits, What Have I Done to Deserve This!? and all his films up to All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Bad Education. In its own clumsy, kind of naive way, in Pepi Almodóvar treats the topic literally, which is consistent with the idea of ‘the aesthetics of bad taste’ that his films of the first half of the 1980s continually pursue. While Almodóvar’s style and aesthetics became increasingly sophisticated in the following two decades, the core themes remain visible from Pepi, Luci, Bom to Bad Education.

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In the next sequence, temporally displaced, Pepi paces her apartment, flamboyantly dressed, nervously smoking a cigarette. She looks out of the window and her action is followed by a jerky panning shot across the apartment building’s interior court, suggesting that she is looking for the rapist’s apartment. But the shot is clearly disengaged from her point of view or angle of vision, violating the continuity of time and space essential to classical film narrative and editing. The shot then incongruously cuts to Pepi on the street, pacing in front of the apartment building, apparently stalking the rapist neighbour. Violating again classical relations of time and space, we see Pepi walking down the street, screen left to right (although she had just been seen looking right to left) and entering a building with a hand-painted number on the entrance. Inside the dark, dirty building Pepi enters an apartment where a punk band are rehearsing a song. Pepi’s friend Bom (Olvido Gara ‘Alaska’) plays the second guitar and gives Pepi an acknowledging wave. The scene is poorly lit, with harsh shadows on the walls and over the actors. In the course of the scene Pepi proposes to the band that they beat up the rapist neighbour in exchange for her marijuana plants. The lead man/bass player agrees to the deal in a thick central-Madrid, working-class accent. The attack takes place at night, on the street, and Pepi curiously wears a sort of faux flamenco outfit consisting of a long, loose skirt, polka-dotted blouse and a white silken stole. The band of attackers is dressed in chulapo costumes, a ‘typical’ popular Madrid style, with grey pants, black vests and white ascots. The significance of the disguises is that they suggest Spanish clichés of rebellion against the authority figure while he repeatedly screams ‘Not on the balls!’. Continuing the folkloric theme, during the beating, two of the attackers sing a zarzuela song, the popular Spanish style of operetta. Pepi is sexually aroused by watching the beating and begins rubbing herself against the corner of a building. Ultimately the scene of brutal violence is undermined by the comic use of Spanish clichés and the open threat to patriarchal authority in the reference to the victim’s testicles. Almodóvar’s career is full of such cultural appropriations of kitsch Spanish themes, which are often subverted, ridiculed or rescued from their folkloric function.3 In an improbable plot twist we soon learn that the presumed rapist of the previous scene is actually the policeman’s twin brother. Identity games,

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confusions, flexibility and crises are common in Almodóvar’s films, and the plots of several of his early movies, including Labyrinth of Passion and What Have I Done to Deserve This!? turn around such concerns. The innocent twin complains about how he always ends up paying for his brother’s wrongdoings. The guilty brother replies with a telling non sequitur: ‘In this country, with so much democracy, I don’t know where we are going to end. If that had happened to me, I’d have taken out my gun and shoot them dead.’ The policeman’s statement is both harrowing and hysterical: the fragility of Spain’s newfound democracy in this transitional phase, while the wounds of Franco’s regime were still open and bleeding, the country’s frenetic rush into democracy was accompanied by the relaxation of formerly repressive laws governing social and political relations and strictly censoring all forms of media. In the mid-1970s, films, magazines, books and television were suddenly thrust into a permissive phase where violence and sexual content was gradually allowed. The policeman’s remark then, has a dual meaning. On the one hand, it refers directly to his Fascist past and his resentment of the political and expressive freedoms championed by King Juan Carlos and instituted by the cortes soon after Franco’s death in late 1975.4 On the other hand, it also touches upon the novelty of democracy itself, the uncertainty of the country’s political, social and economic future that was still quite fragile and unpredictable in 1980. This Fascist, pro-Franco, anti-democratic character is also criminal, misogynistic and abusive, verbally and physically, to his wife, the title character Luci (Eva Siva.) The policeman is the first of a long line of such patriarchal figures in Almodóvar’s career, appearing to varying degrees in almost all his films. In Pepi, Luci, Bom however, the sadistic male character is paired with a masochistic wife. After Luci and Pepi meet each other on the street and become friends, Luci confesses that she married the policeman because she thought that he would ‘treat [her] like a bitch’. Pepi’s search for revenge against her rapist is the trigger for her unexpected friendship with his wife, Luci. Under the pretext of knitting lessons, Pepi and Luci meet. Almodóvar introduces a new cartoon title card reading: ‘The next morning Pepi gets her next lesson’. The title card is accompanied this time by a few bars from Bernard Herrmann’s musical score for

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Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960): the first of many Hitchcock references in Almodóvar films that reach their peak in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Nearly all the social and sexual relationships portrayed in Pepi, Luci, Bom are mediated by violence whether it be physical, sexual or psychological. In fact, Pepi and Luci’s blossoming friendship over the knitting lessons and their mutual hatred of the husband-rapist also involves an agreement that Pepi will physically beat Luci every time she drops a stitch, which in turn reveals Luci’s deep rooted masochism; the physical violence results in sexual arousal. ‘That’s why I married him’ Luci confesses, ‘I though that him being a cop, he’d treat me like a bitch. But he respects me as if I were his mother.’ Pepi, who was a virgin hoping to sell her virginity for 60,000 pesetas is infuriated because the rape has spoiled her plans. Meanwhile Luci becomes fast friends with the bandleader Bom, the sixteenyear-old lesbian who woos her with a beating and a golden shower.

‘Treat me like a bitch’: ‘Alaska’ and Eva Siva in Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap

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In this early stage of his feature-making career bodily fluids, excrement (in Labyrinth of Passion) and later semen (in Kika) are all clearly shown in Almodóvar’s movies. It was all part of Almodóvar’s aesthetics of bad taste, which responded directly to Spanish cinema’s newfound freedom of expression after the abolition of the strict censorship laws in place under Franco. Bom, the tough girl with the butch side talks dirty to Luci who sincerely appreciates it. The three women’s relationships are based on sexual power, ‘perversion’ and an apparent shared hatred of men. By comparison, Luci’s policeman husband is a devout misogynist with a ‘Franquista’ past with a particular distaste for ‘independent women’. Almodóvar presents us with a cast of characters who represent opposing political extremes: on the one hand, a caricature of Spain’s recent past under Franco and on the other hand, an exaggerated portrait of what ‘freedom’ and ‘so much democracy’ meant for his generation, whose members grew up traumatically repressed yet were to attain all sorts of personal and public freedoms. The transition itself seems traumatic for the characters in Pepi, Luci, Bom and his other films made between 1980 and 1986. Part of Almodóvar’s strategy is to take the ‘underground’ characters of his earlier career as a magazine illustrator and columnist (such as Bom’s world of musicians, southern immigrants and loud music) and transfer them from the margins to the centre, placing them ‘over ground’. The world of Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap emphasises the potentially traumatic transition from an authoritarian regime to democracy, and from marginality to centrality, while presenting us with one of Almodóvar’s most consistent themes and one that ultimately has emerged as the most recurring of his authorial arch: the reconstitution of ‘the family’. The characters of Pepi, Luci, Bom are organised as a type of underground microcosm where ‘paper-thin’ types of characters are offered as representations of a number of sectors of Madrid society, as they go about their business in-and-out of ‘marginality’. Thus for instance, the large complex of buildings where Pepi’s flat is found offers us ‘an inside look’ (as we see in the first scene when the rapist-policeman is spying into Luci’s apartment from the opposite side of the building) into assorted segments of the city and its people. For instance, across the central yard lives a married couple

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composed of a drunken, falsetto-voiced, mustachioed woman and her closet homosexual husband. Paradoxically, the woman constantly nags her husband for his drunkenness, his homophobia and for not having sex with her ‘for forty days and forty nights’, a clear reference to the Catholic period of Lent. But in a parallel sequence, some of the other neighbours already know the closeted man and refer to him as ‘an old queen with money’ (carroza) who customarily engages young men as prostitutes. There is a whole sexual underground contained within this compact neighbourhood and the parallel sequences, bridged by audible party music coming from the central yard, emphasise their similarities, despite appearances. The sequence thus maintains simultaneity of time and space underscoring the contrast of ‘in–out’ between the closeted, married man with bourgeois pretensions, and the ‘out’ male prostitute making a living on the margins of society. In spite of their ‘average’ lives, it is the married couple that come out looking like the ‘weird’ ones in the world of Pepi, Luci, Bom. The couple’s unbearable life and non-stop bickering are contrasted sharply with the party outside where Bom and Luci reach a relationship landmark: Bom extracts a booger from Luci’s nose and orders her to eat it, which she does submissively. As a pattern, submission, violence and the centralisation of formerly marginal characters and situations seem to mediate all relationships in Pepi, Luci, Bom. Allusions to Spain’s cultural ‘past’ however, constantly emphasise context, allowing the story to retain its Spanishness. In another vague and comical cultural reference Luci offers to introduce Pepi to a woman who specialises in restoring virginity by ‘stitching up’ torn hymens. Pepi, however, has decided to remain sexually active and graciously turns down the offer. As with the previous ‘fake’ cultural reference of the chulapo costumes, the restoration of virginity is also a Spanish cultural myth based on the play by Fernando de Rojas, La celestina, the story of the fifteenth-century ‘star-crossed’ lovers Calisto and Melibea and their ‘Celestine’, a woman whose speciality is the restoration of virginity in young ladies before marriage. The outrageous nature of the dramaticsituationsdoesnotfullyconcealAlmodóvar’sconcernswithSpanishpolitics,aswellaswiththeculturalandhistoricalcontextatthedawnofdemocracy. Almodóvar himself makes the first of many cameo appearances in his films in Pepi, Luci, Bom. At the height of the outrageous party at the centre of

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the movie, Almodóvar shows up, takes to the improvised stage on the patio as a sort of ‘MC’ to announce the forthcoming contest ‘general erections’.5 This parody of the political process in Spain’s young, fragile democracy in 1980 is significant in its punning combination of the democratic practice, the freedom of Madrid’s young underground counterculture (of which Almodóvar became an exemplary) and a celebration of sexuality itself. The analogy of elections and sexuality, both activities highly controlled and even ‘prohibited’ under Franco, was daring for Almodóvar to foreground and call attention to so early in the period of transition to democracy.6 In the movie, however, a gleeful Almodóvar, with long hair and a thick moustache, announces the contest’s premise: ‘he who has the biggest, most svelte, longest and most amazing cock will be declared king for the night’ and can do whatever he pleases ‘with whoever he wants’. The crowd of punk musicians, men and women prostitutes and other marginal figures cheers joyfully, and the contest gets under way.7

‘General erections’: Almodóvar names the king for the night

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This early ‘stage’ setting in Pepi, Luci, Bom introduces Almodóvar’s interest in performance in theatrical spaces and his eventually common practice of interrupting the narrative flow to introduce a moment of performance. For Almodóvar, the theatrical space is almost sacred, a place where paradoxically ‘real’ emotions can be glimpsed and where characters often confront real feelings, despite the false expectations suggested by the stage. From his first feature film, Almodóvar has put forward theatricality and performance themselves as significant moments of revelation for his characters, a practice seen in almost every film from Pepi to Volver. The paradox is the suggestion that in a ‘theatrical’ space (in High Heels, in All About My Mother, in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), on a television screen (in Women on the Verge, in High Heels) or through some kind of performative, pretended or technical reproduction (writing and forgery in What Have I Done to Deserve This!? and The Flower of My Secret) his characters are ‘more genuine’ than they are in their ‘real’-life contexts. In Pepi, Luci, Bom, the significance of the stage and the ‘general erections’ contest is that it is Almodóvar’s first example of a character expressing his or her own reality on stage: the contest winner announces that what he wants is (the demure housewife) Luci to perform fellatio on him. Although she has presumably never practised before, Luci performs superbly well, and is thus initiated into her new life of sexual explorations, ‘aberrations’ and submission to Bom’s desires. Also notable throughout the ‘general erections’ sequence is the poor quality of the film-making. As I suggested above, from the very first shot, Almodóvar’s first film seems to be purposely badly made: alternately overexposed and under-exposed shots are made with awkward and uncomfortable camera angles, hard shadows that suggest careless cinematography, poor sound quality and even an apparent lack of attention to mise en scène evidenced by clumsy compositions that do not show any of Almodóvar’s future visual sophistication. Much of that quality had to do with the film’s production history and context. Almodóvar produced the film by soliciting contributions from friends of the actor Félix Rotaeta and by shooting during evenings and weekends in the summers of 1979 and 1980, adhering mostly to a one-to-one shooting ratio, while improvising and adapting constantly to meet financial constraints.8

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Yet, in spite of its cheeky execution, the ‘general erections’ sequence in Pepi, Luci, Bom is significant in its revelation of Almodóvar’s ability to create allegory and political satire out of sexual situations, something that by his next film, Labyrinth of Passion, would become much more sophisticated, even artful. The sequence in Pepi, Luci, Bom is clumsily shot, but it already contains the seeds of Almodóvar’s most recurrent themes: that is the aesthetics of bad taste. In other words, there is something about this clunky sexual parody of the democratic process that is ‘pure Almodóvar’. The ‘erections’ lead to an amalgam of monarchy, dictatorship and democracy, to the designation of a ‘king’ with absolute (sexual) powers, arguably a thinly disguised allegory of Spain’s transition, or at the very least reflexive of the country’s political uncertainty and social instability at the time. The association, sometimes direct, sometimes allegorical, of sexuality, national politics, performance and self-reflexivity, an Almodóvar trademark by the late 1980s, is already in place in Pepi, Luci, Bom. After the ‘general erections’ sequence we find Pepi in front of a typewriter, self-reflexively, beginning to write ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom. . .’. Inexplicably, she announces her plan ‘to become a writer’. Significantly, in another self-reflexive jab, Pepi realises that she cannot type and the clumsy typing reminds us momentarily of Almodóvar’s own technical infelicities with Pepi, Luci, Bom. ‘It turned out badly’, Pepi announces to her friends, ‘but if I want to be a writer I’ll have to learn.’ Almodóvar’s aesthetics of bad taste would show, over the next twenty-four years, a visible process of learning, of mastering a craft while also refining his political, social and historical rhetoric. Cut off from her wealthy parents who suggest she do something ‘practical’ to earn a living, Pepi improbably finds work with an advertising agency that’s placed an advertisement for ‘imaginative girls’. At this point in the narrative, Almodóvar arbitrarily introduces a stylistic device that would also continue through the rest of his career: media intersections. In the middle of Pepi, Luci, Bom and without a visible transition of any sort, the film turns into a television advertisement for ‘Ponte’ brand panties. The name, which comes from one of Almodóvar’s Super-8 shorts (‘Las tres ventajas de Ponte’ 1977) is, of course, a pun since ‘Ponte Panties’ in Spanish simply means ‘wear panties’. Thus, the perfect, simple logic of the slogan: ‘Hagas lo

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que hagas, Ponte bragas’ means ‘Whatever you do, wear panties’. These new panties, according to the advertisement, are chemically treated to make farts smell like flowers, can be used as a sexual ‘consolatory’ device ‘because of their consistency’, and are self-cleaning in case of urinary ‘accidents’. At the end of the forty-second spot, which is shown in its entirety, we learn through a transition from the television screen to Pepi’s new office that this is Pepi’s first achievement as an advertising creative executive, as she proudly shows it to her friends, Bom and Luci. As a media intersection, the advertisement in this movie is used for comic purpose and as a media parody, but it also suggests a certain deliberate ‘quality’ to Almodóvar’s early aesthetic of bad taste. The advertisement, in which a woman’s voice-over informs us of the product’s versatility, is photographed, edited and produced with significantly superior production values to the movie in which it appears. The soft focus ‘glamour’ shots, ‘elegant’ mood lighting, proper cinematography, smooth camera movements and invisible editing make the commercial suspiciously and deliberately call attention to the now apparent poor quality of the picture-making in the main narrative.9 The media intersections in Almodóvar’s career, as we will see several times in the course of this book, have various, shifting purposes, but the ‘Ponte Panties’ commercials seem to be a self-reflexive device. They call attention to Pepi’s new creative career (after we see her struggling with the writing) and make a fitting point about Almodóvar’s own aesthetics: he is perfectly capable of delivering a technically proficient product, but at this stage in his career, it seems more appropriate not to do so. It makes sense of course in its own context: as a celebrated member of Madrid’s artistic underground in the 1970s, of La luna magazine in the 1980s and alternative theatre troupes that, having turned Pepi, Luci, Bom into a midnight-show success, Almodóvar acknowledges his marginal artistic roots while showing evidence of his more ‘conventional’ talents. At the end of the ‘Ponte Panties’ commercials, Pepi, like Almodóvar, celebrates her own talents and offers all to ‘the public, the public’ as Luci and Bom praise the ads for being ‘so gorgeous’. Almodóvar’s use of media intersections such as made-up television commercials or television shows, musical spots, newscasts and later real and invented films (Bergman’s Autumn Sonata in High Heels, and The

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Shrinking Lover in Talk to Her) is always self-reflexive but often presents a further degree of social and political satire. The practice, as perfected in Almodóvar’s films of the next two decades (High Heels, Kika, Talk to Her), clearly grows out of this sequence in Pepi, Luci, Bom. The next improbable plot twist in the movie narrates how Pepi’s sudden success in advertising and other business ventures (she has designed a doll that menstruates) allows her to finance a tour of Bom’s renegade rock band, ‘Bomitoni’. Luci declares herself Bom’s groupie and abandons her husband finally to go off with her new, abusive, under-age lesbian lover. Luci’s husband makes legal attempts to have her returned to him, but in this ‘new’ Spain (after the 1978 constitution, divorce was only legalised in 1981) to his surprise, he holds no possession rights over his wife. In fact, until Franco’s death in 1975, men had the legal right to control their wives’ affairs and assets, but those times were over when ‘marital rights’ were abolished. The affront leaves him ‘thirsting for revenge’, as we are advised with the return of the familiar cartoon intertitle accompanied again by a few bars from Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Capriccio Español’. In order to deflect the humiliation of his wife’s newfound sexual freedom, the policeman soon commits his second rape attempt. As I have already stated, rape in Almodóvar’s narrative world is always treated as both literal and symbolic. The second rape attempt occurs as a result of the ‘mistaken identity’ scenario that the movie pursues. One of Luci’s neighbours, Charito, is a typical ‘spinster’ in love with the policeman’s twin brother. In an improbable and yet repeatedly seen soap-opera plot twist, the policeman, pretending to be the good twin, perpetrates the rape attempt. Almodóvar stages the shot’s mise en scène to include a mirror and, in an extreme low angle that reflects part of the shot itself, creates a doppelgänger effect. Almodóvar would use these types of visual games of deception, identity and mirror images repeatedly in his films, as we will see later in Matador, High Heels and The Flower of My Secret. The low angle clearly dramatises the power relationship between the victim and the sexual predator, between the misogynist, Fascist, pro-Franco representative of law and order and the naive, powerless woman. This second rape also indicates that sexual assault is the only type of sexual activity that the policeman desires

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(having raped Pepi in the first sequence of the movie). Amid her resistance, her crying and screaming and sincere attempts to fight him off, he ejaculates between her thighs, but apparently does not succeed in penetrating her vaginally. The significance of the failed rape and penetration, events that recur in Almodóvar’s Matador and Live Flesh respectively, is its suggestion of violence as a failed measure of control. In Matador, discussed in Chapter 2, the rapist played by Antonio Banderas is traumatised by the sight of blood and quickly faints after the unsuccessful violation (he too fails to penetrate the woman vaginally before ejaculating). In both movies, as well as in Kika, What Have I Done to Deserve This!? and Labyrinth of Passion, the analogy between rape and the brutal violence of past social and political relations in Spain under Franco is made clear. Sexual and political violence become symptomatic of the trauma of social relations, especially when we see patriarchal ‘authority’ figures, either real or imagined, imposing themselves on the women around them as if they were helpless victims. In case after case of rape in Almodóvar’s movies, and the presence of rape or sexual assault as a narrative tool is constant from Pepi to Volver, the analogy drawn between sexual assailant and ‘authority’ figure is almost transparent. But it’s also important to notice that, even as early in Almodóvar’s career as Pepi, Luci, Bom the rapist often fails to ‘perform’ or succeed in his designs, being himself humiliated in the process. In other words, Almodóvar often turns attempted rape into its own weapon of revenge and humiliation against the perpetrators. Paradoxically, Bom and Luci’s relationship is based on a different yet also disturbing dependence on violence. Bom is verbally abusive and Luci responds usually with pleasure because she is supposedly a masochist. At a concert by Bom’s band (which Pepi now finances), Bom sings to her new sexual slave with lyrics that are equally hysterical and harrowing. Again ‘disguised’ as a Spaniard (wearing a peineta and waving a hand fan), Bom sings to her woman of Murcia: I love you for being dirty, a slut, a whore, and you adulate me, the most obscene woman in Murcia, and entirely at my command . . . I only think of you, Murciana, because you are a sow. I stick my finger in your crack, I give you a

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pair of blows, I force you to jerk me off, I’m more violent than a bully . . . I fit you like a ring to your finger, with me you have orgasms, if I blow a fart in your mouth, you cheer me with enthusiasm. You belong to me Murciana, because I say so. It is evident that the relationship between Luci and Bom is not better than the one Luci had with her abusive husband; however the transgression of the social and moral codes of Spain’s recent past signified by a lesbian relationship (with a minor!) seems to be what is more important here. Popular songs, whether original, adapted or adopted from other artists are always important in Almodóvar’s narrative style. Like the stage and other instances of performance, songs often take on the signifying responsibility of allowing us to glimpse into a character’s fears, desires, state of mind and motives. And, like almost every other stylistic device in Almodóvar’s repertoire, they have evolved from the crude, offensive tone and content of Bom’s song ‘Murciana’ and Fanny McNamara’s songs in Labyrinth of Passion, to the elegant torch songs and boleros of Trío Los Panchos in The Law of Desire and Agustín Lara in High Heels. The narrative content in Pepi, Luci, Bom becomes increasingly selfreflexive as the movie develops. After her earlier attempts to write something called ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’, we find Pepi and her friends going over what looks like a screenplay and reviewing its content, which not surprisingly mimics that of the movie. They are writing the ‘general erections’ scene, and Pepi makes some corrections to the script to match the written version to the content of the movie itself. Later at Bom’s apartment, where her band Bomitoni rehearses, Pepi arrives with the cameras from her advertising agency to begin ‘videotaping our lives’. The pretext is to make a music video of the band. The musicians, their groupies and friends have prepared the apartment for dramatic effect including a woman dressed as a flamenco dancer but meant to be a ‘postmodern’, camp interpretation of the kitsch motif.10 Under noticeably poor technical conditions, bad lighting and an audible reverb in the sound take, Pepi begins filming ‘their lives’ in a direct reference to the movie itself. Pepi’s directions to her friends are also very telling, and prophetically Almodóvarian: ‘You have to act to be yourselves . . .

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Reality looks artificial.’ The theme of performance, reality and artificiality so directly and self-reflexively treated in Pepi, Luci, Bom would re-emerge in Almodóvar’s films so consistently that it was to become one of his thematic trademarks, reaching its peak in High Heels and All About My Mother. Pepi and her friends seem to be deliberately deconstructing the fiction on its own basis: calling attention to its production and particularly to the poor technical quality of lighting, composition, mise en scène and sound recording. Later in the movie the policeman finds his wife Luci and her friends Pepi and ‘other ordinary girls’ at a Madrid disco that recreates the city’s energetic, irreverent 1970s’ underground youth culture, the famous ‘movida’ In Pepi, Luci, Bom Almodóvar makes references to the movie’s own poor production values

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that Almodóvar and his group helped define in the transitional period. The sequence dramatises and literalises the culture and generation clash between Almodóvar’s ‘movida’ and the retrograde remains of the regime who regret the abolition of state repression. With the disco setting, Almodóvar creates an inclusive portrait of Spain’s younger generation, the children of Franco who will be the first ‘free’ society in two generations. Along with Pepi and her friends, the scene includes a Malagueñan singer (defensively trying not to be mistaken for a whore), an actress incongruously dressed like Scarlet O’Hara, as well as the assorted chulapos, faux flamenco dancers, and other Spanish regional characters who have descended upon Madrid in the last decade. The gathering is symbolic of Madrid’s ‘movida’, of its inclusive and tolerant acceptance of all kinds of ‘eccentricities’ (homosexuality, prostitution, transvestism) that Francoist mentality prohibited or repressed. Everybody is coming to Madrid and Pepi, Luci, Bom shows us the construction of an alternative cultural set-up that pursues tolerance and personal expression almost aggressively as a sign of rebellion. The disco setting serves as a kind of Spanish glasnost; in this transitional period the movie refers directly to Spain’s first period of cultural openness since before the Civil War (1936–9). Between Bomitoni’s punk, the Malagueñan’s ‘flamenco-rock’ and Pepi’s own flamenco and chulapo disguises, finally something from outside penetrates the hermetic cultural shell in which Spain was sealed for forty years under Franco. When the policeman arrives looking for Luci they soon get into a violent fight. Of course, he’s a sadist, she’s a masochist so the altercation evolves into a seduction peppered with beating and insults. Luci calls her husband a “Communist” which is probably as big an insult as a Fascist can ever hear. The rape and beating becomes reconciliation for the sadomasochistic couple, as Luci agrees that she enjoys the physical abuse. As disturbing as the content of the scene might be it is essential in understanding Almodóvar’s constant use of physical and sexual abuse as a metaphoric representation of Spain’s relationship to Franco’s regime. That discourse of representation shifts in content as Almodóvar’s career evolves, but in this early stage it is significant in several ways. First, it presents the Franco/Spain relationship as a type of sadomasochistic arrangement and second, it suggests the possi-

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bility that Spain’s transition into democracy and away from the Fascists’ violent, authoritative ways is not complete, that the country might still be in danger of a return to a reactionary state. After that moment the bond between Pepi, Luci and Bom (although also based on physical violence) is dissolved for good, and the rest of the movie centres on Pepi and Bom’s newfound friendship without Luci who has returned willingly to her ‘reactionary’ past. After they separate from Luci, back at Pepi’s apartment, Pepi and Bom share a rare domestic moment that diverts significantly from their characters so far: they cook together and the scene has a maternal and seductive charm. While cooking a traditional Madrid ‘bacalao al pil pil’ (a codfish stew) the two women discuss ‘the end’ of the screenplay version of the stories Pepi has been writing. The ‘end’ that Pepi describes in the context of preparing a traditional Spanish meal is, in retrospect, pure Almodóvar: Bom and Luci get married ‘both in white . . .’ says Pepi, ‘I have a baby by the cop [a rape child] but I give the baby to you two, because you have formed a family.’ When Pepi and Bom finally find Luci she is in a hospital brutally beaten almost to death but reconciled with her husband. Luci refuses her medicines because she prefers to be in pain. In the hospital setting, Luci finally breaks up with Bom ‘for not beating [her] enough’. At the end of the movie, after leaving Luci in the hospital reconciled with her rapist, abusive husband, Pepi and Bom walk away assessing their adventures and promising to stay together. They console each other, and the two are optimistic about the ‘new life’ opening in front of them. ‘Imagine that’ says Pepi as the last words spoken in the movie, ‘a new life.’ The themes of this movie would become recurrent, insistent even, in Almodóvar’s career. In its own crude way Pepi, Luci, Bom introduces and begins to elaborate Almodóvar’s constant thematic motifs and narrative tools: identity, rape, violence, sadomasochistic relationships, the confusion of fiction with reality and the hope and desire to reconstitute or rebuild a ‘family’. Ultimately all the relationships in the movie are mediated by physical and sexual violence. But the hope of recovery is what remains, the promise of something new, of possibility; the characters might overcome the traumas of the past and re-invent and rebuild social relations. It is also

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significant that Almodóvar’s first ‘Francoist’ figure of the many that appear in different guises throughout his entire oeuvre sees himself humiliated and neglected by laws he would expect to be on his side.11 In Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, Almodóvar clearly emphasises the shifting nature of that which is legal or illegal and of what constitutes a viable ‘family’, making analogies and raising questions about what is ‘marginal’ and central in this new Spanish society that can barely keep up with the speed of its own social and political changes, ‘with so much democracy’.

Labyrinth of Passion (1982) In Almodóvar’s second feature film, Laberinto de pasiones, the director continues his comical treatment of violent relationships as allegorical to Spanish society under Franco and the process of political, cultural and social transition into openness and democracy. In this film also, the reconstruction of family relationships and the reconstitution of the family itself becomes a central concern. It is already clear however, that Almodóvar’s style has gone through a visible evolution. Labyrinth of Passion is technically more proficient; the ‘underground’, midnight-show aesthetics of Pepi, Luci, Bom are here replaced by better picture and sound, sharper cinematography and by the presence of professional actors, namely Imanol Arias and Cecilia Roth in the leading roles of Riza and Sexi respectively. The plot concerns the unbelievable adventures of Riza Niro, the exiled son of the emperor of the fictional country of ‘Tirán’, who has chosen Madrid, ‘the most fun city in the world’ for his home. But the movie is ultimately a chronicle of Madrid’s ‘movida’, the self-proclaimed punk avant-garde of the period of transition to democracy. As such, it is also a celebration of everything that was repressed and forbidden under Franco’s regime and a rebellious romp proper to Almodóvar’s generation. Riza is an active cruising homosexual in constant pursuit of casual sexual encounters. His life eventually becomes entangled with Sexilia, a nymphomaniac since childhood whose problem, announces her unorthodox therapist Susana (Ofelia Angélica), is ‘[her] father’s fault’. Thus in Labyrinth of Passion, Almodóvar plots his narrative directly around his characters’ sexual problems as the anchor of deep identity crises. According to her therapist,

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Sexi’s problem is that she is ‘in love with her father’ making the protagonist’s Oedipal/Electra complex quite literal. It is also telling that Susana, the therapist, describes herself as a ‘Lacanian’ analyst. This reference provides a key to the film’s interpretation while, at the same time, offering a preemptive, defensive deconstruction of its meaning: a caricature of psychoanalysis.12 To further complicate the pleasure of the text, it also turns out that Sexi’s father, Dr De la Peña (Fernando Vivanco), is a renowned biogynaecologist, Spain’s ‘father of artificial insemination’. One of Dr De la Peña’s current clients is Riza’s stepmother, Toraya, the infertile princessempress of Tirán (played by Helga Liné), who is trying to artificially conceive Tirán’s new heir to the throne. The significance of all this is that Almodóvar deliberately constructs an over-complicated, caricaturesque plot that revolves entirely around the unresolved sexual, psychological and Oedipal ‘problems’ of parents and their children. The sterile princess and the fertility doctor: ‘children don’t bring happiness’

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Labyrinth of Passion is then Almodóvar’s first feature to deal specifically with parent–children relationships, a theme that resurfaces directly or indirectly in all of his films. It is also very significant that in this film Almodóvar incorporates as well a very complicated flashback scenario that goes back fifteen years in the protagonists’ lives, to the summer of 1967, setting the origin of the characters’ traumas in the period before Franco’s decline in power (the ‘dictablanda’ or soft-dictatorship of the mid-1970s). When the empress visits Dr De la Peña, it is revealed that the physician and the emperor had met years before while vacationing in the Costa del Sol, when the emperor was devising plans of ‘fathering half the population’ of his country of Tirán. A patriarchal authority figure, the emperor is offered as a potential Franco stand-in, a ‘father of the nation’ with Fascist ideals about power and genetics. Parenting is at the centre of Almodóvar’s ‘labyrinth of passion’ with desires, fears and traumas, all revolving around parental ties. By contrast, Dr De la Peña finds sexual intercourse to be ‘repulsive’ and that, he explains, is why he has dedicated his career to artificial insemination. Sexi’s psychologist, Susana, believes that Dr De la Peña needs to have sex to be cured of his aversion and she does not hide her desires to be the one to provide the treatment. At Dr De la Peña’s office, for instance, the empress also meets a successful in vitro mother who has come to hate her miracle child. In front of her child, the mother regrets having had the procedure and refers to her daughter as ‘a monster’. ‘I’m fed up to my cunt with her,’ the woman complains, concluding: ‘children don’t bring happiness’. Sexi and her father, it turns out, also have a clearly incestuous connection that demands resolution and which ultimately anchors the narrative. While Sexi’s and her father’s desires remain platonic, even unacknowledged, Almodóvar introduces two parallel characters, a dry-cleaner and his daughter who are involved in an abusive incestuous relationship. The drycleaner (Luis Ciges) takes some aphrodisiac concoction and customarily ties his daughter up and rapes her, pretending that she is his estranged wife. Although the relationship clearly traumatises the young woman, Quety (Marta Fernández-Muro), who is in her twenties, she plays along as if the matter was inevitable. To no avail Quety puts a sexual inhibitor in her

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father’s tea, who scolds her ‘not to call [him] dad’, accuses her of schizophrenia and claims to love her the same whether she calls herself his daughter or his wife. From the opening sequence, which shows us the identical desires of the two protagonists in similar eye-line shots of men’s crotches in Madrid’s celebrated Sunday flea market ‘el Rastro’, the movie treats Madrid’s sexuality as either something open, fun and careless, ‘indifferent’, as Paul Julian Smith characterises it, as if Franco or Catholicism had never existed, or as something deeply disturbing.13 Both Riza and Sexi alternate between solving their incestuous traumas and cruising the city’s streets in search of casual sexual encounters. While cruising one afternoon Riza picks up and has sexual relations with a medical student named Sadec (played by Antonio Banderas) who has an abnormally developed sense of smell and who is also an exile from Tirán. Afraid that his cover and assumed identity will be compromised, Riza rushes out without revealing any personal information to the casual lover. But Sadec’s roommates, also from Tirán, are actually terrorists planning to kidnap Riza (who they know is in Madrid) to make the emperor pay ‘for all he’s done to our people’. Almodóvar once more proposes some identity misperception, both a crisis and a denial of identity that ties up the plot of sexual trauma, incest and the abuse of patriarchal authority. Almodóvar makes his second acting appearance in Labyrinth of Passion. Here, as in Pepi and later in Matador, Almodóvar’s presence is doubly selfreflexive: he plays a photographer and director of a sadistic, pornographic type of photonovella.14 In the scene, Riza goes to visit his friend and casual lover Fabio (the movida professional celebrity and performer ‘Fanny’ McNamara whose real name is Fabio de Miguel) who is in the middle of a shoot. Riza wants Fabio to give him a make-over in order to fool the Tiránian terrorists, his pursuers. In the scene, directed by Almodóvar-asAlmodóvar (McNamara calls him ‘Pedro’ at some point) Fabio, which is McNamara’s real name, is being punctured with an electric drill while screaming with pleasure, making sexually suggestive movements and speaking with someone on a telephone. ‘Pedro’, as director, commands the actors and mise en scène while another man operates the still camera. Here Almodóvar references his own career with McNamara as a performer and

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Agustín Almodóvar (Pedro’s brother and business partner), left, and Antonio Banderas, centre, in Labyrinth of Passion

songwriter in the duo ‘Almodóvar and McNamara’. Ultimately, he also references his contribution in the 1980s to the popular culture magazine La luna (modelled on Warhol’s Interview) where, under the pseudonym ‘Patty Diphusa’ (Spanish for ‘flabbergasted’), he published a column about the fictional adventures of the homonymous pornographic ‘photonovella’ star.15 It is also evident that McNamara’s character is ‘Patty Diphusa’ herself. Eventually Almodóvar’s ‘cameo’ appearances in his movies become more Hitchcockian, less narcissistic, disappearing altogether by the time of The Law of Desire, although his brother and business partner Agustín continues to appear as a bit player in all their movies. But in these early movies and until Matador, Almodóvar’s physical presence was rarely disguised and was a playful self-reflexive stylistic feature. In the films of his middle period, covered in more detail in my discussion of The Law of Desire, his

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‘appearances’ are only theoretical: he is present in ways that emphasise his authorial presence, but he no longer appears physically in his movies. Almodóvar’s next appearance in Labyrinth of Passion occurs in the next sequence when Sexi and her punkrock band, Las Ex (a sly reference to Pepi, Luci, Bom) are playing in a club. Almodóvar arrives with Fabio and Riza, all in drag, and Pedro gets on stage to introduce the next act, the band, Them (Ellos). In a recreation of their musical times in the midst of ‘la movida’, Almodóvar and McNamara perform one of their songs, ‘Suck It to Me’. Meanwhile, due to an improbable accident backstage, Riza is recruited by Them to replace their lead singer, Eusebio, on stage. Their song, ‘Gran Ganga’ is a big hit with the nightclub crowd and Sexi enjoys the performance. But she is disturbed suddenly by the direct hit of a stage light on her face. The shot of the light gives it a sun-like appearance, which triggers a childhood flashback in Sexi’s mind. Suddenly Sexi sees herself as a young girl, maybe ten years old, on a sunny beach, walking on the sand. A shot of the sun at the beach establishes the connection with the stage light trigger. The shot cuts back to Sexi in the club, visibly stunned by the memory or vision. Significantly, the song on stage, sung by Riza throughout the sequence, underscores the ‘identity’ problem of the protagonists. The lyrics directly address identity issues, as the song goes ‘Who am I and where am I going . . . Where do I come from and what are my plans . . .?’. Once the memory-triggering song emphasises the connection between Sexi and Riza, they finally meet in person and take an immediate liking to each other. After the show, while they are both in the process of finding sexual partners for the night, they meet backstage and exchange glances full of curiosity and desire, almost as if they know each other. But they go home with other people that night: Sexi, the nymphomaniac, picks up two men and Riza who is gay, picks up another man from the band. Later in bed with her two casual lovers Sexi hums the tune ‘Gran Ganga’, a clear suggestion that she cannot get Riza out of her mind. She excuses herself to the men, saying that she’s simply not in the mood for sex. In parallel shots, Almodóvar cuts to Riza in bed with his pick-up for the night. Riza is equally disinterested, visibly bored while the young man performs fellatio: he too has other things on his mind, namely Sexi. Until then, both Sexi and

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Riza have been sexually predatory but they are suddenly subdued in their desires by the thought of each other. Unsettled, Sexi pays Riza a visit and they confess they’ve been thinking about each other since they first met. They soon get in bed together, but uncharacteristically, they lie in bed like friends, like cousins, maybe even like children, in a completely asexual manner. Riza acts as host, serving them tea while they childishly fantasise about ‘getting away’ together, playing ‘house’ so to speak. Riza tells Sexi of his plans to leave Madrid and go into permanent exile on the island of Contadora, off the coast of Panama.16 But Sexi expresses her dislike for the beach (as we know she seems to be traumatised by a childhood memory involving a sunny beach). ‘Why can’t we go somewhere else?’ Sexi asks Riza and he takes the opportunity to confess to her the secret of his identity. They immediately plan to run off together ‘anywhere’: Sexi is bored with her ‘nymphomaniac’ ways and Riza is tired of constantly living in hiding. Madrid, ‘the most fun city in the world’ may just not be ‘fun’ enough for the two of them.17 What Sexi and Riza do not know, but what is becoming clear to the spectator is that their connection is deeper and closer than even they realise: their sexual ‘traumas’ are related. Paradoxically, in spite of Sexi’s and Riza’s ‘traumas’, Sexi takes on the therapist’s role when she encounters Quety, the rape victim daughter of the dry-cleaner, wearing her clothes on the street. Quety had been ‘borrowing’ Sexi’s clothes every time she took them to the laundry. Instead of anger, Sexi shows great interest in Quety, who quickly confesses that she is being sexually abused. Taking on the therapist’s role (even though Sexi herself has resisted her Lacanian therapist’s diagnosis and treatment), Sexi offers Quety some advice: ‘Maybe you like it,’ Sexi suggests. ‘No,’ replies Quety, quite resolute, ‘but one gets used to anything’. In the context of Labyrinth of Passion, Quety’s reply invites an analogy with Spain under Franco. Since Almodóvar continually proposes elaborate analogies between children and parents, rape and other sexual crimes, and identity issues as essential to the structure of this film it is thus fair to suggest that Quety’s plight is equally meaningful. Like the Spanish people in the nearly forty years of ‘abuse’ under Franco, the paternal and patriarchal figure self-declared ‘Caudillo of Spain by the Grace of God’, Quety ‘gets used to anything’. It is as if

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Almodóvar is calling attention to the inertia of Spanish politics, the failure to change anything in nearly forty years of dictatorship, while emphasising the analogy of a mentally unstable, patriarchal figure who is literally ‘screwing’ his children. Sexi and Quety bond instantly. Their relationship is especially interesting because their problems are potential flipsides to the incest coin; according to Susana, her therapist, Sexi’s problem lies in her unconscious sexual desires for her father, Dr De la Peña. Meanwhile, Quety’s problem presents a real abusive, incestuous relationship. Quety becomes in some ways a projection of Sexi’s desires: she is not only a devoted fan of Sexi’s punk band, but also wears Sexi’s clothes, has a naive desire to become a rock star and has real sexual desires for Sexi’s father, Dr De la Peña. It becomes quickly apparent that Quety offers a way for Sexi to safely channel her incestuous desires. Meanwhile when Them get a recording deal with Riza as lead vocalist, his picture ends up on the cover of the sensationalist/fan magazine, Diez minutos. When Sadec sees the picture, he quickly identifies Riza as both his lost object of desire and the man his Tiránian friends intend to kidnap. The narrative of sexual trauma in Labyrinth of Passion then turns into a plot of personal and sexual identity. While the Tiránian terrorists are hunting Riza with the aid of Sadec’s over-developed sense of smell, Sexi is helping Quety to escape her life of sexual abuse and incest by arranging for her to change her identity and her appearance surgically. And as their lives get more and more entangled the two former sexual predators, Sexi and Riza, changed by real love (which presumably they have never known before), maintain a completely chaste relationship. The confusion between sex and love, lust and affection, is a theme that Almodóvar explores and develops in his later films. For now, Riza finally brings up the topic: ‘We’ve talked about love, but we haven’t talked about sex.’ Misunderstanding him, Sexi protests: ‘Can’t you wait a few days without screwing? It’s the first time that I’ve been with a guy without fucking or getting stoned and I feel great.’ To her surprise Riza even suggests that they return to Tirán where he can inherit the throne with Sexi by his side. Riza’s stepmother, the empress, has other plans. Dressed androgynously, in a man’s suit and hat, the empress Toraya cruises

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Madrid’s gay neighbourhoods and prostitute corners around Chueca and Casa de Campo searching for Riza. Toraya finally catches up with Riza in his hotel room. In a strangely maternal way Toraya seduces Riza in her attempt to get pregnant by the heir to the throne, so her child will be next in line for succession. When Sexi realises that Toraya and Riza have had intercourse, Riza’s first time ever with a woman, she is devastated. In the ensuing confrontation, Toraya blinds Sexi by reflecting light on her compact mirror case, creating a similar effect to the stage light that triggered Sexi’s traumatic childhood memory. Sexi again goes into a sort of trance, between the light and the shock of the sexual revelation about Riza and Toraya. Sexi runs away angry and frustrated, screaming and yelling that she will never fall in love again. But, interestingly, Sexi runs to Susana’s home, her therapist, muttering something incoherent about the ‘Spanish sun’. In Susana’s office, with the help of natural sunlight, Sexi has a psychological regression that reveals the origin and nature of her trauma. We see her as a child of ten or so, on the Costa del Sol vacation, where she meets the young Riza. Threatened by her husband’s rejection, Toraya takes Riza away from Sexi and attempts to seduce him behind a nearby bush. Traumatised by Riza’s rejection, Sexi seeks her father’s attention but he is too busy to pay attention to her (he is talking to the emperor about his plans to populate the nation). Sexi tries to follow and get his attention but as Dr De la Peña walks away she falls down, looks up and is then momentarily blinded by the sun, ‘this Spanish sun’. As a result of the boyfriend’s and the father’s rejection, a patriarchal figure and an object of desire, Sexi offers herself sexually to all the other boys on the beach, thus revealing the source of her incestuous desires, her self-described nymphomania and her phobia of the Spanish sun. Sexi’s problem is then literally a failure to resolve her Oedipal crisis, as she is unable to transfer her desire from father to lover. But the stepmother’s seduction is also traumatic for Riza; following his technically incestuous sexual initiation, Riza observes Sexi on the beach, taking off her swimsuit for all the other boys and ‘becomes’ a homosexual, walking away holding hands with another boy. Although Almodóvar’s pedestrian psychology is transparent and not very rigorously represented, it is effective in

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expanding on the analogy of national identity, sexuality and trauma already proposed in Pepi, Luci, Bom. In fact the sexual-identity-as-trauma scenario continues as Sexi and Quety effectively exchange identities when Quety returns from her retreat physically transformed into Sexi, due to the magic of plastic surgery. Quety is pleased to assume the ‘daughter’ role with Dr De la Peña and, after seducing him, in Sexi guise, he is quickly cured of his aversion and disgust for sexual intercourse. This technical rather than real instance of incest is what resolves the major conflicts of the movie, curing Sexi, Riza, Quety and Dr De la Peña of all their sexual ‘problems’. Finally it seems that Sexi and Riza are ready to resume their romance and build a family. At the film’s incredible climax, Sexi and Riza narrowly escape their Tiránian pursuers in a mad chase that begins with the building porter soiling herself while they run from her, a gratuitous gag that gets some cheap laughs. The shot of the porter’s legs smeared with her own excrement is comparable to the ‘Ponte Panties’ commercials in Pepi, Luci, Bom. While it is inconsequential to the narrative, it shows Almodóvar’s early taste for shock value, for exploiting his own aesthetics of bad taste with a moment that, while admittedly funny, is really only stalling the narrative. The scene is added, arguably, for suspense: a moment before the Tiránians arrive at the recording studio looking for Riza (triggering the climactic chase), we learn that the porter has taken a strong laxative, leading to the punchline mentioned above. But ultimately Sexi and Riza arrive at Madrid’s international airport at Barajas, where they escape to Contadora taking with them Riza’s band, Them, as an adopted family. The end of the film is furiously incestuous showing Quety (as Sexi) in bed with her supposed father, Dr De la Peña. Quety/Sexi is on the phone to Susana, her psychotherapist, who is happy to confirm her earlier diagnosis. ‘You were right,’ says Quety/Sexi, ‘I am in love with [my father] . . . There are no more sexual problems in this family.’ Meanwhile the real Sexi flies away on an aeroplane with Riza towards the tropical paradise of Contadora, taking the band Them with them. The final shot shows the plane taking off while Sexi and Riza’s moans and grunts of pleasure are heard on the soundtrack, as they finally consummate their relationship mid-flight.

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Almodóvar’s daring approach to sexual/national/identity trauma in Labyrinth of Passion presents us with a playful and yet politically savvy way of elaborating on the themes so crudely treated in his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom. Almodóvar incorporates into the plot sexually and politically repressive parental-maternal figures through the characters of the emperor, his ex-wife Toraya, the good Dr De la Peña and the laundry owner. He treats their offspring, Almodóvar’s own generation, as being desperately in need of ‘treatment’, therapy or change. And he continues to develop his interest in handling Spain’s repressive past under Franco and Catholicism as an amalgam of deeply ingrained yet treatable mental and sexual ailments. The cure for all in Labyrinth of Passion, as in Pepi, Luci, Bom seems to be to confront identity and sexuality and to adapt to immediate, contemporary needs. Once his characters, Pepi and Bom, Riza, Sexi, Quety, Dr De la Peña and the others realise that there is the possibility of moving forward (in Pepi, Luci, Bom) or away (in Labyrinth of Passion) there are ‘no more problems in this family’ indeed.

Dark Habits (1983) Stylistically more sophisticated and equally eloquent about Spain’s awkward transition to sexual freedoms and democratic rule (now with the liberal socialist PSOE in power)18 is Almodóvar’s third feature: Entre tinieblas, or ‘In the dark’. The film tells the story of an unusual Catholic convent whose nuns and novices, in order to be accepted into the congregation of the ‘Redentoras humilladas’ or ‘Humiliated Redeemers’ must have a sordid past from which to escape and repent. Thus former prostitutes, drug dealers, addicts and even a murderess populate the convent. The convent setting provides an easy, predictable way for Almodóvar to directly address and caricaturise his experience with the Catholic Church (in a way that foreshadows the smarter and more elegant Bad Education) and the protection granted it by Franco’s regime. Paradoxically, while Dark Habits emerges as flat and preachy in narrative compared to Almodóvar’s two previous features, it is also the most visually ambitious of the three films. Perhaps the brightest contribution of Dark Habits to Almodóvar’s career in this first cycle is the visible combination of generic form and content. In Dark Habits Almodóvar

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begins in earnest his experimentation with mixing genre conventions by testing the elasticity of both comedy and melodrama. As Mark Allinson reminds us, comedy is by definition an elastic genre, a genre of ‘formal diversity’ in which ‘satire, irony . . . parody, the absurd, and even slapstick’ commonly coexist.19 Yet, as in Douglas Sirk’s best Hollywood movies of the 1950s (Magnificent Obsession, 1954, All That Heaven Allows, 1955 and Written on the Wind, 1956), which Almodóvar often quotes, the camp visual codes of melodrama sometimes make timing the clearest difference between tearjerkers and comedy. The movie opens to an image of Madrid’s frantic skyline at dusk, an elaborate time-lapse shot of cars speeding under fading daylight, accompanied by a surprisingly under-stated piano score. The next shot shows a distressed-looking woman walking down a lively street in Chueca. The shot turns into what may be Almodóvar’s most technically ambitious camera setup to date: the camera on a crane tilts down to focus on the woman in the street and follows her through a doorway into an apartment building and halfway up a flight of stairs. The mobility of the camera and the varying lighting set-ups are reminiscent of some of Michael Chapman’s camera work in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). In contrast to the drab set-ups and the messy photographic work in Pepi, Luci, Bom, cinematographer Ángel L. Fernández has evidently evolved technically as much as Almodóvar has stylistically. There is also a very clear sense of the director’s relationship to this city, as the sequence of three shots that opens the movie connects space and character directly.20 The mysterious woman, Yolanda (Cristina S. Pascual), a torch-song singer in a decadent Chueca nightclub, eventually leads us to the convent when, after her boyfriend dies of a heroin overdose, she seeks the protection of the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano), a devoted fan of Yolanda. Back at the convent we are introduced to the recently widowed ‘Marquise’ (Mari Carrillo) who expresses her pleasure at her husband’s death while withdrawing the generous financial support he gave to the Sisters. The contrast is very telling as in Dark Habits Almodóvar places his principal characters in a moral quagmire between devotion, religion and the pleasures of the lay world, very much suggesting Spain’s own situation in the transition to democracy and moral freedom. The Marquise’s argument

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with the Mother Superior, Sister Julia, about her late husband’s virtues evolves into a discussion of opposing views about Franco and his relationship to the Church and the nation respectively. Sister Julia defends the late Marquis as ‘a good servant of God’. But the Marquise replies: ‘As a husband and a father he was a monster . . . he was a Fascist . . . since he died I feel freed, like my life is mine.’ The Franco reference from the repressed Marquise is very direct since Spain is one of the few places in the world where the noun ‘Fascist’ has a literal and historically specific meaning. The references to Spain’s transition do not end there. As the Marquise announces that she will cut off the convent’s annuity, she names ‘the economic crisis’ as another reason for her decision. Almodóvar thus puts in context the difficulty of Spain’s transition to an open-market economy, the end of Fascism and religious repression, which until very recently was exercised and sanctioned by Franco’s government. Early in Dark Habits Almodóvar names the contradictions of the Catholic Church and Spain’s cultural transition towards a more secularised society as the immediate context for understanding the film’s meaning. As Gwynne Edwards points out, religious-themed films featuring priests and nuns were common under Franco as a form of political-religious propaganda, often making allegorical claims about the stability of the Church and State.21 Yet significantly, in recent years it is estimated that less than twenty per cent of Spanish citizens attend church regularly although most still call themselves Catholic. The Marquise, echoing the feelings of many Spanish Catholics, announces that she has attended Mass so many times in her life that God and the Mother Superior should forgive her if she never goes to church again. Later, while the sisters attend Mass and the celebrant priest (Manuel Zarzo) smokes a cigarette during Communion, Yolanda arrives at the convent. She dramatically flings the chapel doors open, letting the bright street sunlight and loud noises flood the sacred, stale space with their lay vitality. The moment is very symbolic in its representation of the coming together of the sheltered, hermetic religious space, seemingly frozen in time, and the vibrant, realist, urban contamination brought in by the cabaret singer and professional sinner. The isolation of the Church is made more dramatic by the over-exposed shot and by the suggestion that this congregation, origi-

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nally from Albacete, cannot ignore the new direction that Spanish society is now taking; the shot represents, literally, a ‘blinding’ contrast. In fact the mention of the province of Albacete, and the possibility or even the need for the congregation to move back there becomes a motif in the film suggesting the nuns’ desire to escape the hardships of Madrid and its accelerated drive towards modernity. Later, in What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Flower of My Secret, Almodóvar revisits the theme of the ‘return to the village’ with a more nostalgic tone, as we will see in the following chapters. In this context however, the mention of the provincial town suggests how difficult it was for the retrograde forces in Spanish society and the Catholic Church in particular, to adapt to the country’s new direction. Yolanda Bell, with her torrid past, torch-song singing and cabaret life makes an ideal candidate for the order of the ‘Humiliated Redeemers’, or at least for temporary refuge behind the convent walls. But tensions soon arise among the nuns; some of them are suspicious of the Mother Superior’s designs for Yolanda. Showing evident romantic or sexual interest in the singer, the Mother Superior offers Yolanda the convent’s best suite and some heroin to make her stay. Yolanda feigns surprise and pretends to be offended by the offer, while the Mother Superior expertly prepares a syringe and injects herself. The Mother Superior then prepares a second syringe for Yolanda, effecting an apparent seduction. The drug has the desired effect and later Yolanda comfortably enjoys her warm bed. Yolanda then produces her dead boyfriend’s journal, which she had retrieved after his death, and writes in it, apparently finishing his thoughts. She adds the line, ‘Yolanda me ha suicidado’ or ‘Yolanda has suicided me’ while the soundtrack produces the line in his voice, as if he were dictating it to her. But Yolanda’s action is a reminder of Almodóvar’s games with the topic of authorship and its ties to identity. As in Pepi, Luci, Bom where Pepi’s screenwriting ambitions are cleverly and directly tied to the movie’s own narrative and Labyrinth of Passion where Riza supplants the singer from Them and where Quety seamlessly takes on one of Sexi’s personalities (that of the daughter in an incestuous relationship) Yolanda’s assumed authorship of her boyfriend’s journal self-reflexively addresses the topic of storytelling itself. In Almodóvar’s films, as we will see later in What Have I Done To Deserve This!?,

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High Heels and The Flower of My Secret, mistaken or assumed identities, authorship games and even ghost-writing become symbolic of the nation’s process of reassessing and rebuilding its own identity. The practice recurs, a therapeutic rehearsal of the trauma of the nation’s own troubled identity under and after Franco. Moreover, the authorship/identity confusion plot continues with Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave) who is secretly the author of a series of torrid, pulp-type exploitation novels that are enormously successful while her blood sister outside reaps the benefits by pretending to be the real author. Sister Sewer Rat talks to her sister Antonia (Eva Siva) about leaving the convent and starting over perhaps as a novelist. Antonia snickers at the idea, stating ‘Those are a nun’s fantasy . . . You are all crazy . . . Everything, everything, everything, everything is exactly the same as it was when you entered [the convent].’ In fact, in Dark Habits Almodóvar seems to ask the question and offer an answer: what has not changed in Spain in 1983? Just like in 1975 after the death of Franco, Dark Habits begins with a dead Fascist patriarch leaving the country in deep cultural, religious and political isolation, and in economic and moral disarray. Almodóvar suggests that Sister Rat, who under the nom de plume ‘Concha Torres’ is the author of Get out of Here Bastard, and Yolanda the torch-singer (who used to be a botany teacher) are trying to re-invent themselves, remaking their own identities as they go along. Significantly they are all, Sister Rat, Yolanda, the Mother Superior and the other nuns, trying to escape their past quite literally: to shed their old identities and in the process pay for their past ‘crimes’. Everyone’s past is one of drugs, prostitution, even murder, but everybody, Almodóvar seems to say, deserves a second chance. They are there to be redeemed through humiliation and mortification, announces Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes) who concludes, ‘humans are the most despicable beings of all creation’. Appropriately, Yolanda’s welcome dinner ends with the Mother Superior, Yolanda and some of the nuns shooting up heroin and vomiting together after the meal. As with the ‘golden shower’ in Pepi, and the porter’s uncontrollable diarrhoea in Labyrinth of Passion, the drug- and food-related sickness and vomiting in Dark Habits, which returns later on in the movie, seems mostly a ‘shock’ technique. But, already in Dark Habits, that which seemed daring in Pepi, Luci, Bom and was still admittedly funny in

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Labyrinth of Passion, now seems a dead-end, unnecessary, purely vulgar. Almodóvar’s sense of the aesthetics of bad taste seems to have peaked in Labyrinth of Passion. The Humiliated Redeemers run a knick-knacks table at Madrid’s celebrated Sunday flea market, ‘el Rastro’. They sell home-made cakes and flowers, hollering to passers-by. At el Rastro, itself a microcosm of Madrid’s vibrant life, of all that is old and new, good and bad, a fire-eater is outdone by Sister Manure who pokes a large knitting needle through her cheek. The flea-market sequence, like the after-dinner sickness, allows us to see the Sisters in their physical reality but it too amounts to a dead-end plot, like a number of other leads in the movie, such as that of the Bengal tiger named el niño that the Sisters keep in the garden. In fact the narrative structure of Dark Habits is somewhat scattered, episodic, with a number of narrative leads that are not quite followed up, like loosely related vignettes. But what the movie lacks in narrative complexity it makes up for in its attention to the centrality of women characters and its focus on forbidden desire. The convent setting is eloquent and simple and it

Yolanda and the Humiliated Redeemers: ‘humans are the most despicable beings of all creation’

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allows for the forbidden quality of desire to be doubly stated because one presumes that everything is forbidden in there. But behind closed doors, just out of sight, the nuns, their protégées and the transient women who seek help at he convent regularly indulge their need for drugs, for sexual activity and even for Sister Rat’s creative endeavours. Behind the repressive façade of the convent walls almost everything is permitted. In one scene the Mother Superior and Yolanda have a sincere bonding moment locked in the nun’s office, getting high and listening to the bolero ‘Encadenados’ (‘Chained’) sung by Lucho Gatica on the turntable. In one of the best moments in the movie they sing the song together, looking into each other’s eyes, which is actually straight into the camera. The shot/reverse shot shows the Mother Superior sitting at her desk, removing her glasses and enveloping Yolanda in her penetrating gaze, while mouthing the words to the song. They sing to each other and into each other’s eyes, while Yolanda circles the room towards the Mother Superior’s desk, as if she were being lassoed into the other’s gaze. Yolanda is evidently put in the position of object of desire, possessed by the nun’s gaze, while Sister Julia is put in the typically masculine position of being the active looker and seducer.22 The added self-reflexivity, already an Almodóvar motif as seen in Pepi, Luci, Bom and Labyrinth of Passion, is emphasised here with a new reflection on the fusion of theatricality and true feelings when the Mother Superior states ‘It’s music that speaks the truth about life.’ This idea of course, gets more complex as Almodóvar’s protagonists eventually find that they can only get in touch with their real emotions through the mediation of artificial settings such as the theatre stage and dressing room (in The Law of Desire and High Heels), the movie theatre (in Matador and Talk to Her), or the television or movie studio (in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, High Heels, Kika and Bad Education). Yolanda and the Mother Superior are able to express their feelings, including the Mother Superior’s homosexual desires for Yolanda, with the mediation of the Lucho Gatica song. On the wall behind the nun’s desk there is a collage made of photographs of famous women cut out from advertisements and fashion magazines. ‘The great sinners of this century’, announces Sister Julia. Among them are Brigitte Bardot, Ava Gardner, Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Sara Montiel and others.

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‘Jesus died to redeem sinners’, explains the nun while taking a hit of cocaine. ‘Thanks to them God dies and resurrects every day.’ It is under the gaze of these ‘sinners’, yet another level of intertextuality, that Yolanda and the nun can indulge in their secret desires. Visibly absent from the background is the otherwise ubiquitous crucifix, from where Jesus himself presumably cares for his servants and watches over sinners. In fact the image of Jesus Christ in the scene is mostly visible in the reverse shot of Yolanda as she approaches Sister Julia while singing. There are images of Jesus Christ (on the crucifix) and of Pope John Paul II in a tiny frame, but both marginalised, on top of a side ledge that circles the room while the pictures of ‘sinners’ are centralised. It is also meaningful that the male figures of redemption, Jesus and his representative, the Pope, are de-centralised in favour of the female ‘sinners’ that they are supposed to redeem. Interestingly, then, Almodóvar literalises one of the topics of the film, by making female desire, literally and symbolically, central to the scene while marginalising all the male ‘characters’, even those essential to Catholic dogma. In the Mother Superior’s office, the nun’s and the sinner’s desires can be glimpsed (as in all classic melodrama), even if those desires are forbidden.23 In contrast to the Mother Superior’s admiration for sinners, later in the film Sister Rat reads to the congregation a book passage about the perils of kissing, and a parallel is drawn with these sinners. As ‘the great sinners of the century’ had kept watch over Yolanda and Sister Julia’s sins, Sister Manure also spies on the dealings between Yolanda and Sister Rat, involving the contraband in and out of the convent of books clandestinely authored by the nun. The sequence of shots of Sister Manure at the lockless keyhole ends in an iris on Yolanda and Sister Rat, and is clearly modelled on the shots of Norman Bates at the peephole spying on Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s Psycho. The Hitchcock reference foreshadows a murderous or traumatic outcome to the secret meeting (a technique further elaborated in the multiple Hitchcock references and citations in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as we will see in Chapter 3).24 Sister Manure is also keen on spying on Sister Rat while the latter eats meat intended to feed the tiger. High on acid (we are cued by a colour/negative point-of-view shot) Sister

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Manure crashes a bottle on the kitchen floor and walks barefoot over the glass shards. But Sister Manure cannot hide her contempt for Sister Rat, and turns her in to Sister Julia, who finds the Concha Torres novels. Sister Rat confesses her secret identity as novelist Concha Torres, and that her new novel is based on the story of Yolanda and the Mother Superior. Moreover, Sister Rat explains her inspiration: she writes the stories of all the women who have passed through the convent and explains that she also writes as a way to deal with her crisis both ‘as a nun and as a writer’. Sister Rat, unlike the other nuns, admits that a crisis of identity is at the centre of her existence: the nun’s identity and moral crisis are again central to Almodóvar’s plot. When the Mother Superior threatens to burn all the Concha Torres books found in Sister Rat’s cell, it is Yolanda who intervenes on the books’ behalf, although she admits the novels are ‘rubbish’. In its context the exchange is significant as it addresses once again the topic of repression and censorship in Spanish society, but here issues a value judgment about a marginal, vulgar and exploitative medium that is transparently self-reflexive at this point in Almodóvar’s career. Between the nun’s crisis of identity and the reference to authorship as a therapeutic practice, Almodóvar draws a new parallel between his own career and the movie’s plot. Reminiscent of Pepi’s screenplay in Pepi, Luci, Bom, Concha Torres’ novels reflect upon the significance of the creative process itself in Spain’s healing course and the country’s political and social transitions. A creative practice censored and repressed under Franco’s regime becomes in the Spain of the 1980s a potential tool of advancement, but not without some crisis. Eventually the police come looking for Merche, a beat-up young woman (Cecilia Roth) who the Mother Superior shelters for one night. Their exchange implies that the nun has had a romantic or sexual affair with Merche. Yolanda thinks they are after her for questioning about her boyfriend’s death; he was poisonedbyheroinspikedwithstrychnine.Believingsheisindangerofdiscovery, Yolanda burns her boyfriend’s journal, and announces that she is breaking with her past: ‘no drugs, no memories’. After Yolanda refuses the Mother Superior’sadvances,theheadnunflagellatesherselfforpenance,repentantfor ‘having sinned so much’, presumably referring to her drug addiction and her

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lesbian desires. But, while the Mother Superior claims to have been abandoned by God, the sisters correctly assess that she is simply heartbroken over Yolanda and decide to have a party to cheer her up. Yolanda promises to sing and the preparationsseemtorelieveallthetensions:SisterRatandtheMotherSuperior mend fences, and the nuns are revitalised and cheerful. When the Marquise refuses the Mother Superior’s request for more funding (under threat of extortion) the nun agrees with her (former) drug dealer to serve as a ‘mule’ and to transportdrugsfromThailandfor100,000pesetas.Theplotdevice,asothersin Dark Habits, seems forced, another Almodóvar shot at the hypocrisy of Catholic institutions that holds more shock value than narrative weight. Carmen Maura as Sister Damned. She could, of course, be Pepi redeemed . . .

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Almodóvar recovers again with the final elaboration of the ‘Concha Torres’ ghost-writing subplot. Sister Sewer Rat visits her blood sister Antonia who has been passing for novelist Concha Torres. Sister Rat confronts her sister for living the high life at the expense of her secret creativity, and the nun discovers that there is further depth to the deception. Sister Rat examines her sister’s bookshelves, which are full of Spanish literary classics, the exact opposite of the ‘rubbish’ published by Concha Torres. Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Calderón, are all lined up on the shelves, but the supposed books are only empty covers. The moment shows how under the wraps of cultural pretence lie only deception and ‘rubbish’. Almodóvar suggests that the up-and-coming approval of all sorts of ‘popular’ art, rubbish in the eyes of the cultural establishment, is substituting for the country’s literary history and cultural heritage. The new post-Franco Spain is one in which religious institutions are corrupt, where culture is a sham and where identity and authorship itself are under question. Almodóvar’s point is not that simple, though, since in his career he periodically adapts and adopts cultural symbols (literary and folkloric) and re-appropriates them in order to call attention to the officialisation and regularisation of cultural practices under Franco. Under the Fascist regime, only ‘high’ culture, focalised folkloric practices (Andalucian flamenco, for instance) and Catholicism were endorsed by the state as being representative of what was ‘Spanish’. Almodóvar’s attention to culture as deception is not so much a dismissal of the Spanish classics as it is an indictment of the arbitrary inclusion and exclusion of regional practices by the cultural establishment under Franco. By the beginning of the third act of Dark Habits, the General Mother Superior (Berta Riaza) of the religious order visits the convent of the Humiliated Redeemers to discover the party that the nuns are throwing for their Mother Superior. The General Mother threatens to shut down the Madrid convent because Mother Julia has ‘gone way over the limit’ of her pious responsibilities. For the party the nuns set up a kitsch paper-andcardboard stage for Yolanda to sing on. As she comes on stage, Yolanda’s hair and make-up are overdone, showing no real evidence of her redemption: she still looks like a whore on stage. She sings a salsa break-up song,

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Cheo Feliciano’s ‘Salí porque salí’ (‘I’m out Because I’m out’) to the false and off-synch accompaniment of Sisters Rat, Manure and Damned (Carmen Maura). The desiring eyes of Mother Julia possess Yolanda while she performs an ill-conceived striptease for the nuns. After the show Almodóvar includes another irreverent religious reference in the film when, in the process of helping Yolanda remove her make-up, the Mother Superior reveals Yolanda’s face imprinted on a handkerchief, in imitation of Christ’s face on Veronica’s veil. The scene creates an analogy between the religious devotion of the Catholic legend and Mother Julia’s ‘sinful’ love for another woman. It equates romantic or sexual love with piousness in the form of a ‘queer Veronica’, initiating Almodóvar’s use of Catholic symbols or artifacts in gender- and meaning-bending versions, such as the ‘queer pietà’ at the ends of both Dark Habits and The Law of Desire. When the Mother General decides to shut down the convent of the Humiliated Redeemers and take the remaining nuns to Albacete, Yolanda leaves the convent with the Marquise and Mother Julia insists that she will found another order. Ultimately the congregation disbands, with a number of the nuns leaving for Albacete, the seat of the religious order. Sister Damned leaves the tiger with the chaplain and Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas) who have decided ‘to start a family’ together. Almodóvar’s theme of forming a family has already appeared in Pepi, Luci, Bom and in Labyrinth of Passion as the promise or possibility of a brighter future. It suggests that the new ‘family’ might be unorthodox, yet acceptable, suggesting that the recovery of Spain from its repressive and violent past demands a real starting over, a deep revision of all social institutions. In Dark Habits however, none of these characters is developed sufficiently and the topic of the reconstitution of the family is relegated to a marginal narrative. And while certain gay references around the chaplain are abundant, they are not pursued as narrative leads. Finally as everything seems to collapse around the Mother Superior, with her congregation scattered, her sisters disbanded, it is the discovery of Yolanda’s absence that leads to her final breakdown. At hearing the news that Yolanda has moved on and left the convent with the Marquise, the Mother Superior screams crazily in heartbroken desperation and collapses in Sister Manure’s arms, as the camera tracks back away from the nuns and

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out of the window through the convent’s patio. The shot retreats from the intimate, controlled and, until now, protected setting behind the convent walls, while also imitating in reverse the shot from the beginning of the movie when the camera follows Yolanda into her boyfriend’s apartment. The final shot through the patio window of Mother Julia collapsed in Sister Manure’s arms revisits the religious allegory of the pietà, artificially framed by the window, in a final irreverent reconstruction of a Catholic image. Ultimately then, Almodóvar secularises religious iconography throughout the film to suggest the humanity and imperfection of his characters, while at the same time heretically equating pious love and homosexual desire. What seems most evidently missing from Dark Habits are the pure fun of Pepi, Luci, Bom and the fervent ludicrousness of Labyrinth of Passion. In his first attempt at melodrama, at serious narrative, Almodóvar’s third feature lacks the structural complexity, emotional depth and convincing styles that make his later melodramatic features High Heels, The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother and Talk to Her so universally effective. But the film’s attention to female homosexual desire and to the weight and trauma of repression under Spanish Catholicism, along with the promise of possible recovery and the reconstitution of ‘the family’ (as it becomes increasingly allegorical of the nation), certainly address Almódovar’s topics. Equally, in Dark Habits Almodóvar emphasises the difficulty of expressing forbidden desire by presenting layer upon layer of real and imagined forms of repression from the sides of the State, the Catholic Church and other social institutions. Significantly, all that happens behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of the convent of the Humiliated Redeemers presents a struggle between desire and repression that ultimately leads to Mother Julia’s collapse. Like in García Lorca’s tragic drama, La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936/1945), the cloistered women of the convent of the Humiliated Redeemers are both crippled by their repression and ripe for emotional explosion.25 Unlike García Lorca’s characters however, Almodóvar’s nuns are occasionally able to access their feelings and passions. The flash of light that accompanies Yolanda’s arrival at the convent, both literally and symbolically begins to dismantle a repressive structure that can barely contain all forms of forbidden desire.

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What Have I Done to Deserve This!? (1984) Almodóvar’s most self-reflexive work of the first cycle of his career is also arguably his first small masterpiece. In ¿¡Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!? the man from La Mancha successfully integrates elements of comedy and melodrama, presents an honest portrait of an unconventional family trying to survive in the midst of major crises, and once again underscores the topics of authorship and identity as integral to an understanding of his own art. The movie opens with a high crane shot coming down onto a movie crew in the process of setting up a shot. In the background we can hear the unmistakable voice of Pedro himself ordering the crew around. The protagonist, a woman named Gloria (Carmen Maura), walks right across the movie set en route to work as a cleaning woman in a nearby karate school. The location is apparently the Plaza del Conde de Barajas, in Madrid’s oldest neighbourhood of ‘Asturias’. The significance of the location is that in What Have I Done, Almodóvar for the first time presents the city of his dreams, which Riza Niro called ‘the most fun city in the world’ as a place at the brink of social and economic chaos. In the course of the film Almodóvar seems to suggest that with all the personal and sexual freedoms ushered in by Spain’s transition in the 1980s, democracy and the governing PSOE have heretofore failed to bring prosperity to many Spanish families and especially to working-class women. In What Have I Done, Madrid is a city where the working class struggles hard for a place in society and the economy and where economic and social frustrations are intertwined with issues of sexual and personal identity. But Almodóvar again suggests that the promise of the future lies in the reconstruction and reconstitution of the national family. The main character, Gloria, is filled with frustrations manifested in her sexual and economic problems. At the karate school where she works as a cleaning woman, Gloria is invited by a man to join him in the shower for a quick sexual encounter. She agrees but he promptly loses his erection. In spite of her efforts, he apologises embarrassed and Gloria vents the built-up energy practising hard blows with a fighting stick on the exercise mat. At the opening of What Have I Done, Almodóvar gives us a character whose sexual frustration and dissatisfaction extend from the workplace to her home and family life. Gloria’s family is composed of her taxi driver husband, Antonio

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(Ángel de Andrés López), who pays little attention to her or the family; an aging and slightly senile mother-in-law who dreams of returning to ‘the village’; and a couple of school-aged boys involved in drug dealing and prostitution. Antonio possesses some talents and characteristics that point towards Almodóvar’s concerns with Spain’s past, present and future. The taxi driver has lived in Germany in the past, and fallen in love with a former Nazi singer named Ingrid Müller, whom he still adores. He still sympathises with Spain’s Fascist past and speaks admiringly of Hitler. And the man is also a naturally gifted forger of handwriting and signatures, an ability with which he aspires to a better life and which he has passed on to his son Toni (Juan Martínez). This particular plot device has evolved from the authorial crisis of Sister Sewer Rat in Dark Habits. At the centre of an identity crisis there lies the possibility of re-invention, even of impostors fixing the problems of their real counterparts (as with Sexi and Quety in Labyrinth of Passion), a topic explored further in High Heels and The Flower of My Secret. At home, Gloria entertains herself sniffing glue, chemicals and any other potentially hallucinogenic household product in order to escape her gloomy reality. Gloria is illiterate, incapable of helping her stray children with their homework (Grandma does, incorrectly), her husband is physically and emotionally abusive and her neighbours are eccentric, even supernatural. Antonio eats dinner in front of the television; he’s grumpy, inattentive and narcissistic. Meanwhile, Grandma (Chus Lampreave) and Gloria’s teenage son, Toni (Juan Martínez), speak of their desire to ‘go back to the village’. The theme of ‘the return to the village’, recurring in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Flower of My Secret, presents a visible paradox in Almodóvar’s discourse about Spain as a whole and Madrid in particular through his career. On the one hand, Madrid, ‘the most fun city in the world’, the ‘centre of the universe’ represents everything that Spain’s retrograde past and that Almodóvar’s youth in La Mancha and Extremadura did not offer. On the other hand, ‘with so much democracy’ Madrid is also an economically repressive environment and a potential moral dead-end. Perhaps Almodóvar’s most contemporary political statement about life in Madrid under the PSOE (Grandma complains disconsolately ‘It’s so cold in Madrid’) is the suggestion that ‘democracy’ has its costs: it comes with eco-

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nomic and social crises. After Franco, Spain’s and particularly Madrid’s reality includes drugs and prostitution, with the eternal shadow of Fascism looming in the background. (Antonio and Grandma drink ‘Vichy’-brand bottled water, perhaps a reference to the collaborationist government in Nazi-occupied France, but also an incongruous Catalan bourgeois product for this poverty-stricken Madrid family.) The country’s new fragile democracy, which Almodóvar mocked in Pepi, Luci, Bom, lies at the centre of What Have I Done. When Gloria explains to Antonio that there’s no wine in the house to go with dinner, his patriarchal upbringing and his Fascist leanings reveal Antonio to be a potentially dangerous man: ‘I spend all day working like an ass to come home to a burned piece of chicken and there’s not even a glass of wine in the house!’ But the truth is not so simple in Almodóvar’s world: Gloria and Antonio live with two children and a grandma in a tiny over-crowded flat; there’s not enough money for food and bills; and the only relative peace is found in drugs, alcohol and fantasy. Almodóvar juxtaposes Antonio’s tirade with one of his television advertisements, by now a common stylistic trend. In the advertisement for ‘Café El Café’ (‘Coffee’ brand coffee) Almodóvar once again introduces a media intersection that serves as an editorial commentary on the film’s themes. As in similar apparent detours in Pepi, Lucy, Bom, Labyrinth of Passion and Dark Habits, this commercial suggests a visible tension between fear and desire and the horrors of the past. In the commercial, a young woman, sitting in bed (Cecilia Roth, again), describes her experience with ‘Café El Café’: a man brings her a cup of coffee the morning after a passionate sexual encounter. But he trips on her shoes and spills the recently brewed, hot coffee on her face. The commercial’s conclusion shows the young woman’s formerly beautiful face, now severely scarred and burned, as she turns to the camera stating, ‘I’ll never forget that cup of coffee’. The message that the scars of the past are impossible to heal and difficult to overcome is presented here as a literal representation of that metaphor. But cheekily, Almodóvar turns the message into an uncomfortably humorous moment. Eventually, in Almodóvar’s films, the treatment of physical pain and the process of healing become analogous to the ‘body of the nation’ (as I will explore further in Chapter 4).

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Carmen Maura as Gloria, broom in hand: ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This!?’

Antonio, the forger with the Fascist inclinations, teaches his son Toni to copy his own signature. ‘I copied my father’s signature, and you should copy mine. It’s as important as your last name’, Antonio explains logically. The Fascist-leaning patriarchal mentality falls well into place with a totalitarian past still looming over contemporary Spanish society. Antonio shows a great deal of pride because his son can already forge the signature, his patrimony. And it is that totalitarian and patriarchal past which seems to be the only thing of substance that this family shares. Later in the bedroom, for instance, Antonio practically forces himself sexually on Gloria while she complains about their economic problems: the poor, dispossessed and under-employed class gets literally and metaphorically ‘screwed’, like

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Quety in Labyrinth of Passion. Almodóvar introduces another media intersection while Antonio and Gloria are in bed. Almodóvar himself shows up on television in a bright, kitsch, incongruous hussar costume, starring in a rudimentary music ‘video’ lip-synching Miguel Molina’s ‘La bien pagá’ (‘The Well-Paid Woman’). The song’s lyrics offer an ironic commentary on Gloria and Antonio’s situation, since the song speaks of a man’s tribulations and heartbreak after having ‘paid well’ for the unnamed woman’s ‘dark flesh’. Almodóvar’s new personal intervention adds to the film’s selfreflexivity, while also presenting the camp appropriation of the song and the costume as an added cultural commentary, calling attention to diverse forms of Spanish popular culture, while the movie’s characters struggle with their own identity. Later in his career, theatrical interventions in Almodóvar’s films allow for the characters to come to terms, confront and acknowledge their real feelings, but here the song is ironic in view of Antonio’s abuse of Gloria. Juxtaposed with that sequence is a scene in which Grandma nostalgically (and ironically) reminisces about ‘those songs of the past’, ignoring the misogynistic lyrics and the ironic parallel with Gloria’s contemporary life. Grandma turns to Toni to write a letter for her (for she too is illiterate) and, as in Dark Habits, The Law of Desire and High Heels later, the topic of ‘authorship’ emerges as analogous to that of identity. Toni, already initiated into the arts of forgery, writes a letter for Grandma, copying Grace Kelly’s handwriting: the three scenes together present a mise en abîme of self-reflexivity, identity crisis and deception. But Toni, who is high on drugs, gets sick and vomits on Grandma’s lap. She cares for him, cleans him up in the bath, and offers her (grand)maternal protection in the first show of tenderness seen in the movie. In this highly dysfunctional family, the second generation, Gloria and Antonio, who grew up under Franco, is severely emotionally crippled, while Toni and Grandma show a deeper, warmer connection. Gloria and Antonio, as well as Gloria’s neighbour, the merry prostitute Cristal (Verónica Forqué), do have sexual relations in the movie but theirs are loveless, abusive or commercial relationships. By contrast Grandma Blasa and the boys show real, if clumsy affection for one another. Gloria’s younger son, Miguel (M. Ángel Herranz), is a child prostitute who spends

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long hours on the streets and with adult men in different sexual situations for survival. Even Cristal with all the traffic of men in and out of her apartment, offers the boys food, money and even sex (believing she can ‘cure’ Miguel of his young homosexuality), showing more care and attention for the boys than their parents ever do. Ultimately Gloria’s family is not only desperate but loveless: Antonio is a frustrated Fascist cabbie; Gloria a desperate, glue-sniffing cleaning woman; Grandma oscillates between insanity and senility; the boys are on their own, caught between drugs and sex. By the end of act one, however, these principal characters have shown some aspiration or desire, perhaps a little sense of hope in the midst of their desperation. Their desires may be pure dreams or small luxuries but they are real and, in their own way, each one is significant to the narrative. Gloria, for instance, sets her sight on an electric curling iron, a small symbol of vanity in an otherwise desperate, loveless, lifeless existence. Antonio secretly desires to return to his German love, Ingrid Müller. Cristal has dreams of going to the USA and becoming ‘a star’, and is learning English in preparation. And Grandma and Toni wish to ‘return’ to the village, which they idealise as the opposite to Madrid. They see ‘the village’ of Grandma’s past and Toni’s future as a bucolic, happy, simple and unspoiled setting, a land nobody has promised them, a space and time as yet unspoiled by Madrid’s ‘progress’ and political evolution in the 1980s, a utopian escape from their very real lives. Paradoxically, in a very short time since Pepi, Luci, Bom and Labyrinth of Passion, Spain’s trajectory seems already riddled with difficulties. This is about the time when the opposition made famous the ironic slogan, ‘We were better off against Franco!’ after Prime Minister Felipe González’s nationalisation policies and stand on NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) made him unpopular with wide sectors of the Spanish public. Grandma Blasa and Toni’s desire to escape the city is perhaps the most consistent structural organising principle in the film and a very meaningful motif in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Flower of My Secret. In What Have I Done in fact, Toni and Grandma’s plan to leave Madrid becomes the plot of the film, even more than Gloria’s survival or Antonio’s deceptions. Toni, aided by Grandma, saves all of his drug-dealing proceeds in a bank account

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with the specific purpose of financing their move. When the two get together with a friend in a bar for a drink, Grandma admits that the only thing she likes about Madrid are the coin-slot machines, profits from which may bolster their finances. At the bar, the two sit at the counter with a big, kitsch representation of Granada’s Alhambra Palace in the background. Grandma, reminiscing nostalgically, says: ‘In my town they say, if you haven’t seen Granada you haven’t seen anything. But I’ve never been there.’ In the film’s context that kitsch representation of Spain’s past becomes one more idealisation of another time and place that is significantly not Madrid, not the M30 highway, or the housing project where the family lives, not ‘here and now’. Grandma constantly complains of how cold it is in Madrid (in contrast, presumably, to Granada or the village’s warmer weather) and how she feels as if she is ‘in a jail’ in Gloria and Antonio’s tiny flat. When Toni and Grandma find a lizard near a construction site, they adopt him, name him ‘Money’, and the lizard becomes another symbol of their needs and desires, a barometer of their existence. Although Toni has never been to ‘the village’, he accepts Grandma’s potentially senile, nostalgic, paradoxical promise of something ‘new’ and possibly better. By contrast, later Gloria is at a dentist’s waiting room with Miguel and is recognised by a former acquaintance from ‘the village’ (actually played by Almodóvar’s mum, Doña Paquita Caballero, who appears in several of his movies). But Gloria does not recognise the friendly old woman, failing to connect with her past. Unlike Toni and Grandma, Gloria’s generation is too lost and too unhappy to visualise utopia, past or future. On the contrary, Gloria’s efforts seem always concentrated in the need for survival. So, when the dentist shows an unhealthy sexual interest in ‘adopting’ Miguel, Gloria agrees, thinking of having one mouth less to feed. Miguel understands and accepts the proposal, but with some conditions of his own: he’ll go along if there is a video, stereo and ‘art lessons’. The addition of the art lessons as a condition allows us a glimpse into Miguel’s desires, heretofore undisclosed, and suggests that his resorting to prostitution is only a survival strategy. Like Cristal, Miguel practises prostitution as a vehicle, a means to an end, not a vocation; he has aspirations and desires. Encouraged by the freedom offered by Miguel’s ‘adoption’, Gloria purchases the curling iron: the sole, pathetic symbol of her own desire.

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Later at home, Gloria is approached by Cristal who needs her help for ‘a job’. Paradoxically, Gloria, who has just given her youngest son up as a sex slave, is insulted by the proposition. But Cristal explains that the job is harmless: her current customer is an exhibitionist and has requested an audience to witness his performance. The result is one of Almodóvar’s funniest forays into the topic of theatricality and performance, and one significantly played by the film director Jaime Chávarri, to make the point even more self-reflexive.26 The ‘john’ dictates his own fantasy of sexual prowess while the two women are genuinely bored and humouring him. The man’s performance in the artificial, theatrical setting of Cristal’s kitschy apartment, cluttered with the objects of her own fantasies of stardom, is a scathing parody of masculinity and Spain’s machista mentality itself. But Cristal and Gloria are clearly the ones who are performing (badly); one simulating sexual pleasure and the other feigning interest and curiosity in the macho performance. The macho deception in Cristal’s apartment is as transparent as Antonio’s own forgery talent. One of Cristal’s clients, a writer for whom Gloria does house-cleaning, later approaches Antonio with an unbelievable plot to falsify the autobiography of a dictator that, ‘with a few changes’, could become Hitler’s memoirs. While the parallels are not quite transparent, it is certainly possible that these could be Franco’s memoirs. Lucas, the writer (Gonzalo Suárez), wants Antonio to copy the false memoirs in longhand, imitating Hitler’s handwriting with his incomparable talent for forgery. There is a precedent, for Antonio, at the request of Ingrid Müller, had already copied Hitler’s handwriting in some lost letters Hitler had supposedly sent to Ingrid’s former employer. But Antonio refuses, outraged at the suggestion that he violate the law. Insulted by Lucas’s proposal and because the writer is one of Cristal’s clients, Antonio comes home very angry and in a heated argument orders Gloria to stop her house-cleaning job. Antonio is particularly angry about Gloria’s friendship with Cristal, because, he says, ‘she’s a whore!’ Antonio’s reasoning sounds anachronistic, hypocritical and potentially Fascist in 1980s’ Spain, screaming that ‘decency’ is more important than money while he remains faithful in spirit to his former Nazi girlfriend. Of course, Antonio retains the mentality of the Franco era, when men had legal rights over their wives’ affairs and property,

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rights removed soon after Franco’s death in 1975. Antonio’s anachronistic machismo, like the policeman’s in Pepi, Luci, Bom, while no longer legal, was still clearly a reality for many working-class Spanish women in the mid1980s. Later, Lucas goes to Berlin to coerce Ingrid Müller into convincing Antonio to forge the dictator’s memoirs. While the plot itself, like others in the movie, is under-developed, it is a new version of the authorship/identity motif, present in Pepi, Luci, Bom, Labyrinth of Passion and Dark Habits, which eventually evolves into more complex matters of performance, deception and body transformations in later films like The Law of Desire, High Heels and All About My Mother. When Ingrid agrees to come to Madrid to speak to Antonio about forging the memoirs, it is the only time we see him happy. Gloria naturally objects to the lover’s visit. Grandma and Toni witness the loud quarrel and seek refuge at the movies. They see a Spanish-dubbed version of Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) which gives them the idea of starting a cattle ranch when they go to the village. Once again, Almodóvar presents Grandma and Toni’s dream as a way of escaping their space, their Madrid life, but also escape from their temporal setting to a simpler, better time, space and even economy. But they never confront the implications of the past, for their return to the village poses a potentially retrograde move. It is as if Almodóvar is constantly suggesting that not only is there no escape from Spain’s past, but also that there may be no escape from the present. The turning point in the narrative comes when Frau Müller is expected to arrive in Madrid and Antonio, brutal as always, demands that Gloria irons his shirt for the meeting with his idealised former lover. When Gloria refuses, their argument escalates to a physical fight and mutual reproaches about money and lack of food and Antonio smacks Gloria in the face. Gloria’s blood splatters over ‘Money’, the lizard, who scurries along the kitchen floor, suggesting that ‘money’ is both the beginning and end of the argument, at least superficially. The fight ends when Gloria picks up a hambone she’s been saving for the end of the month, and with the same blow she had been practising at the karate school, hits Antonio on the head with it. He falls, cracks his head against the sink and dies instantly. The weapon itself

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is significant in the context of the family’s poverty and as a Spanish gastronomic cultural symbol. The violent end of the failed patriarch seems to confuse Gloria more than comfort her and her first instinct is to look for an alibi. Gloria arrives at her neighbour Juani’s apartment, while the woman, a Jaén native with a strong accent (Kiti Manver), is in the middle of a hateful tirade against her abused daughter, Vanessa (who possesses strange telekinetic powers). Juani hates Vanessa because her daughter reminds her of her ex-husband, who she accuses of being abusive. It is out of this environment that Vanessa acquires her mental powers, which she exercises constantly to attract attention or simply to annoy her verbally and physically abusive mother. The importance of this narrative device, interesting though underdeveloped in the story, is that it offers an arguable psychic abnormality as another expression or byproduct of the characters’ traumas (comparable to Sadec’s abnormally developed sense of smell, or even Sexi’s ‘nymphomania’ in Labyrinth of Passion). Almodóvar repeatedly resorts to diverse expressions of trauma in the form of body transitions and/or psychological ailments (beginning, of course, with Labyrinth of Passion which centres on parent/children relations and their psychological weight). Juani and Vanessa’s relationship (which is interspersed in the narrative of What Have I Done) literalises its own violence and unusual expression in Vanessa’s telekinesis. Realising that Juani is not going to help her, Gloria goes to Cristal’s flat, still in search of an alibi. Cristal and Gloria return to the apartment and supposedly then find Antonio dead. Eventually the police arrive. One of the detectives happens to be the man Gloria had had her brief, unsatisfactory sexual encounter with at the karate school and he is also one of Cristal’s clients (she helps him with his impotence treatment by posing as his girlfriend in therapy sessions). One detective steps on ‘Money’, accidentally killing the lizard. They throw his little body out of the window so Grandma and Toni can find it when they arrive from one of their bank excursions. Antonio and Money’s deaths cement Grandma’s resolution to take the boy and leave the city. With few familial or emotional ties left, Grandma states ‘I don’t want to die in Madrid. I want to go to the village.’ Toni again promises to take her away and, in a rare gesture of kindness, invites Gloria to come

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along with them. But Gloria fails to see that solution (or regression) as a way out of her misery. As the movie’s third narrative act begins, it is significantly the children, especially Toni but eventually Miguel as well, who take on the adult responsibilities. It is Toni who advises Gloria to stop taking drugs and Vanessa who comforts Gloria and helps her to change the kitchen wallpaper using her powers, which the girl considers a therapeutic exercise. In this extremely dysfunctional environment socially, economically and emotionally, Gloria’s generation (Gloria, Antonio, Cristal, Juani, Lucas the forgery-inclined writer and others like the paedophile dentist and the impotent policeman) is incapable of overcoming its difficulties, of fulfilling its social responsibilities (such as taking care of children, putting food on the table, solving a crime or performing sexually). By contrast the children, the new generation born towards the end of Franco’s regime, Toni, Miguel, even the traumatised Vanessa, seem better able and willing to struggle to solve problems and

Death in the kitchen: Verónica Forqué (as Cristal) and Carmen Maura in What Have I Done to Deserve This!?

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to evolve, to move forward. Their problems and traumas, Almodóvar seems to suggest, although difficult and potentially crippling, can be overcome, and the promise of a better future, either by starting over in the country or by taking over from their parents’ generation, is real. So, when Miguel returns to Gloria at the end of the film, just in time to save her from attempting suicide (she is determined to jump over the balcony in a final reaction to her solitude and desperation, after Toni and Grandma board the bus for the village), his sight brings a smile to her face for the first time in the movie. Miguel announces that he has come to stay because the house ‘needs a man’ and Gloria happily accepts him. The return of Miguel sets up a final irony, as he claims a patriarchal role for which, being a child and a homosexual prostitute, he is not really qualified. Gloria’s welcome of the not-so-prodigal son is an indication of the narrative’s attempt to reconstitute the family, the eternal Almodóvar theme constantly revised throughout his career. In What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, the city and the nation are emotionally scattered, showing signs of a deep identity crisis, again illustrated by Almodóvar’s attention to matters of authorship and in this case forgery. But we also see the representation of a ‘national’ family that is either longing for freedom from the recent (Fascist) past or looking forward to an uncertain future. But in reconstituting the family (or families) without the literal or symbolic presence of strong patriarchal figures (only the women and children: Grandma and Toni, Gloria and Miguel), Almodóvar shows that there is some hope, in spite of the claustrophobic lives of the protagonists. The final shots of the film show an apparently interminable succession of the large, drab projects along the M30 highway where Gloria and her family lived, their tiny flat multiplied a thousand times. The shot itself, characteristic of the film’s neo-realist style, allows us to see (like the shot of stack upon stack of pawned bedsheets in De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, 1948) that there are thousands of stories like Gloria’s. But What Have I Done remains neo-realist only in style, not in execution, and perhaps in its attention to the stories of everyday, real people, like the Riccis in Bicycle Thieves or Umberto in Umberto D (1952). These are fictionalised stories of people who came to Madrid from the provinces, like Almodóvar himself, searching to escape their medieval lives (as Luis Buñuel once called them),27 or looking for the dream of moder-

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Almodóvar’s first ‘return’ to the village: What Have I Done to Deserve This!?

nity promised by the wave of development of the last decade of Franco’s regime and of which the M30 itself is a noisy reminder. Paul Julian Smith rightfully argues that in What Have I Done To Deserve This!? Almodóvar gives us a paradoxical view of life in a city where modernisation (so symbolically present in the ubiquitous M30 highway, Franco’s last monument to his own regime) has failed to conceal the city’s ‘provincial’ roots.28 It’s as if the city’s, and by extension the country’s, frantic transition, first from ‘tradition’ into modernity, later from dictatorship to democracy and ultimately from sexual and religious repression to all forms of personal freedom, has proven, in the end, traumatic. Arguably, Almodóvar has since focused his attention on the complexities of the people and the nation’s processes of adjusting, of healing, of recovering, equally, paradoxically, from the traumas of both repression and liberty. As the former Fascist policeman so ironically states in Pepi, Luci, Bom, ‘In this country, with so much democracy, I don’t know where we are going to end . . .’ Pedro Almodóvar’s first four feature films Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, Labyrinth of Passion, Dark Habits and What Have I Done to Deserve This!? appear to show little stylistic consistency in the sense that their visual

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styles are diverse but not distinct. While the clumsy mise en scène, cinematography and sound design of Pepi, Luci, Bom and its narrative structure seem haphazard, the gleefully ludicrous Labyrinth of Passion already shows a more mature consistency of style in the visibly higher quality of cinematography, the use of classical editing and the better-built narrative: a much more ‘classical’ three-act structure based on cause and effect. In Dark Habits and What Have I Done, Almodóvar is leaning towards better-defined genre forms, showing his interest in classic European and Hollywood melodrama, as well as paying more attention to light, colour and stylistic matters such as camera set-ups and mobility. For instance, the interplay of darkness and brightness in Dark Habits and the drab palette and stationary camera of What Have I Done are evidence of Almodóvar’s sensitivity for symptomatic use of mise en scène. But, in particular, the early films set up the essential Almodóvar narrative themes: national and individual identity crises, the trauma of Spain’s past and the parallel treatment of political and sexual repression, the self-reflexivity of authorship and the insistent desire, either literal or symbolic, to reconstitute the ‘family’ as a sign of the reconstruction of the nation’s past and a promise for the future. The treatment and even the meaning of these themes have certainly evolved in Almodóvar’s career while remaining in principle the same. The films of the second period, from Matador to Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! show the development of concerns with genre and an even more direct correlation between style and themes. In the next chapter, we will see how in his films of the mid-to late 1980s, Almodóvar creates a peculiar type of literalisation of style and content in which mise en scène, characters and themes are continually adopting and adapting diverse generic and stylistic practices. This apparent schizophrenia however, the ‘cannibalisation’ of cultural practices, genre, even styles and themes from other directors (Hitchcock in Women on the Verge; Bergman and Sirk in High Heels; Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan in All About My Mother), emerges eventually as Almodóvar’s own style, in which the rearrangement of genre, identities and style, the frenetic centrifuge of his own stories, gives his oeuvre its discursive coherence.

Two Memory, Identity and Style ‘This country has always been divided in two: the envious and the intolerant. I am both.’

Matador (1986) Almodóvar’s cultural satire, Matador, opens with a shocking scene of a man watching snuff videos and other extremely violent, misogynistic, sadomasochistic images of women being killed, dismembered, decapitated and mutilated. The extreme images are juxtaposed with the man (Nacho Martínez) getting sexually aroused and masturbating in front of the television. As the violent content escalates on the television, the man gets increasingly excited until he reaches sexual climax. The scene of the pervert is cleverly juxtaposed with a sequence of the same man (named Diego) in a bullfighting ring, instructing his students on the theory of the ‘art’ of the perfect kill. Diego explains to his students how the faena is a seduction, equating women and bulls as the targets of the ‘art of the kill’. An avid student named Ángel (Antonio Banderas) is clearly aroused by the content of the class and the camera shows us his eyes, in close-up, shifting their focus from the teacher’s eyes to the crotch, with fascination and sexual curiosity. Diego, the teacher, is a formerly celebrated matador, retired into teaching after being gored by a bull. Thus begins Almodóvar’s Matador, in which the cultural values of the ‘old’ Spain are made equal to criminal and psychotic behaviour, in which patriarchal values are only a façade for different types of ‘perversions’. The movie’s extended analogy of bullfighting, sexuality and criminal behaviour is continued in the first three sequences as Almodóvar further juxtaposes Diego’s lecture and demonstration on the perfect kill with the scene of a woman (Assumpta Serna), seducing a bullfighting student and ‘labouring’1 him to death. Her modus operandi is imitative of the matador’s art, when she pulls out a long hairpin and fin-

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ishes her victim in the moment of orgasm, stabbing him at the base of the nape. The woman’s murder of the tauromaquia student in the guise of a faena, Diego’s necrophilia and misogynistic perversions and the young student’s confusion of violence and sexuality, set up the themes of sex, death and cultural identity, emphasising and at the same time presenting an homage to and a satire of Spain’s bloodiest and culturally most distinctive sport. Diego, like so many other Almodóvar characters, bears the wounds of his past literally on his body and his mind: he is sexually ‘perverse’, and walks with a visible limp. His apt pupil Ángel, who is about nineteen, is a virgin who faints at the sight of blood, a trait suggested as a sign of a latent but strongly repressed homosexuality, the result of years of religious repression and a strict, abusive upbringing. When Ángel is unable to identify Ava Gardner in a photograph, he explains to Diego, ‘My family belongs to the Opus Dei; I’ve spent my life praying and exercising.’ A symbol of Spanish Catholic repression at its best, the Opus Dei was aligned with Franco’s brand of Catholic Fascism through most of the dictator’s long rule and is representative of the particularly Spanish combination of devout Catholicism and staunch nationalism that characterised Franco’s regime.2 Ángel’s upbringing in the 1960s and 1970s within the strict ways of the Opus Dei is presented by Almodóvar as the unqualified source of his sexual repression, which ultimately leads to both his crimes and his redemption, a theme revisited by Almodóvar in Bad Education. It seems that Ángel may have decided to train as a bullfigher in the hope that this could ‘cure’ his repressed homosexuality, or at least that seems to be what Diego believes. It is in the course of their initial conversation in Diego’s house within the school grounds, where the Master’s worldly interrogation of the naive pupil about his relations with women leads him to ask Ángel whether he is a homosexual. Ángel is extremely offended at the suggestion, challenged, or so he believes, to prove his manliness to the teacher. Later at home Ángel picks as his victim the beautiful girl nextdoor, a fashion model named Eva (Eva Cobo) who is coincidentally Diego’s girlfriend. From his bedroom window, one in a long list of Hitchcock references peppered throughout Almodóvar’s films, Ángel spies on Eva with a

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‘Are you a homosexual?’: Antonio Banderas and Nacho Martínez in Matador

pair of binocular lenses as she steps nude out of the shower. A pair of iris shots inspired by the ones of Norman Bates and Marion Crane in Psycho shows the semi-nude model and an extreme close-up of Ángel’s eye. His private fantasy is disrupted when his mother (Julieta Serrano) knocks impatiently at the bedroom door, enquiring what he is doing locked up in there. ‘I’ve told you I don’t like it when you lock the bedroom door!’ she cries. Almodóvar’s most repressive mother figure to date, Ángel’s mother emerges as overwhelmingly castrating (like Mrs Bates), characteristic of the marriage of State and Church under Franco. Ángel leaves the house in an effort to escape, with Diego’s intriguing words from the lesson still ringing in his head (‘You must treat women like bulls . . .’). Ángel follows Eva on the street and into an alley. She is wearing a long jacket of a fuchsia colour similar to a matador’s cape; Ángel wears a bright red pullover. Ángel’s rape attempt is a violent parody of itself. Ángel is comically unable to open his Swiss army knife, taking out a bottle cork-opener and nail file before finding and pulling out a barely menacing blade. He is clumsy and more nervous

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than the victim herself. When he finally subdues Eva, who looks more annoyed than threatened, a storm settles in and Ángel ejaculates immediately, alarmed by a loud crack of thunder and a bright flash of lightning. Along with the attempted rape the violent storm crashes upon them, one of Almodóvar’s many uses of symptomatic mise en scène in the movie. Immediately after the assault, Ángel sheepishly apologises to Eva and she slaps him hard and decisively on his face. Eva runs away, slips on the wet, muddy floor and cuts her lip in the fall. When Ángel sees her bloody lip, his eyes roll over and he passes out, much less macho aggressor than a feminised victim. In fact, he shows signs of a severe emasculation around all the women characters, Eva and especially his repressive mother. After the failed rape attempt, Ángel goes home and has dinner with his mother. The dinner table sequence is very telling of Ángel and his mother’s relationship. While they are having cold soup, his mother scolds Ángel for his straying ways and continues to torture him, demanding that he meet with his spiritual advisor and go back to church. ‘Either you’ll take the righteous path,’ mother says, ‘or I don’t want to see you.’ His mother’s continued repression of Ángel weighs heavily on him, and Almodóvar sets up the shot/reverse shot arrangement of the two at the table, placing a centrepiece in the shape of a hen sitting on top of a pile of eggs, suggestive of the mother’s overprotection of the young man. The mother hen literally puts her weight on the sons ‘eggs’, an emasculating gesture since huevos is Spanish slang for testicles. She continues her psychological abuse at the table, stating: ‘Sometimes I think you are crazy, like your father.’ Thus the dinner table scene emphasises Spain’s repressive religious, political and cultural past as the origin of the madness of the country and in particular of Ángel’s generation, the first one born and raised under Franco. As a direct result, Almodóvar clearly suggests, Ángel struggles with feelings of insanity and sexual inadequacy. Ángel in fact goes to church the next day and attends Mass, presumably with the intention of speaking to the priest. The church setting looks extremely cold, empty and dramatically lit, as in Dark Habits, a sign of Spain’s newfound secularity. But instead of waiting for the priest, Ángel goes to a nearby police station and tries to turn himself in for the rape of Eva. Almodóvar emphasises the turn from repressive Catholicism to the

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rule of secular law, already suggested in Dark Habits. Ángel speaks with an inspector named Del Valle (Eusebio Poncela). Inspector Del Valle is introduced as a reflection on a glass door, so that he shares the frame with Ángel, seen through the glass, and thus a connection between the men is drawn. The meaning of the connection will not yet be revealed, but their early alignment in the mise en scène makes the characters seem sympathetic towards each other.3 Inspector Del Valle and Ángel very evidently measure each other up, with corresponding gazes that cannot hide a hint of mutual desire. But Ángel’s confession to Eva’s rape is foiled when she, the presumed victim, is interviewed by two policemen (one of them is Agustín Almodóvar, Pedro’s brother and business partner who customarily appears in bit parts) and denies the crime. ‘He tried to [rape me]’, admits Eva, ‘but he came between my thighs.’ Ángel is clearly embarrassed, even humiliated by the revelation of his further sexual inadequacy, unable to succeed even in taking a woman by force. Eva continues with the relation of how Ángel apologised then fainted and she refuses to press charges, in spite of Ángel’s own insistence. Ángel’s transparent show of farcical machismo continues when he confesses to four other sexual murders, those in fact committed by María (the bullfighting-inspired murderess of the opening sequence) and Diego, the bullfighting instructor. Inspector Del Valle seems incredulous of Ángel’s new confession, but since both María and Diego pick their victims at the bullfighting school, there are several links between them that Ángel may help to explain; so Ángel is detained. María Cardenal, the attorney and murderess, shows up to assume Ángel’s legal representation. Ángel protests why would she want to defend a monster like him. María replies, ‘because I think you’re innocent’. Ángel’s answer is eloquent in the context of the movie and a further reference to Norman Bates in Psycho: ‘I’m a lot guiltier than you think. Ask my mother.’ The scene in the jail shows a further evolution in Almodóvar’s use of mise en scène, as it repeats somewhat the arrangement and composition of the introduction of Inspector Del Valle. María Cardenal and Ángel also share a reflected glass, but are divided by the cell bars between them. María’s bright red lipstick, which she had used to mark the spot on her victim’s nape before stabbing him, is the most colourful and eye-catching object in the

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shot and the play with shades of bright red, fuchsia and silky gold, the colours of the bullfighting faena, is soon established as an insistent motif in the movie. In the next scene, for instance, Eva wears exaggerated bright red lipstick as well, as she pretends to be dead in bed with Diego making love (revealing further his taste for necrophilia). While he gently makes love to Eva, Diego repeatedly asks her to play dead. The representatives of patriarchal and secular law, the attorney and the teacher, are shown as the ‘perverted’ ones, while Ángel is disturbed and his mother is behind the origins of his neurosis and projected feelings of guilt. When María Cardenal visits Ángel’s mother with the intention of interviewing her in preparation for the young man’s defence, his mother at first refuses to meet with the lawyer, already convinced of her son’s guilt. For different reasons María, Diego and Eva all know that Ángel is innocent, but his mother is unforgiving. The struggle between Spain’s old reactionary Catholic values and the new rule of secular law continues when the mother and María Cardenal argue about the divine and terrestrial repercussions of Ángel’s supposed crimes. ‘Ángel should answer to God for what he’s done’, his mother says, in a prosecutorial tone. But María replies logically, ‘It’s not God who’ll decide his fate.’ His mother answers ‘Are you an atheist? . . . Already as a child, evil nested in him . . .’. His mother’s rationale is, in fact, pure Opus Dei ideology, which assumed the potential sinfulness of children and the need to clean their souls.4 Ángel’s childhood hallucinations, clairvoyance and seizures were assumed by his parents to be evil, diabolic visions, not of psychological or neurological origin, in spite of the boy’s traumatically repressive upbringing. Between Franco and the Church, between Fascism and devotion, Ángel seems to have developed a real neurotic and perhaps sociopathic condition. And, of course, María Cardenal herself is only interested in pursuing her own ‘perversions’ and in saving herself. During the movie we see María Cardenal several times applying lipstick and looking at her own image in mirrors: the bright red lipstick is both indicative of her homicidal activities (she marks her victims with it) and a reference to bullfighting. This self-reflexive motif of the character beautifying her self in front of a mirror is also indicative of Maria’s narcissism. On

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one such occasion, María is applying lipstick in her car when she sees Diego, who has been following her, through the rearview mirror. The two begin a sort of cat-and-mouse chase (which is really a seduction) and María leads Diego into a movie theatre. On screen is the climactic ‘duel’ between Luke (Gregory Peck) and Pearl (Jennifer Jones) at the end of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946). María stares at the screen seemingly transfixed, as the onscreen characters kiss and kill and confess their love to each other and die in each other’s arms. María responds to the images with apparent arousal, excited, dramatically bathed in red light reflected from the screen, when Diego enters the theatre after her. The entire scene foretells María and Diego’s own relationship. As with Grandma and Toni’s experience of Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass in What Have I Done, Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978) in High Heels, and Kazan and Mankiewicz in All About My Mother, Hollywood and European film melodrama media intersections in Almodóvar’s movies often give clues to the meaning of the narrative content, emphasising how the film fiction and the narrative ‘reality’ of Almodóvar’s characters are eternally confused. María and Diego are no exception, as we soon learn. In the gent’s toilet, María and Diego finally get together. They go to Diego’s house which combines the bullfighting school (a former active arena) and an elegant villa as living quarters. Their long process of seduction begins when, while admiring Diego’s bullfighting and teaching paraphernalia, María puts on Diego’s fuchsia and gold ‘labour’ cape. María pops into the tape player a video of Ángel’s class practice and the two discuss Ángel’s case. The young man’s motive in Eva’s rape, María explains, was to emulate his Master. They have a rough, passionate kiss; when María tries her kill (pulling the hairpin, marking the nape) Diego struggles with her and finally subdues her attempt, taking the pin. Diego gives María the same lesson he had given his pupils: ‘At the time of the kill, we must not hesitate.’ Their faces, smeared with her bright red lipstick, look as if they were bloody. But María walks away, temporarily defeated, as Diego finishes his lesson, ‘It’s the golden rule of bullfighting.’ The game with bullfighting colours, death images and self-reflexivity continues in a later sequence where Almodóvar himself, once again, shows up in the bit part of another directorial figure, the fashion designer

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Francisco Montesinos. Eva gets made up for her current fashion show, while Almodóvar gives her and the make-up artists their directions. AlmodóvarMontesinos wants Eva’s face to look disfigured, he says, while fixing his own hair in the mirror. A reporter (Verónica Forqué) begins an impromptu interview with the celebrity designer, asking about the show’s title ‘Spain Divided’. Almodóvar’s explanation is that the country ‘has always been divided in two: the envious and the intolerant . . . I am both,’ he concludes. The comical commentary is of course, a lot less harmless than the shallow fashion designer pretends: Spain is divided, between many factions, between the paradoxes of unprecedented freedom and a repressive history, between the political violence of the past (the Civil War, Fascism) and the cultural violence of sports like bullfighting, and certainly between the intolerant and the envious (Almodóvar’s detractors and competitors who resented his celebrity and success in the 1980s). And as in almost all his movies since Pepi, Luci, Bom a further reference to the movie itself is introduced when two models shoot up heroin and proceed to vomit in each other’s lap: ‘I love it,’ says Almodóvar, ‘come out to the runway that way.’ Since the beginning, of course, Almodóvar’s inclusion of body fluids, excretions and vomit in his movies works as a sort of self-parody, just like Concha Torres’ novels in Dark Habits. It is as if Almodóvar is periodically reminding his audience (and his critics) ‘Yes, it’s rubbish . . . but it’s my rubbish and it’s true.’ The fashion show sets up Eva killing a fictitious fiancé, a plot appropriate to introduce Montesino’s new line of bright-red bridal gowns, referential to the movie’s own plot. At the fashion show, Eva’s mother (Chus Lampreave) wears a fuchsia jacket; Eva wears the bright red wedding gown; and María Cardenal, who is in the audience, wears gold and fuchsia; all the women in traditional bullfighting colours. Paradoxically the matador himself, Diego, who is accompanying Eva to the show, wears drab, dark colours. Upset at the sight of Diego (although she must have known he was going to be there), María hurriedly leaves the fashion show and walks out onto the street. After a short, hurried chase that is again more a seduction than a defence, María stops on a street overpass, allowing Diego to finally catch up with her. While seemingly contemplating suicide, María tells Diego how, when she arrived in Madrid, she saw a suicide on that particular bridge. ‘I

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felt something strange,’ she says, ‘empty.’ Diego replies: ‘You and I are both obsessed with death . . .’. Clearly, Diego and María are now bonded, fully aware of their fatal connection, fully knowledgeable of each other’s crimes: the missing, raped and killed women and men from Diego’s school for which Ángel has been accused. Later at home Diego watches a videotape of the bull gore that forced him into retirement and crippled him for life (his limping a constant reminder). The video is real, graphic and shocking documentary footage of a violent goring in a crowded bullfighting arena (intercut with footage of the actor Nacho Martínez as Diego). With a fascination similar to that he shows for his snuff films at the beginning of the film, Diego watches and re-watches his own mutilation and ‘death’ (in a manner of speaking), seeing his mangled body being tossed around violently and his inert self carried away, his lips smeared with blood. In its critical, culturally referential context, which Almodóvar would revisit in Talk to Her, the image is also a commentary on Spain’s violent past and its lasting effect, since Diego carries his physical and psychological scars (his limping, his extremely violent misogyny) with him constantly, and those wounds still need to heal. As he watches the video, Diego realises that María witnessed his tragic encounter with the bull, noticing her in the crowd on the video. Now he really knows that their bond is deep and that their traumas in many ways have a similar origin. Diego gently kisses the television screen, deeply moved (and disturbed) by María’s presence in his life. Now aware of María’s motives, Diego shows up at her office, demanding to see her. They know they are destined for each other, to kill each other. Diego gives María the blood-stained cape he was wearing the day of the gore, which she embraces as a fetish. Eventually the police inspectors, who are investigating the four disappearances linked to the bullfighting school, and to which Ángel has falsely confessed, come by Diego’s house to investigate. Inspector Del Valle soon finds María’s hairpin (her murder weapon), which Diego has planted in Ángel’s locker. Inspector Del Valle had shown some sympathy to Ángel, of course, but the evidence may be damning. In his search of the school grounds, Inspector Del Valle, arrives at the practice ring: Almodóvar begins the scene with a close shot tight on a man’s training pants’ bulging crotch.

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The shot simulates Inspector Del Valle’s point of view (or angle of vision) as he observes with delight the young men’s fetishised bodies, while they practise their sword and banderilla moves. Almodóvar clearly emphasises the potentially homoerotic content of this most Spanish of sports. Between all the blood and the phallic symbolism of picador stabs, banderilla pricks and the matador’s sword thrusts, lies a strangely feminised group of sportsmen, with greatly ornate, elaborate and tight costumes, delicate body movements and a highly homoerotic content and context. Almodóvar emphasises that by putting the future toreadors in the usually feminine position of being the objects of the (homoerotic) male gaze and desire, in a sequence of shots reminiscent of the opening of Labyrinth of Passion.5 Inspector Del Valle has already been shown to have some kind of erotic interest in Ángel, and he interrogates the class about the hairpin, the missing students, Ángel’s character. But he seems much more interested in Diego’s limping and gore. In its context however, Diego’s limp is also indicative of his sexual dysfunction, a metaphoric treatment of both his sexual impotence and his perverse necrophilia. Interestingly, Inspector Del Valle does not hesitate to ask Diego, ‘Do you believe Ángel is a homosexual?’ That same question of course, when asked by Diego, was the immediate cause of Ángel’s rape attempt of Eva. But Diego’s answer is as elusive as the classification of Ángel’s sexuality: ‘He’s not easy to figure out.’6 Later, Inspector Del Valle interviews Ángel’s state-appointed psychiatrist, Julia (Carmen Maura). She concludes that Ángel suffers from a great guilt complex ‘because his family is in the Opus Dei . . .’. The scene of the interview is juxtaposed with the spectator’s first glimpse into Ángel’s ‘horrible visions’; Almodóvar shows us a montage of violent scenes (some of which could be taken from Diego’s snuff videotapes) and which include María and Diego’s murders and rapes, a street fight, a seemingly random mugging that results in a fatal stabbing, and several other acts of apparently indiscriminate violence on the streets of Madrid. The montage is cross-cut with close-up shots of Ángel’s pained facial expression, connecting the visions with his reaction. Triggered by a bout of vertigo during a hearing test, Ángel, we discover, possesses a strange clairvoyance that allows him to ‘see’ extreme violence and crimes as they occur around the city. Ángel’s psychic access to other people’s

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crimes is clearly what his mother refers to as his ‘horrible visions’ but is also the source of his ‘extreme guilt’. Almodóvar poses innocence and guilt as being related in Ángel, linked both to his repressive ubringing and the violence of the past and the present, something incompatible. Even when his lawyer María Cardenal interrogates him about the (her) pin, Ángel continues to accuse himself, since his mother has made him feel guilty no matter what the evidence of crime or sin may be. Ángel confesses the source of his psychosis to María Cardenal. ‘I wish I could go to a deserted island where no body can bother me,’ he tells María. ‘I can hear knives going in and out of flesh, pins being stabbed into napes (María’s own modus operandi), shots echoing in my head . . . I can’t stand it . . . If you only knew how many murders are committed in Madrid.’ Ángel’s ‘horrible visions’ of violence ‘in Madrid’ is of course doubly significant in the context of the film: with democracy and civil liberties also came Spain’s highest crime rate ever. But Almodóvar makes reference as well to Spain’s violent cultural and historic past, in the connection of Ángel’s neurosis to his Catholic and Fascist upbringing, and the significance and cultural baggage of bullfighting. In other words, Ángel’s entire trauma, manifested in his insecurity, his potential, closeted homosexuality, his failed rape attempt of Eva and even his neurotic confession to horribly violent sexual crimes against men and women that he did not commit, are all directly linked to the convergence of extreme sexual and political repression and a violent cultural context. María, however, makes Ángel confess to Diego’s killing of the two missing women, one strangled in the course of a rape, and the other drowned in a bathtub after sex. Ángel leads Inspector Del Valle to Diego’s villa, where he knows the bodies are buried in the garden, protected by a bed of poisonous mushrooms. Ángel digs the freshly disturbed soil with his own hands and the bodies are soon discovered. In a final moment of acknowledgment, before being taken away by the police, Ángel reassures Diego: ‘Trust me,’ knowing that Diego knows that he knows. The meaning of the gesture is surely significant in Ángel’s decision, whether demented or not, to confess to the past crimes of a chosen parental figure. In Ángel’s case he wants to pay for the crimes of ‘the father’, for the violence of the past generation. In Matador, Almodóvar links the crimes of the father, Diego’s ‘skeletons in the garden’, literally and symbolically, to the nation’s cultural past.

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Later María, seduced by the certainty of Diego’s guilt, takes him to her hideout, a villa outside Madrid, where she keeps as fetishes a number of objects from Diego’s past as well: the bloody suit he was wearing when he was gored by the bull, his cape, publicity posters and a vast array of personal objects, sold to her by Diego’s assistants over the years. María has obsessively collected Diego’s items, her fetishes, since the day she witnessed his tragic goring. María also confesses that she has been copying Diego’s moves in the ring, his bullfighting faena or labour, when seducing and killing her lovers-turned-victims. Their ensuing exchange is equally literal and paradoxically poetic, ‘You’re still a matador,’ María says, and Diego replies ‘To stop killing is to stop living.’ For Diego and María, love is death and vice versa. At María’s hideout, the two seal their pact; their fatal attraction to death and sex can only be appeased by a mutual death/love promise. María and Diego are obsessed with the literalisation of the sexual violence of the nation’s past.

‘To stop killing is to stop living’: Nacho Martínez and Assumpta Serna in Matador

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By the beginning of the third act, Ángel faces a new ‘vision’ that makes him faint: he sees Diego and María’s future sex/death moment, as the two have planned it. Ángel’s mother and Eva have revealed to the police inspector that he faints helplessly at the sight of blood, that he is, says his mother, ‘a coward, like his father’. But Ángel is also showing signs of a strange sensitivity to a forthcoming solar eclipse, which has been widely publicised on television. Incongruously, and yet interestingly, the newscaster explains that many scientists and dignitaries (‘all of them reactionaries’) are coming to Spain to witness the astronomic event. The added adjective, while not pertinent to the news, extends Almodóvar’s attention to the unusual events in the movie to make a political statement. While the ‘reactionary’ eyes of the world are fixed on Spain, violence, sexuality and the eclipse seem to converge as a single event leading eventually to Almodóvar’s most dramatic use of symptomatic mise en scène to date. Diego later breaks up with Eva over the telephone. But she makes herself up in the red wedding dress of the dead bride of Diego’s necrophiliac ‘fantasy’ and, in a last attempt to seduce him and regain his affection, goes to visit him at his villa. Instead, Eva witnesses Diego and María’s murderous confessions to each other, as the two decide to go ahead with their plans right away. Eva, who is emotionally dependent on the relationship, attempts to blackmail Diego into staying with her with threats to turn he and María in to the police but Diego is deaf to her plea. Desperate, Eva confronts María Cardenal outside her office to no avail because María and Diego finally do run away together. Eva believes, or so it seems, that she can ‘cure’ Diego of his problem: the emotional, emasculating goring that prevents him having normal sexual relations with women and also leads to his murderous misogyny. The belief that affection and ‘normal’ relations can cure Diego’s sociopathic behaviour is perhaps naive in the fiction of Matador. However, it is consistent with Almodóvar’s focus on the reconstitution of the family and the normalisation of otherwise unorthodox personal relations, as symbolic of the attempt to rebuild the nation after Franco, as a way of reconstructing the national past. But María and Diego are special, their psychopathology and symptoms too deeply disturbed, too ‘reactionary’, for hope. On his way to the mutual kill, Diego stops to greet and buy flowers from a ‘gypsy’ for-

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tune-teller (Bibi Andersen). As most of the women in the movie at some point, she wears a bright red and fuchsia shawl, the colours of bullfighting, and as an Andalusian gypsy fortune-teller she is also, like bullfighting itself, a Spanish cultural cliché. While Diego buys several dozen red roses, the gypsy woman takes a look deeply into his palm and is alarmed at the sight: Diego has no future. The suggestion that Spain’s past ‘has no future’ is a direct indication of the death of the country’s ‘reactionary’ past. And, of course, the actress Bibi Andersen, who would become increasingly important in Almodóvar’s actors’ company through the following decade, from Matador to Kika, was in the 1980s’ Spain’s most famous transsexual. Performer, actor, model and professional celebrity, Andersen’s presence in Almodóvar’s movies after Matador points to the physical body itself as a sign of the deep, difficult but ultimately necessary changes undergone by Spanish society in the transitional decade of the 1980s. Her prophetic appearance in Matador is doubly significant since it also points out the futility and danger of lingering on the meaning of the historic past, so transparently represented by Diego. After Diego finally rejects Eva, she, out of spite, tells Inspector Del Valle about Diego and María’s four murders. Now aware of their murderous past and future suicide pact, the climax begins with a chase against the clock. Inspector Del Valle, Eva and Julia, guided by Ángel’s clairvoyant ‘vision’ all try to apprehend the pair and prevent their homicidal/suicidal pact. The dramatic narrative tool of the eclipse, along with the colour co-ordination of red, fuchsia and gold, and the chase itself amount to Almodóvar’s most frenetic climax to date. Although reminiscent of the chase-to-the-airport finales of Labyrinth of Passion and later Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, in Matador the atmosphere itself, in the guise of the solar eclipse, seems to be affecting and affected by the characters’ own narrative plight. The chase takes us outside of Madrid itself, for the first time in Almodóvar’s career, to the countryside village of Chinchón, where María’s villa is located. The country setting, the site of Grandma Blasa and Toni’s utopian dreams in What Have I Done To Deserve This!? is here presented as something rarefied, natural yet eerie with the effect of the approaching eclipse and María and Diego’s unnatural arrangement. The villa in

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Chinchón is ultimately a cultural and spatial regression for María and Diego to express their perverted passions (that use of the country space will return later in Kika). In María’s living room, the woman and her last lover get nude and embrace near the fireplace, with the song ‘Espérame en el cielo’ (by Paquito López Vidal) playing in the background. As so often happens in Almodóvar’s narrative imaginary, as with the scene from Duel in the Sun that also predicted their own inevitable outcome, the song’s lyrics (‘Wait for me in heaven, my love, if you go away first . . . over there among cotton clouds, we will make our nest’ sung by Mina) is the type of popular culture media intersection that Almodóvar employs not so much to prefigure a character’s action or fate (a much less-inspired practice) as to emphasise the relationship between (popular) art and the entanglements of his fiction. But the high-angle shot, the torch song, the fireplace, María’s cape play, are all also a reflexive visitation of romantic, cultural and sexual clichés (especially when Diego caresses María’s nude pubis with a rose clenched between his teeth). ‘I love you more than my own death,’ they pledge to each other.

‘I’m a lot guiltier than you think’: Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas in Matador

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With María’s revolver and hairpin, a red rose by their side, María and Diego finally consummate their passions spread over a bull skin. Sex and death finally converge as María kills Diego with the hairpin and then approaches the gun and puts it in her mouth at the moment of orgasm. Death and the ultimate sexual pleasure coincide with the eerie context of the solar eclipse: Inspector Del Valle, Eva, Julia and Ángel arrive at the villa and are immediately detained by the heavenly phenomenon, looking awestruck into the reddened sun. The shot of the four characters looking into the sky is flooded with the saturated red, whose implications in dramatic narrative (‘passion’, ‘danger’, ‘love’, ‘death’) make for a comical and selfreflexive moment as the whole scene turns red with María and Diego’s climax. As they look up, they hear the single gunshot coming from the house. When they run inside they find María and Diego nude and dead in each other’s arms, the scene suggestive of a couple cuddling after making love, with the whole romantic setting around them: red capes, silk sheets, the rose and the gun. Ángel is regretful that he couldn’t ‘save’ Diego in spite of his earnest attempt. Even Inspector Del Valle is impressed with the sight: ‘It’s better this way,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so happy in my life’ and the scene fades to red. Almodóvar’s experiment with Matador thus ends in an overly dramatic, clichéd romantic setting that is clearly a parody of itself. Ultimately what the film’s entire scenario and mise en scène suggest is a very reflexive look at the meaning of cultural baggage for Almodóvar’s generation. The movie’s ornate combination of the literal and metaphoric cultural symbolism of Catholicism, repression, bullfighting, Spain’s Fascist past, sexual inadequacy and sexual abuse, and its exploration of the physical and psychological wounds of the past represents up to its release in 1986, a summary and deeper elaboration of Almodóvar’s topics so far. But in its careful and deliberate attention to mise en scène, cinematography, the co-ordination of costumes and sets, and other technical and stylistic matters, it also exemplifies Almodóvar’s visible transformation into auteur, into a director with a coherent vision, and a perceptive combination of style and topics with special attention to the meaning of objects in the mise en scène. In his next phase, as his movies become more and more dramatically complex,

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Almodóvar became increasingly aware of the nuances of dramatic structure, especially in his attention to narrative structure and character development. His follow-up film to Matador, The Law of Desire is in fact, still considered by many critics to be Almodóvar’s greatest achievement as a director and screenwriter, his most personal film, and certainly his most mature malecentred drama until Talk to Her.

The Law of Desire (1987) Almodóvar’s self-reflexive sex thriller La ley del deseo was the first film to be made under the director’s own banner and production company ‘El Deseo, S.A.’ (Desire, Ltd), with his production team firmly in place, in partnership with his brother Agustín, and with the assistance of the Ministry of Culture and a number of other Spanish and European private and public corporations. It was also Almodóvar’s most transparently self-reflexive film since Pepi, Luci, Bom in which the writing of a screenplay within the fiction directly addressed the action and characters of the film and the process of authorship itself. In The Law of Desire, Almodóvar returns to those concerns and composes his most ‘queer’ narrative to date, centred around the romantic, creative and sexual misadventures of a celebrated Madrid film and theatre director. Almodóvar also concentrates on the pains of authorship and on the physical and psychological trauma of change. The movie begins with the production of a film-within-the-film, as we see an actor enter the frame, and we hear in the soundtrack the instructions given to him by the off-screen voice of the director. Following the instructions strictly, the actor sits on a bed, undresses slowly, observes and then kisses his own reflection in the mirror. The voice off is firm yet gentle, specific in the instructions, correcting as necessary, the actor’s errors (‘Don’t look at me . . . Don’t look at me!’). The off-screen voice of the director becomes strangely familiar as the sequence develops and the sexual content more frank. Eventually the director orders the actor ‘Ask me to fuck you’ and to masturbate, while their voices on the soundtrack become more and more engaged in the sexual transaction. But then Almodóvar reveals the cinematic apparatus as he has never done before, beginning his mounting fetishisation of cinema technology, continued in Women on the Verge of a

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Nervous Breakdown, Talk to Her and Bad Education. At the climactic moment of the scene while the gorgeous young actor on screen masturbates, Almodóvar cruelly breaks the illusion revealing the two middle-aged, overweight, balding men who are actually providing the sensuous voices to the post-dubbing that is under way. The scene is especially reflexive of the influential branch of post-dubbing in the Spanish film and television industries where virtually all foreign-language films for screen release or television are dubbed into Spanish, but where also almost all motion-picture dialogue and sound is added in the post-production process.7 The scene of the dubbing actors then cuts to a shot of the reels of a flatbed Moviola editing machine, and in close-up, a grease pencil marking a frame for picture–sound synchronisation. The scene turns to the finale of the movie-within-the-movie: it is the premiere, and on screen the word ‘FIN’ in bright red letters marks, paradoxically, the beginning. A woman (Carmen Maura) exits the screening room and meets up with a man (Eusebio Poncela) in the lobby of the theatre, while another man (Antonio Banderas) walks across the screen away from the other two characters. Almodóvar introduces the triptych of principal characters whose lives the film pursues in a single freeze frame that clearly aligns two and alienates the third. Apparently inspired by the screen images (that we have just seen) the ‘third man’ (Banderas) hurries to the theatre WC, locks himself up in a stall and begins to masturbate, repeating to himself the screen character’s mantra ‘Fuck me . . . Fuck me . . .’. Indeed, the disturbed young man, as we will learn in the course of the narrative seems to have difficulty distinguishing reality and fantasy, fiction and fact. But Almodóvar has already set up the problem with the opening sequence deception. Thus, in The Law of Desire Almodóvar begins with and continues to develop a complex exploration of the relationship between the protagonist’s (Poncela) fictional and factual worlds, as well as focusing on the topics of authorship and identity, from his previous features. At the party that follows the premiere the previously seen characters are properly introduced: the film director, Pablo (Poncela), his sister Tina (Maura), Pablo’s young lover, Juan (Miguel Molina) and the devoted fan, Antonio (Banderas, using his own artistic name). From a reporter’s ques-

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tions, we learn that Pablo is a workaholic. He will soon begin directing Cocteau’s La Voix humaine for the stage and he loves making films (‘The Paradigm of the Clam’, ‘Ass Face’, ‘Remake’ and ‘Halitosis’ are among their titles), but detests watching them. And we learn that Pablo Quintero has been thus far promiscuous in all his love and sexual affairs. Pablo is clearly fond of Juan who is leaving for the coast for the summer. Later in the night, Juan visits Pablo’s flat, where the two get in bed together tenderly but do not make love. Instead they sweetly break up their affair; in the background, on the turntable, Maysa Mataraso sings Jacques Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (‘Don’t Leave Me’), the song made famous by Mireille Mathieu. The song will become a motif in the film and like so many other theme songs in Almodóvar’s movies, its lyrics mimic the character’s emotions, as later Los Panchos’ song ‘Lo dudo’ (‘I Doubt It’), composed by Chucho Navarro, does. Dawn catches the two men nude in bed, in a beautifully romantic sunrise-to-bedroom cut. In The Law of Desire Almodóvar introduces one of the landmarks of queer cinema aesthetics, by treating homosexual relations without excess or reflexive rarefying effects, simply as romantic and/or sexual relations. In other words, Almodóvar’s representation of a potentially sensationalist theme as something quotidian makes The Law of Desire a landmark of queer cinema in which the focus on homosexual desire creates a viable romantic plot that adopts the narrative and stylistic conventions of the representation of heterosexual romance. The devoted fan, Antonio, shows early signs of a dangerous attachment to his object of desire, Pablo, when he enters a Madrid clothing store and purchases a silk printed shirt identical to the one Pablo was wearing at the movie premiere. Antonio’s crisis of identity and desire is further emphasised when he takes detailed notes about Pablo’s ideal lover, described in a television interview. But it is also evident that Pablo suffers from a deep and potentially clinical case of narcissism. Creative and narcissistic, Almodóvar marks Pablo as someone with the evident need for creative control, for authorship. After receiving a friendly postcard from Juan, he replies: ‘I like your letter, but it’s not what I need. I’ll type up the one I want. Sign it and send it back to me.’ Later, Pablo types up Juan’s letter and Almodóvar intertwines the actors’ two voices, sharing the voice-over in the soundtrack. The

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A landmark of queer cinema: The Law of Desire

scene intercuts Pablo at the typewriter with extreme close-up shots of the machine’s legs hitting the paper, typing: ‘I adore you . . .’ Pablo creates his own reality and fantasy, attempting, like the fiction-maker that he is, to make ‘characters’ of all the people that surround him. Eventually Pablo’s narcissism is overcome by his realisation that he cannot control everyone as if they were his characters and in this process he learns a terrific lesson of humility and openness. It is his relationship with his sister, Tina, which allows for Pablo’s emotional development. In many ways, The Law of Desire is Almodóvar’s most mature narrative to date and paradoxically also his most classically structured as it is a story very much organised around a central character’s emotional journey. In contrast to Pablo’s narcissism, Tina is portrayed as a selfless character in several ways. She is, for instance, the devoted caretaker of a child of twelve or so named Ada, the daughter of a famous model who is touring Japan. Tina explains, ‘I have to keep her. She hates her grandparents, and is in love with [Pablo].’ Interestingly then, Ada’s mother (played by Bibi Andersen later in the film) suffers from a form of narcissism similar to Pablo’s: her personal, professional, sexual and romantic pursuits come before her daughter’s needs. Ada, however, also expresses the wish that

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Pablo were her father, a romantic–filial confusion that ultimately links her even closer to Tina, her caretaker. Tina, however imperfect, is as devoted to Ada as to her brother Pablo. Out for a walk with the girl, Tina has a Proustian moment when she walks by her primary school and parish at Serrano 127 (Almodóvar often uses the exact names and/or addresses of places or firms in Madrid, emphasising the city’s provincial quality and spirit). Nostalgic for her past, Tina and Ada get through an opening in the iron fence and walk by the patio towards the church. Tina sighs, ‘How many times I jerked off within these walls!’ Inside the chapel, Tina begins to sing a song to the Virgin Mary, accompanying the already playing organ. In a sudden performative moment of self-reflexivity, Tina turns to and walks toward the camera continuing her singing in a sort of first-person address to the spectator. The shot opens up slightly wider to reveal an old priest at the organ. The two finish the song together, and Tina explains: ‘As a child I used to sing in the choir.’ The priest, a bit baffled, responds: ‘You remind me of a young lad who also used to sing here.’ Tina breaks the momentary spell caused by the memory: ‘Father Constantino, it’s me.’ But the priest is incredulous and slightly repulsed: ‘It’s not possible, you’ve changed much.’ Tina’s response is eloquent and prophetic, symbolic of Almodóvar’s treatment of transsexual characters for the rest of his career. She says ‘No, I’m essentially the same.’ That ‘essence’ of Tina’s identity is instrumental in understanding the character and the film as a whole, as it suggests that, in spite of much ‘change’ which in Tina’s case is physical, emotional and psychological, Tina’s personality is not so much changed as it is adjusted. Regardless of all the trauma of the past, which Tina will soon reveal, the process of adjustment and reconstruction, of rebuilding and confronting the past, will ensure the character’s and the nation’s survival. In fact, in the course of the conversation with Fr Constantino, Tina begins for the first time, as far as we can tell, to dig up and explore the wounds of her past, allegorical of the national identity crisis. It turns out that Tina had been the victim of sexual abuse, which s/he confused with love, from both her father and the priest (later to be one of the themes of Bad Education). Tina’s process of reassessing, understanding and healing the resentment and wounds of the past begins with the revelation that ‘in [her] life there were only two men’, her

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father and Fr Constantino. ‘You both abandoned me,’ she concludes. As in Matador, the trauma and abuse of Franco’s patriarchal state and a repressive Catholic upbringing result ultimately in abandonment, pain, mistreatment and sexual and psychological abuse. And yet Tina is determined to confront her past in order to retain some sense of identity, which is particularly logical for someone who has, as is now evident, reinvented her present. Her memories, she says, however traumatic, are the only past she has left. While Tina’s reinvention begins with the (long, painful and traumatic) transformation of his/her body, her tender devotion to her brother and Ada offer a glimpse into Almodóvar’s interest in recreating the family as a reflection of the nation. While Tina, Pablo and Ada will ultimately convene into a ‘queer’ and happily ‘incestuous’ family (with both Tina’s and Ada’s romantic attachment to paternal figures), it will evolve nevertheless into a potentially functional one. Just like Spain in the 1980s, this family has a pressing need to confront its history, to endure a lot of pain but eventually have the chance to recreate itself. The detour into Tina’s confrontation of her past is even more significant because Almodóvar himself was educated by Salesian fathers and, as a child, sang in the choir and was a soloist at his Catholic school in La Mancha and Cáceres.8 Tina and Pablo then seem to represent different stages of Almodóvar’s own development in this most selfreflexive of his films. Unexpectedly the visit to the church makes Ada suddenly religious and she professes her devotion to the Virgin Mary. Ada makes a promise to the Virgin and builds a makeshift altar, a pastiche rendering of pious and profane figures. Unlike the Mother Superior’s wall shrine to the world’s sinners in Dark Habits, Ada’s promise involves the restoration of the family as she prays to the Virgin for work and for Pablo never to abandon them. The promise pays off immediately when Pablo offers Tina the leading role in La Voix humaine. Meanwhile Pablo begins to work on his next project, a feature film screenplay titled ‘Laura P.’ about a woman’s violent relationship with and revenge on an abusive former lover.9 Eventually at the opening of La Voix humaine, Antonio returns looking for Pablo and finally forces their acquaintance at the after-show party. Still moping about losing Juan, who has become distant over the holiday, Pablo accepts Antonio’s advances and

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takes him home. But Antonio warns Pablo that he ‘usually’ does not sleep with men. He snoops around the flat, asks questions about Tina’s transsexuality, and shows an uncomfortable attachment to Pablo who he has just met. But Pablo effects a successful seduction. Pablo gives Antonio, supposedly the uninitiated, all the lovemaking instructions (always the director), and Antonio assumes the ‘passive’ missionary position. But Antonio also shows signs of an incongruous conservatism, accusing Pablo of promiscuity and enquiring nervously about ‘venereal’ diseases. Along with his instant attachment to Pablo, his assumption of the ‘feminine’ role in the sexual act itself (from a patriarchal perspective) and his concern with Pablo’s sexual past, Antonio seems both conservative and possessive in an ‘old Spain’ sort of way in contrast to Pablo’s contemporary, carefree and narcissistic ways. After their initial sexual encounter, Antonio continues to snoop around possessively in the flat, until he finds and reads one of Juan’s letters. Antonio is very upset with the content of the letter, and writes an insulting letter of his own to Pablo, before leaving the flat in the middle of the night. The next day we see Pablo again at the typewriter, the medium long shot shows him from behind, with the bright blinds in front of him. He is typing, apparently, his new screenplay, ‘Laura P.’ and in the background the song ‘Lo dudo’ by Trio Los Panchos is not so much an accompaniment as a complement to this activity. While the lyrics seem to mimic Antonio’s possessive stand (‘I doubt it, I doubt it, I doubt it, that you’ll ever get to love me, the way that I love you . . .’) Pablo’s typing is synchronised to the song’s beat. Like ‘Ne me quitte pas’ in Tina and Ada’s life, the song ‘Lo dudo’ is another media intersection which Almodóvar incorporates into Antonio’s plot, literally, metaphorically and even stylistically. Antonio returns, now obsessed with Pablo; he steals a set of keys and starts fixing things around the house. Pablo types up a new break-up letter addressed to Antonio, admitting his narcissism: ‘Don’t fall in love with me. I’m too egotistical and I can’t share my life.’ But Antonio responds with an even more possessive attitude, giving Pablo some matrimonial advice, lifted from Juan’s (false) letter, before leaving for the country himself. Interestingly the conversation leads to further revelations about Antonio’s strange brand of conservatism; he asks

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Pablo to remain faithful and to stop snorting cocaine and he demands that Pablo write letters to him but sign them with a woman’s name. Antonio’s past and present repression and obsession makes him want to protect himself and to deny his homosexuality when he is in the context of his provincial city of Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz). Interestingly then, in The Law of Desire, Madrid is the centre of free expression, of free sexuality, of art and creative authority, but the provincial city can still be the site of repression. Back in his home town of Jerez, Antonio warns Pablo, ‘my mother is German, and she likes to spy around . . .’. Antonio’s schizophrenic relationship with his own sexuality, between conservatism, patriarchal authority and homosexual desire, ultimately emerges as a sign of instability, an expression of the difficulties of coping with forbidden desire and repression. Antonio’s repressed, authoritarian upbringing finally gets the best of him and his emerging criminal behaviour is a clear expression of his maternal and paternal models.

‘I don’t usually sleep with men’: Antonio Banderas and Eusebio Poncela in The Law of Desire

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Almodóvar again contrasts Antonio’s repressive past with a promising future as the relationships of Pablo, Tina and Ada are evolving into a ‘normal’ family. Integrating theatre with cinema narrative, in one scene from La Voix humaine we see Tina on stage destroying a bedroom with an axe while Ada, standing on a dolly, tracks slowly across the stage, lip-synching Maysa Mataraso’s rendition of ‘Ne me quitte pas’. Almodóvar revisits his narrative motif of the confusion between theatrical performance and real emotions when, in the middle of the show, Ada’s mother visits the theatre and watches her daughter from backstage. Later in the dressing room, Ada and her mother have their only real conversation in the movie. Ada’s mother wants her daughter to go with her to Japan, where she has found a lover, but Ada confronts her mother with resentment about her abandonment and narcissism, and refuses to leave Tina and Pablo. As he did later in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, High Heels and All About My Mother, Almodóvar uses a theatrical or performance space (the stage, recording studio, the backstage or dressing room) as a privileged space where, paradoxically, characters have access to their real emotions. And for the part of Ada’s mother Almodóvar again resorts to the model and actress Bibi Andersen. Here Almodóvar introduces a further layer of meaning in terms of the creation of a viable identity in the midst of crisis by having Andersen, a transsexual, playing the role of a ‘real’ woman (i.e., mother), while Carmen Maura plays the part of the transsexual. Gender and real identity are not confused, just fused. Almodóvar’s attempt to suggest the re-creation of an alternative national family involves the reassessment of gender roles in a patriarchal society so focused on change in the 1980s. The inversion of the conventional gender roles of woman and/or mother in The Law of Desire is another way Almodóvar addresses both the need to challenge social, political and sexual attitudes and the potential scale of change that is needed. To wit, the superimposition of paradoxes (by which theatre becomes reality; man becomes woman; transsexual becomes mother) in The Law of Desire ultimately suggests that the process of reconstructing the national family is one that demands more than compromise, but profound transformations.10 Back on stage, the theatre sequence ends with the reprise of ‘Ne me quitte pas’. Tina acts out a painful break-up over a red telephone with an

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unnamed interlocutor (a preview of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) while the song on Ada’s lips is not so much a performance as an address to her mother backstage. The confusion between her reality and the drama makes Ada break down in tears. In Almodóvar’s world, as underlined in All About My Mother, theatre is reality while reality is made of superficiality and appearances, whether it is about emotions or gender roles. Significantly, Ada’s mother is a model, a career concerned with the superficial. Ada unequivocally rejects her mother’s attempt at reconciliation precisely because she does not sense that her mother is sincere. Instead, Ada has a further moment of bonding with Tina when the two share a bed after the night’s performance and confrontation. In twin Betty Boop nightshirts and their matching brown hair, it is evident that Ada’s chosen family is indeed more real than her only blood relative that we know of, in spite of the fact that Tina is not Ada’s biological mother and, being a transsexual, cannot physiologically give birth either. Yet Ada puts her arms around Tina and sincerely professes her love and devotion to Tina and Pablo. Consistent with Almodóvar’s theme of the reconstruction of the national family and national identity, this family of Ada, Tina and Pablo, gets the opportunity to invent itself.

Bodies in transition: Carmen Maura as Tina in The Law of Desire

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Pablo’s romantic plot continues with a telephone call from Juan; a splitscreen keeps them in the same frame, stating their solid connection. In contrast an angry, obsessive and paranoid phone call from Antonio to Pablo further characterises the volatility of their brief affair. Aware of and concerned about the evidently close bond between Juan and Pablo, Antonio sneaks out of his mother’s house in Jerez and rides his motorcycle to a nearby town where Juan tends bar by the Trafalgar lighthouse. Pretending to bring news from Pablo, Antonio gets Juan drunk with whisky and takes him to the lighthouse where, in a fight that is also a failed seduction or even a rape attempt, Antonio kills Juan by throwing him off the lighthouse cliff. Later, back at home, Antonio burns the evidence against him: the shirt identical to Pablo’s, which was torn during the fight with Juan. Antonio shows signs of an unusual struggle between his unbridled desire and his crippling repression. While he is burning the shirt in his toilet, his mother (Helga Liné) is desperately knocking at the bedroom door, trying to gain access to her son’s secret. In fact, this mother figure, very much like Ángel’s in Matador, is evidently the cause of many of her son’s problems. While disapproving of her son’s secrecy and at the same time lying to the police to protect him (they have come by to enquire about Juan’s death), the mother shows signs of the type of repressive presence in her son’s life already familiar in Almodóvar’s films. ‘Sometimes you scare me,’ she says, ‘between your father’s politics and you . . . you’re going to kill me.’ Antonio’s mother is one of the maternal types in Almodóvar films characterised as repressive, obsessive, castrating, irrational and even demented (which we will see even more directly expressed in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown); a maternal type that represents a shorthand for the Spanish, Catholic, Fascist conservatism of the 1950s–70s. This mother, who Antonio describes as ‘German’ (for many Spaniards, another cliché of control, conservatism and intolerance), is a symbol of the retrograde mentality that remains firmly in place in provincial Spain, in spite of the political and social progress of the 1980s. Furthermore, the vague references to her absent husband’s involvement in local politics (he is an elected official in the regional parliament) at several points in the film also suggests that she has little understanding of the new political processes or, in other words, of democracy. Indeed,

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Antonio’s mother, like Ángel’s in Matador and like Carlos’s in Women on the Verge (all of them characters played by Antonio Banderas) and like the Empress of Tirán in Labyrinth of Passion, are all at least partially responsible for deeply ‘disturbed’ reactions in their sons, for the sons’ sexual and/or social inadequacies. These mother figures all seem to have extreme difficulties in adjusting to Spain’s new democratic and secular ways. This attitude however, as we will see, is very much revised in Almodóvar’s maternal melodramas of the1990s, High Heels, The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh and All About My Mother. Eventually, Pablo arrives at Antonio’s house, purportedly with news, but with more questions about Juan’s death. It is immediately clear to Pablo what has happened and that Antonio’s obsession is insane. After a fight in which Pablo bites and draws blood from Antonio’s lip, afraid of Antonio’s irrational violence against Juan, Pablo drives away on country roads, apparently aimlessly. A comical dissolve from Pablo’s eyes and the car tyres, leads to the extreme close-up of Pablo’s eyes and a cut to his point of view of the road ahead of him, which is then interrupted by his own tears, streaming over the camera lens. The sequence creates the effect of Pablo’s involvement in his own thoughts, of his meditation on the events that have led to Juan’s death: his own self-involvement, and narcissism, his own hedonist pursuit of desire. Distracted by his thoughts, Pablo crashes his car against an olive tree. After being rescued by the Civil Guard (Spain’s national police), Pablo is put in hospital in Madrid, where Tina visits him regularly. The accident leaves Pablo amnesiac (of course), and Tina and his physician systematically avoid questions from the police. The two police detectives are a comical contrast to other authority figures thus far introduced in Almodóvar’s movies. They are a father/son team sharply contrasted by their opposing attitudes to their profession. The elder (Almodóvar regular Fernando Guillén) is a liberal-thinking, slightly crooked cop who enjoys a line or two of cocaine, dresses casually and flirts openly with Tina, incredulous at the thought that she ‘used to be a guy’. The younger policeman is conservative, professional in dress, jealous of procedure, homophobic and misogynistic. The contrast is atypical for Almodóvar who more often sets up ideological differences on strict generational lines, the younger being usually

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the more liberal. But with these two, Almodóvar’s inversion of his own pattern suggests, much like Antonio’s paradoxes of character, that the differences of opinion in Spain’s society are not so much generational but ideological; they remind us of the possibility that Spain might turn rightwing again, as in fact the election of the Popular Party and Prime Minister José María Aznar a decade later confirmed.11 It is the younger of the two detectives who harasses Tina, who they suspect to be ‘Laura P.’ and Juan’s killer. He accuses her of being ‘not a real woman’. He calls Pablo and Tina ‘faggots’ and assures them that they will pay for Juan’s death, prejudicially presuming their guilt. Pablo’s amnesia while in hospital gives Almodóvar the opportunity to address the topic of historic memory more directly in The Law of Desire than in any of his previous films. While caring for and tending to Pablo in hospital, Tina is deeply concerned about Pablo’s loss of memory. Her memory, as she told Fr Constantino at the church, ‘is the only thing [she] has’. Tina’s only past and history is now lost for Pablo who is also her only remaining blood relative (their mother is dead, their father estranged in New York). Thus Tina takes on the responsibility of reconstructing their historic memory. She reveals the tragic past; a traumatic family history of incest and sexual abuse. As a boy, Tina was her father’s homosexual child lover (as suggested by her conversation with Fr Constantino). The two eloped to Morocco, where she had her sex-change operation, but eventually, although they were ‘happy’, her father left Tina for another woman. ‘I loved him,’ Tina says to her brother, ‘I would have given up my life for him.’ Tina and Pablo, who had been estranged since the escape to Morocco, finally reconciled at their mother’s funeral years later. With tears in her eyes, Tina makes her final appeal for Pablo to recover his memory: ‘Your amnesia leaves me with no past . . . If you don’t recover your memory I’ll go insane. You are the only thing I have.’ Tina and Pablo’s recounted history in The Law of Desire, a narrative device that Almodóvar continues to elaborate in his career with the inclusion of flashbacks and other strategies, is perhaps the director’s best dramatic moment to date. It is especially telling that in spite of their history of sexual abuse, incest, painful physical and emotional transformations, and of repressive Catholicism under Franco, Tina insists

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that they recover their memory, that they reconcile their identity with their past, because it is, however traumatic, ‘all [they] have’. The moment shows Almodóvar’s continuing allegorical treatment of national history and family history, of the projection of personal identity issues into national and cultural anxieties and highlights of the need for (national) reconciliation. In fact, after the dramatic moment between the brother and sister, after their joint effort to reclaim their past, Tina’s first sign of recovery (as she is glad to tell Pablo as soon as he recovers his memory) is that she has met a man and fallen in love. Before that, Tina had, of course, ‘loved’ only two men, her father and her spiritual advisor, Fr Constantino. Thus, the film’s third act begins with the promise of a new romantic life for Tina. The police detectives, however, soon break the illusion when they announce that Tina’s lover is none other than Antonio (who, like Pablo and Tina, is a suspect in Juan’s death). Pablo tries to warn Tina on the telephone, but she is at home with Ada and Antonio, who quickly realises what the call is about. Pablo has barely time to warn her: ‘He’s a good kid, but he’s completely insane!’. The warning works, momentarily. Tina tells Antonio that Pablo has died, that he has committed suicide, but he can see right through her; paradoxically when it really matters, Tina cannot act. Tina and Antonio have a violent fight in which he ends up overpowering her, while Ada escapes. Meanwhile, Pablo and the police are on their way to the flat, convinced that Antonio will harm Tina. When the police arrive, Tina is tied up, and Antonio threatens to kill her and anybody who gets in his way because, he says, ‘I’m really crazy, damn it!’. Pablo agrees to talk to Antonio, who is keeping Tina hostage. She feels deceived again by the two men she loves; they have both lied to her. Her last words to Pablo before being released by Antonio are ‘I hate you . . . both.’ Tina’s short-lived reconciliation with men will need to be revised, but she will reunite and reconcile with Pablo, as the two siblings and Ada eventually form a family, however unorthodox. After Antonio agrees to release Tina, he asks to be left alone with Pablo for one hour. Tina, Ada and the cops wait outside, looking anxiously up into the flat’s balcony, several stories up. The final two sequences of the film take up again and reassess the topics of the film. Pablo is first drawn to his typewriter, so prominent in the first

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A filial love triangle: ‘He’s a good kid, but he’s completely insane.’

half of the movie. He curses it for causing the summer’s problems, since at the centre of the plot lies the confusion of the authorship of Pablo’s, Juan’s and Laura P.’s letters. In the background, candles and offerings burn on Ada’s altar to the Virgin Mary. Antonio’s request to have an hour alone with Pablo is clearly a last, desperate attempt at romantic reconciliation. But every one of those elements involves a deception: there’s no Laura P., no real letters from Juan, no real devotion, only the confusion of need with chance and there is no romance between Pablo and Antonio. Perhaps, what is there is the self-reflexive paradox of a story whose fiction seems to take on a life of its own. Thus, Pablo’s reaction to the sight of the typewriter, his anger and irrational blaming of his and Tina’s and Juan’s problems on the machine. Antonio seems focused on effecting a seduction, or so he seems to believe. He puts on the self-reflexive song already introduced in Pablo’s break-up letter, Trio Los Panchos recording of ‘Lo dudo’, which also accompanied Laura P.’s ‘letters’ to Antonio in the beginning of the second act. The song as always, more than echoing the character’s feelings, is

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prophetic, and certainly true: ‘I doubt it, I doubt it, I doubt it, that you’ll ever get to love me, the way that I love you . . .’. Antonio tenderly, resigned, sings the song to Pablo, accompanying the recording, and carrying Pablo to bed, as if they were a newlywed couple. Antonio undresses Pablo delicately and seems to confuse his own words with the corny lyrics: ‘To love you this way,’ he tells Pablo, ‘is a crime . . . but I’m willing to pay for it.’ As in the final sequence of Matador, the romantic mise en scène at the end of The Law of Desire is also a parody of itself, with the song, the altar candles, the moody lighting. In bed, Antonio is nostalgic, harmless, performing for Pablo as with a director: ‘How am I doing?’ he asks. ‘You taught me.’ Antonio and Pablo make love in bed, apparently, superficially happy. Almodóvar introduces some surprisingly metaphoric sexual references that are unusual for him. Instead of the lovemaking scene, Almodóvar cuts to the rhythmic motion of the patrol car lights, and two pods or nuts swinging together, hanging from a keychain. The effect is both comical and paradoxical, and a show of restraint that seems premature in a director’s career whose only movie with no sexual content, All About My Mother, came in 1999. Back inside, after sex, Antonio covers Pablo’s body with a sheet, motherly, protective, because he says it is cold. In his briefs, Pablo’s slender, practically nude body under the white sheet seems reminiscent of Christ under the shroud. The moment of serenity is shortlived when Antonio excuses himself to go to the next room and Pablo, alarmed, calls out to him. ‘Don’t come over here!’ yells Antonio before shooting himself in the head. Pablo drags himself to Antonio’s body (his leg still in a cast, after the car accident). He holds Antonio’s body up in his arms, in the guise of a queer pietà; in the background Ada’s altar is now on fire, making the religious allusion even more profane. The mise en scène is more than dramatic, melodramatic incorporating symptomatic use of mise en scène with the religious allusion, and with the sudden redemption of Antonio of whom Pablo now seems curiously protective. Pablo’s last gesture of anger and desperation is to pick up his accursed typewriter from the floor and toss it violently out the window. Inexplicably, yet symbolically, the typewriter explodes in a ball of fire and smoke upon hitting the floor of a dumpster on the street, and thus the movie ends.

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There is an intriguing succession of symbolic objects in the final scenes of The Law of Desire which incorporate incongruous religious imagery into a failed love story, create a heretofore unseen sympathy for the clearly maladjusted Antonio and resolve the authorship crisis with the added reflexive element of the exploding typewriter. It is as if Almodóvar were assessing the content and themes of his previous films in this strangely self-reflexive and tragic story of desire, narcissism, the tribulations of the creative process and the perennial confusion between life and melodrama. Until his 2004 film Bad Education, Almodóvar would not present another such elaborate, self-reflexive and self-referential structure, story and style. Through his first six films Almodóvar creates a convincing and telling contrast between opposing political, sexual and religious views in 1980s’ Spain that evolve in complexity from the transparently criminal and Fascist policeman in Pepi, Luci, Bom, to the deeply disturbed Diego in Matador and Antonio in The Law of Desire. However, while these often involve relationships between young men and women of Almodóvar’s own generation and more mature parental figures, it is not simply a generational ideological gap, it is something more profound, which explains in part Antonio’s own contradictory views about sexuality and relationships.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) The presence of Hitchcock in Almodóvar’s films often appears in the form of ‘appropriation’ rather than homage. While allusions to Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, Ingmar Bergman and other directors are usually referential and frequently acknowledged (for example, in Almodóvar’s Patty Diphusa writings there is a story in homage to Sirk entitled ‘Scrotum in the Wind’, and in High Heels the two principal characters discuss how their lives mimic the relationship between Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata), citations from Hitchcock films are incorporated into the narrative and generic configurations with which the director plays. Hitchcock becomes Almodóvar’s own discourse. Almodóvar’s interest in Hitchcock as a visual stylist is well documented, and he once stated that Hitchcock’s films were ‘visually the richest in the history of the cinema’.14 But while some critics dismiss Almodóvar’s generic and

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intertextual games as ironic humour or ‘pastiche’, they help us to understand better Almodóvar’s aesthetics as a discourse on crisis that aspires constantly to reinvent and ‘correct’ itself.15 This section explores the meaning and contribution of the Hitchcockian appropriations in his most popular film, Mujeres al Borde de un ataque de nervios to Almodóvar’s style and discourse. Almodóvar’s style is based in part on the instability of genre as a metaphor of sexual and national identity, and it often draws from Hitchcockian themes and direct quotations from Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Peter W. Evans has pointed out and analysed some of these references in his excellent case study on Women on the Verge.16 Almodóvar resorts to Hitchcock allusions repeatedly, but in no film does he do that so much, or so poetically, as in Women on the Verge, where he uses direct citations and motifs from Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), Spellbound (1945), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial ‘M’ for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho and The Birds (1963). Almodóvar’s films exploit their generic ‘indefinition’ for dramatic value, playing equally with the conventions of melodrama, screwball comedy and the thriller. Helping to hold the structure of Women on the Verge together are many Hitchcockian allusions that emerge in key moments of crisis and revelation. Almodóvar’s intertextual experimentation is instrumental to the exploration of identity issues that characterises his films. His reworking of Hitchcock in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (as did his visit ten years later to Elia Kazan, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Tennessee Williams in All About My Mother) is particularly meaningful but not just because of its post-modernist irreverence. Its significance lies in the complexity of intertextuality and how it serves to deepen the meaning of what really is an emerging multicultural aesthetic that has helped Almodóvar redefine the meaning of national cinema. Almodóvar here appropriates Hitchcock and Hitchcock’s meaning to make a statement on Spanish national and cultural identity in a moment of crisis. Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown tells the story of television commercials and voice-dubbing actress Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura) and her attempts to communicate with her ex-lover Iván (Fernando

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Guillén). They have recently broken up, but Pepa has just learned that she is pregnant. That information serves as the MacGuffin, and the movie follows Pepa through her attempts over the course of two days to speak with Iván, tell him the news and perhaps convince him to get back with her. In the process she puts their apartment up for rent. Coincidentally Iván’s son, Carlos (Antonio Banderas) and his girlfriend Marisa (Rossy de Palma) come to see the apartment with a view to renting it. Pepa’s friend Candela (María Barranco) seeks Pepa for help when she discovers that her Shiite boyfriend is a terrorist planning to hijack an aeroplane for Stockholm, which Iván plans to take with his new girlfriend, the ‘feminist’ lawyer Paulina Morales (Kiti Manver). Meanwhile, Iván’s insane ex-wife, Lucía (Julieta Serrano) also tries to get to Pepa, with whom she assumes Iván plans to leave the country. At face value, the movie is structured around the coincidences and ‘disphasure’ or ‘bad timing’ typical of both classic Hollywood melodrama and screwball comedy, following Pepa after the news of her pregnancy through a series of missed telephone connections and her search for Iván around the city.17 The complications of the plot insistently call attention to the selfreflexive and allusive content of the film (with the presence of film technology and different types of recording devices), to the city of Madrid itself and to the frantic search for a vanishing gentleman, all of which builds up to the ‘verge’ of a nervous breakdown. The film’s credit sequence is typical of Almodóvar, with pictures simulating magazine cut-outs allusive to the film content and the different film-making tasks described in the credits, accompanied by a torrid love song (‘I Am Unhappy’ by Lola Beltrán) in the soundtrack. The sequence ends with a picture of a movie set serving as background to the words ‘screenplay and direction by Pedro Almodóvar’, a strategy the director returned to later in Bad Education. Then the film opens with a fade-in to a simulated conventional establishing shot of an apartment building at dusk. It is clearly revealed however, that the structure is only a scale model of Pepa’s apartment building. Accompanied by music heavy on strings, reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s all-strings score for Psycho, the shot of the building refers to that Hitchcock movie first and suggests the opening bird’s-eye view of Phoenix and the hotel where Marion Crane and

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Sam Loomis have their sexual rendezvous. The Psycho reference is later confirmed with the revelation of Lucía’s insanity and unhealthy relationship with her son Carlos. The shot of the apartment model is followed, incongruously in this apparently modern urban setting, by a shot of a duck, hens and other birds in a pen, an obvious reference to The Birds. The opening references to film-making, Bernard Herrmann (whose Psycho score Almodóvar directly used in Pepi, Luci, Bom and Kika among others), Psycho and The Birds, establish Hitchcock as a formal point of reference from the beginning. As the film progresses the themes of miscommunication, insanity, and the terrorist plot extend the recurring formal references to Hitchcock’s films into narrative ones. The film’s MacGuffin turns out to be the elusive meeting between Pepa and Iván, operating, as in Hitchcock’s films, as a narrative pretext to set the protagonist off in her search. In this film, one can argue, the search is for a ‘vanishing gentleman’ posing an analogous reference to the disappearance of Miss Froy in The Lady Vanishes. Unlike the Hitchcock film, in Women on the Verge, the search for the ‘vanishing gentleman’ suggests that it is the image of the man that becomes difficult to represent visually. While Iván refuses to allow Pepa to see him, she does hear him on numerous telephone messages and other voice-recording devices; in Pepa’s dreams he appears speaking through a microphone and he dubs Sterling Hayden’s voice for a Spanish version of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954). In Women on the Verge, which like most of Almodóvar’s films is populated by a largely female cast, the man’s voice becomes a substitute for his image, and Pepa’s search ultimately leads to the synchronisation of the man’s image and sound. Almodóvar’s attention to Iván’s voice also poses him as a sort of feminised actor, his voice disembodied, his image scattered. Paradoxically, while it is Pepa who seems to be unravelling, it is Iván who needs to be ‘put together’. I have digressed here because the presence of Hitchcock in Women on the Verge is also a way for Almodóvar to revise Hitchcock as the subject of criticism itself. From Raymond Bellour to Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Amy Lawrence and Kaja Silverman, Hitchcock’s films arguably appear more insistently than any other director’s as case studies in feminist film theory and criticism.18 From Blackmail (1929) to The Lady Vanishes, from Notorious

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‘I am unhappy.’ Carmen Maura as Pepa, Almodóvar’s most emblematic character

(1946) to Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and Marnie (1964), what Hitchcock does to women is often taken as exemplary of the classical cinema’s fixation with controlling, repressing and occasionally even destroying troubled women. When Almodóvar speaks of Hitchcock he acknowledges the influence in his own style and narratives. Almodóvar also discusses women as characters and actresses, and their two different relationships, as directors, with them: The way I deal with my heroines is less neurotic than Hitchcock’s. His female characters are very neurotic, but behind them there’s a man whose relationship with women [is] just as highly neurotic . . . Hitchcock used the scenes of his films as a way of relating to his actresses. His difficult relationships with women enriched his female characters and inspired the most memorable scenes of his films, even if they also end up giving a rather negative image of the men. I haven’t such a complicated relationship with women; it’s much more generous and limpid.19

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Fernando Guillén as the ‘vanishing gentleman’ in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Almodóvar’s admiration for Hitchcock retains some echoes of the general critical perspective on Hitchcock and women. While Iván seems to be displaced into the position of Hitchcock’s ‘women’, Almodóvar’s ‘women on the verge’ can also be seen as reflections of some of Hitchcock’s ‘men on the verge’, from the neurotic Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo to the psychotic Norman Bates in Psycho, to the murderous Dr Murchison and the amnesiac Dr Edwardes in Spellbound. Unlike Hitchcock, however, Almodóvar grants his women the narrative agency (as it is Pepa’s search for Iván that structures the plot), the power to liberate themselves from the neurotic men in their lives and the chance to build a narrative in which men become neutralised or harmless and, ultimately, do vanish. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown thus begins with an immediate self-reflexive focus on film-making, Hitchcock and the reversal of the

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roles women and men assume in classical cinema, as exemplified by Hitchcock’s films. As discussed above, Pepa’s life in the two-day story time of the movie is organised around the need to find this vanishing gentleman so that she can tell him she is pregnant. The promise of an Oedipal narrative is ultimately subverted, as so often in Spanish cinema, but in this case, that happens by focusing on the organisation of the narrative around the intertextual Hitchcock allusions, rather than the Oedipal story itself. The movie’s attention to the film-making process resumes early on in the film, when it is revealed that one of Pepa’s (and Iván’s) jobs is to dub Spanish dialogue for American movies. The choice scene for that revelation is from Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, in which Vienna (Joan Crawford) and Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) are reunited after many years, and it is revealed that (in exact opposition to Pepa and Iván’s situation) Joan Crawford is no longer romantically interested in the nominal hero. Iván shows up first at the EXA studios to do his recording, in the first of a series of missed encounters between him and Pepa (she has overslept due to her dependency on sleeping pills). Iván seductively moistens his lips in extreme close-up, almost touching the microphone, and we see Sterling Hayden’s face speaking with Iván’s (Fernando Guillén’s) voice. It’s the famous ‘tell me some lies’ dialogue in Johnny Guitar, and we see Joan Crawford’s moving yet mute lips responding to Sterling Hayden’s requests for lies (‘Tell me you still love me as I love you’). The vanishing gentleman Iván, always speaks in clichés and is always mediated by recording technology, whether on a film soundtrack, or an answering machine, telephones, or tape recorders. After his ‘out-ofsynch’ love confession, Iván quickly goes to a telephone booth and places a call to Pepa. She does not answer the telephone (out cold with sleeping pills), but he leaves a message on the recorder, which introduces the first reference to Dial ‘M’ for Murder. A close-up shot of the telephone and answering machine not only paraphrases the shots of the ringing telephone in the Hitchcock film, but the choice of a wide-angle lens allows for a distorting effect and shot size that even suggests Dial ‘M’’s original stereoscopic (3-D) format. Then the wide-angle close-up of the telephone and answering machine is directly juxtaposed to a medium close-up shot of Iván in the phone booth: we see him through the right angle made by the two glass

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panes that make the booth, one red and one blue, precisely as if they were the two lenses of a pair of 3-D glasses. The motif of telephones is as insistent in Women on the Verge as it is in Dial ‘M’ for Murder. Eventually the action in Women on the Verge is also temporarily confined to ‘real time’, a single set and somewhat theatrical space, as in Dial ‘M’. These two stylistic choices also reference Hitchcock’s other ‘single-set’ films, Lifeboat (1944), Rope and Rear Window. Pepa spends most of the film calling Iván from her home, payphones and other people’s telephones, or trying to retrieve her messages in the belief that Iván will eventually call her. In Women as in Dial ‘M’ there is an implicit danger in answering the phone and a heightened sense of suspense of how difficult it becomes to actually have the conversation. While in Dial ‘M’ answering the phone means death for Grace Kelly, in Women on the Verge, for Pepa it means the misery of a relationship with a man that she considers as murderous, in a way, as Ray Milland in the Hitchcock film: later Pepa even refers to what Iván has done to her as ‘terrorism’. Yet, it also means ‘life’ rather than death since Pepa’s main intention is to give Iván the news of her pregnancy. In Women on the Verge as in Dial ‘M’, there is no real telephone conversation and yet the telephone miscommunication leads to a tragedy and to the arrival of the police on the scene to investigate a crime (due to an anonymous tip about the terrorist attack plotted by Candela’s boyfriend). Pepa eventually makes it to the studios to do her dubbing of Joan Crawford’s voice in Johnny Guitar. The studio setting allows for more selfreflexive licence on Almodóvar’s part, beginning the sequence with a view of the recording studio from inside the projection booth. The shot shows the studio through the projector window. We then see the film leader running through the projector, the film loop inside the projector and then the screen as the synch-sound mark bleeps when the leader hits ‘2’. Besides the direct reference to the opening of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), the close-up of Pepa in front of the microphone reveals her to be wearing glasses similar to those worn by several female characters in Strangers on a Train (Patricia Hitchcock and Laura Elliot, who plays ‘Miriam’) which upset the murderer Bruno (Robert Walker) so much. Pepa recites Joan Crawford’s lines in Spanish, paradoxically having the conversation she

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wishes to have but only with Iván’s voice in the ‘projected’ setting of the recording studio. Pepa’s delivery is ironic in the sense that unlike Joan Crawford in that film, Pepa does mean the words she addresses to Iván: ‘I still love you . . .’. At the end of the recording, overcome by heartbreak, emotion and morning sickness, Pepa faints and collapses on the floor of the booth. The shot of Pepa on the floor is a direct citation of Miriam’s death in Strangers on a Train. We see Pepa through her inverted glasses lying on the floor, the view distorted and mediated by the myopic lenses. In Strangers on a Train we see Miriam’s murder reflected on and also distorted by her glasses, which fall off her face while she is being strangled. Unlike Strangers on a Train, where Bruno’s sexual perversion, and strange relationship with his mother, is a theme linked to Hitchcock’s ‘difficult’ relationship with women, in Women on the Verge it is precisely Pepa’s dubbing director, standing in for Almodóvar, who enters the frame to rescue her after her collapse. He bends over her body, picks her up, asks her if she’s OK. Formally, Almodóvar’s shot is different from Hitchcock’s since we see Pepa not reflected, but through the glasses, so it appears as a mediation rather than a cinematic reflection. The shot’s meaning is revised as well, since ultimately she is rescued, not doomed, by the directorial presence. Pepa has her first hysterical crisis over a Hitchcockian moment, and yet the perversion of Bruno’s (and Hitchcock’s) action is here neutralised by Almodóvar. After her hysterical, symptomatic fainting, Pepa goes directly to the telephone again, to place a call to Iván’s house. His ex-wife, Lucía, answers. Lucía’s heavy make-up and nervous demeanour suggest her mental instability (later confirmed in conversation). Lucía is in the process of putting on her elaborate make-up and trying on wigs: in her insanity and instability Lucía is distanced from reality, in drag, and with a criminally psychotic disposition. After insulting and dismissing Pepa on the phone (another fruitless phone conversation), Lucía’s son, Carlos comes in to question her. They stand in a two-shot, facing each other and both in sharp medium close-up profile, the shot a perfect facsimile of one of Marion Crane and Norman Bates in Psycho, when they have their first real conversation in the office parlour. The shot of Lucía and Carlos is completed in the background

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with a glass box full of dissected butterflies. As in Psycho where Norman’s stuffed owls and ravens in the background suggest Norman’s mother’s dead, stuffed state and foretell Marion’s destiny, in Women on the Verge, the butterflies help to frame the spectator’s discovery of this mother–son relationship. The shot in perfect profile is always significant in Hitchcock’s films and Almodóvar’s use of it here (and later in All About My Mother) is equally important. In his book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, William Rothman writes that Hitchcock characteristically used the profile shot to indicate a character’s impenetrability, his or her ‘complete abstraction and absorption, in an imagined scene to which we have no access’.20 Almodóvar uses the profile shot identically formatted to convey instead the knowledge of a character. We are introduced to Lucía and Carlos in the form of this succinct yet direct quotation from Psycho including the dissected butterflies in lieu of the stuffed birds in the background (also suggestive of the wallpaper flowers reflected in the mirrors in Norman’s office) and the young man nervously stuttering. Thus, the knowledge of their troubled relationship and her insanity is suggested a priori, before we are given that information in the narrative. For those of us who are able to identify the reference, this particular Psycho citation mediates our knowledge of these characters as they are introduced. We may remember other Hitchcock stuttering characters like Brandon Shaw (John Dahl) in Rope and Bruno (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train who, like Norman Bates and Carlos, have unresolved issues with their mothers.21 The theme of the troubled relationships between parents and children in Spanish cinema is practically condensed into a type of Hitchcock-inspired shorthand. So, as is common in Almodóvar’s intertextual appropriations of other directors’ work (with the occasional, yet logical exception of Luis Buñuel in Kika and Live Flesh), the reference needs to be adapted into something fitting to the cultural function of Spanish cinema in the 1980s, in this case the ‘troubled’ past and the promise of recovery, Almodóvar’s eternal theme since Pepi, Luci, Bom. While the stuffed birds are indicative of death, decay and aggression, the butterflies in Almodóvar’s version, although equally dead, are suggestive of change, grace and hope (of recovery from the troubled Spanish national identity issues of the 1980s). This theme is symptomatic of Spanish cinema

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of the period. In Women on the Verge, insanity mediates the relationship between Carlos and his mother (who, like Mrs Bates, is also suspicious and jealous of his new ‘girlfriend’). The insane mother and nervous, stuttering son (like Norman) clearly have an unresolved, traumatic relationship. Furthermore, as in Psycho, Lucía has, like Norman’s mother, neglected her son for the love of a man. It is revealed eventually that Lucía’s insanity, which caused her to be institutionalised, resulted in Carlos being brought up by his grandparents. And her insistent pursuit of Iván after being released from the mental institution has led to a further estrangement from her son. Lucía and Carlos’s traumatic relationship, and the shot citation from Psycho make a direct connection between the two films. Unlike Psycho, however, where Norman/Mother’s troubled relationship is, as explained by the psychiatrist at the end of that film, the cause of Norman’s psychosis and his murderous ways, Carlos’s distance from his insane mother allows him to grow up somewhat normal (in spite of his Norman Bates-style symptomatic stuttering). Marsha Kinder and others have argued that the revision and rearticulation of the Oedipal narrative is a recurring theme in Spanish cinema of the last two decades.22 In Almodóvar’s films (especially Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, The Law of Desire and High Heels) dysfunctional father–mother–son–daughter relationships are suggestive of the nation’s traumatic road to recovery from the forty-year dictatorship. The nuclear family is reconstituted in a revision of the nation-as-family allegory exploited in Franco’s days. Carlos in Women on the Verge, unlike Norman in Psycho, is saved by his estrangement from his mother, who, in this case, is the murderous one. As he does with the references to Dial ‘M’ for Murder and Strangers on a Train, Almodóvar appropriates Psycho formally but revises its meaning to make it fit a Spanish national thematic specificity. In the process, Almodóvar links insanity and sexuality to the national–cultural identity trauma. After the failed new attempt at a telephone conversation with Iván, Pepa goes back to her apartment, which she now intends to put up for rent. The modern Madrid apartment setting is reminiscent of the use of similar mise en scène in Hitchcock’s Rope. First, the apartment windows allow us to see the day go by outside, with some indications of the passage of time, the way

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the set design (by Perry Ferguson) and the cinematography (by Joseph Valentine and William V. Skall) do in Rope. Also, the apartment serves an intimate, enclosing function, as mentioned before, similar to the way Hitchcock’s other single-set films (Lifeboat, Dial ‘M’ and Rear Window) operate. Finally, there are two long significant sequences in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in Pepa’s apartment that are staged and filmed to simulate ‘real time’. These scenes do not pretend to give the impression of Hitchcock’s celebrated series of sequence-shots in Rope, but they do imitate the integrity of the physical and temporal space in that film. Once in the apartment the first thing Pepa does is run to the telephone and play the messages on the answering machine. But the call she expects has not come. Pepa then goes to the kitchen, where she prepares a tasty gazpacho (Iván’s favourite) and dopes it with prescription barbiturates, so that when Iván comes she will be able to keep him there, even if it is against his will. The drugged gazpacho will return later to perform the same function as the glass of drugged milk offered to Gregory Peck’s John Ballantine/Dr Edwardes in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. While alone in her apartment, Pepa packs all Iván’s clothes into a suitcase and accidentally burns their bed with a box of matches. The remains of their relationship charred and stored, she goes back out to look for Iván in his apartment. Another missed connection follows: this time Pepa leaves Iván a note which is intercepted and thrown in the garbage by Lucía on her way out of the apartment. Pepa returns to her apartment and the Madrid skyline begins to reveal itself in the background. As in Rope, the sight of the skyline in the background of the main set serves as an indication of the passage of time. Besides the Rope-inspired view from her apartment balcony, which contains a number of Madrid landmarks (like the ‘Phoenix’ building dome at the corner of Gran Vía and Alcalá), Pepa’s run through the city works, like Scottie’s in Vertigo, as a veritable check list of recognisable places. Unlike Vertigo, however, where Hitchcock exploits the city of San Francisco and its outskirts for their tourist value, Pepa’s run through Madrid concentrates on real places that are of little interest to the outsider. Pepa’s home address, as well as Lucía’s and Paulina Morales’s (Iván’s new lover) are all real places in the city. The neighbourhood of ‘Cuatro Caminos’ is mentioned by name, as are the EXA sound recording

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studios, and the famous antenna from Spanish radio-television (RTVE) also appears a number of times in the background. There is a sense of great familiarity with this city, unlike the somewhat uncanny quality of San Francisco in Vertigo. As Marvin D’Lugo has argued, the city of Madrid itself is symbolic in Almodóvar’s films of the ‘radical reformulation of Spanish cultural values’, of the cultural trajectory from Franco to freedom.23 In Vertigo, however, the city and the characters’ trajectory round and about San Francisco are instead symptomatic of their helplessness and desperation. As Lesley Brill states, in Vertigo the characters tend to ‘wander’, and their wandering is ultimately destructive.24 In Almodóvar’s film, Pepa’s search has some structure and her final intention, the recovery, reconstitution and revision of the family, delivers the promise of reconstruction and further life. Waiting for Iván, Pepa nervously and rhythmically paces her apartment. She watches the television, where one of her commercials, for the laundry powder ‘Ecce Homo’, comes on. The character she plays in the detergent commercial could come from any number of Hitchcock’s films: Pepa is ‘the murderer’s mother’ and she proudly displays her son’s sparkling clean shirt which she has washed after his latest crime. The policemen’s complaint ‘no sign of blood or guts’ seems to be a humorous revision of Norman’s cleanup after ‘Mother’s’ murder of Marion in Psycho. While Pepa waits, her friend Candela arrives. Candela has been involved with a Shiite terrorist who plans to hijack a plane to Stockholm that evening. (In a purely melodramatic coincidence, it happens to be the same flight that Iván plans to take with his new girlfriend, Paulina, to escape from both Lucía and Pepa.) But Pepa leaves Candela alone and goes back out to stake out Iván in front of his apartment building. Pepa sits on a bench outside Iván’s building and inspects the place with an inquisitive gaze. Her wait outside the apartment building leads to the most direct reference to Rear Window. Pepa inspects some of the oblivious inhabitants through their windows or on their balconies. Through an open window, Pepa observes a young woman joyfully dancing in black lingerie for some (unseen) spectator in her apartment. The young woman first reminds us of the shapely dancer ‘Miss Torso’, and of the sexually active newlyweds

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that L. B. Jefferies spies upon. Pepa also sees a lonely man on a balcony, a reference to the lonely music composer in Rear Window. The young man seems to be wiping some tears off his face, which connects him to the pathetic ‘Miss Lonely-hearts’ as well. Pepa soon discovers Marisa (Carlos’s girlfriend) sitting outside the apartment inside a car. Former model and actress Rossy de Palma’s striking features immediately call Pepa’s attention. Pepa’s gaze finally settles on Iván’s wife and son whom she can see through the window. They are having an argument (presumably about Carlos’s plans to move out). Pepa’s expression suggests that she, like L. B. Jefferies, is judgmental of the events she witnesses, her facial expression changing as do her feelings of amusement (at the sight of the dancing beauty), concern (for the crying loner) and curiosity (over Carlos and Lucía’s argument). Pepa also serves a kind of mediating function since her activities are often seen or heard through some kind of representational apparatus (recordings, television, answering machines, telephones, voice dubbing). Unlike Rear Window, where L. B. Jefferies’ voyeurism is symbolic, reflexive and deconstructive of Hitchcock and his manipulation of the cinematic apparatus, Pepa’s situation positions her quickly within the projected diegesis of the apartment building (and not so much as a director or spectator).25 And while L. B. Jefferies is initially passive and brought by chance and routine to spy on his neighbours, Pepa begins by going out in search of the story and becomes immediately and intrinsically involved. Jefferies’ position as a ‘surrogate for the director’ dictates his existence outside the diegetic world (of his neighbours); he is an image-maker and cinematic speaking subject. Pepa retains the ‘directorial’ control for a moment before choosing to enter the action and claim narrative agency, something Grace Kelly (as Lisa) is not allowed to do since she is ‘directed’ by Jefferies to enter the action in Thorwald’s apartment.26 Pepa enters the action by going directly to the telephone booth outside the building to check her messages again in the chance that Iván may have called. Of course he hasn’t, but then the telephone booth shakes and rattles violently and noisily, startling Pepa inside the booth. Pepa turns around to find out what is causing this, and the medium shot of her turning around inside the booth, the noise, the shaking and the rattling are clear references

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to Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) inside the phone booth in The Birds. It turns out that, angry at her son’s apparent intention to move out, Lucía throws the suitcase he was packing out the window and it falls on top of the phone booth. Some articles fall out of the suitcase and Pepa comes out to help Carlos and Marisa pick them up. Pepa finds a photograph of Carlos and Iván together and so discovers their relationship. The introduction of The Birds reference is significant since that film, like Psycho, which Almodóvar had already cited, also presents the problem of an unresolved mother–son Oedipal conflict as the reason for the punishment of the heroine. In his conversation about The Birds with François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that the film was supposed to be the story of ‘a possessive mother’ and that ‘her love for her son dominated all of her other emotions’.27 Carlos in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown shows signs of anxiety (as evidenced by his insistent stuttering) and, like Norman Bates in Psycho and Marnie Edgar in Marnie, his relationship with his mother is at the centre of his symptoms. But Carlos’s mother, Lucía is also troubled, and like Mrs Brenner (Jessica Tandy) in The Birds and Mrs Edgar (Louise Latham) in Marnie she loses control of her emotions with the threat of her child’s departure leading to a ‘hysterical’ reaction.28 After the chance meeting with Carlos, with whom Pepa eventually develops a pseudo-maternal bond, she returns home and again confronts the answering machine but still there is no message from Iván. Instead there are repeated calls from her friend Candela. Exasperated, Pepa yanks out the telephone and throws it out the window, mimicking Lucía’s hysteria. Candela arrives, desperately in need of Pepa’s help, but Pepa goes out again to look for Iván on the street. Coincidentally then, Iván’s son, Carlos and his girlfriend Marisa arrive to look at the apartment, now for rent. Once the action is contained in the apartment set Pepa returns from the street and Almodóvar stages the first of two interior sequences in Pepa’s apartment that create the illusion of real time, like in Hitchcock’s Rope. The editing structure in Almodóvar’s sequence does not conform to the complexity and claustrophobia of Hitchcock’s experiment. However, the single-set locale, real-time action, theatrical mise en scène and eventually the presence of a ‘body’, clearly imitate the spatial, temporal and narrative continuity of Rope.

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In the two separate sequences inside Pepa’s apartment, the visual and thematic references to Rope, Vertigo and Spellbound follow each other and eventually converge as the story itself takes on the Hitchcockian quality of a thriller about a terrorist plot. Initially, Candela, desperate to talk to Pepa but incapable of getting her attention now that Iván’s son is present, goes out on the terrace and tries to jump off the balcony. Suddenly repentant, Candela holds onto the railing, screaming for help. Certainly, the scene is reminiscent of Scottie at the beginning of Vertigo hanging from the ledge at the top of the building. Candela is seen from above in a medium close-up that reveals her hands in the foreground, her face and the depth and danger of the possible fall. As in Vertigo, Candela is the victim of a traumatic situation (with her terrorist boyfriend) that in this case leads to her suicide attempt. After helping Candela climb back up with Carlos and Marisa, Pepa listens to Candela’s story about the terrorist, prescribes her own tranquillisers to Candela, and goes out to talk to a ‘feminist’ lawyer about Candela’s problem. Carlos and Marisa have become involved in the action when Marisa accidentally drinks some of Pepa’s spiked gazpacho (which contains ‘twenty-five or thirty’ sleeping pills) and passes out in a profound sleep. Marisa thus becomes the ‘corpse’ of this Rope situation, and like the dead man in that film, her body remains in the background of the action until the plot is fully resolved. While Pepa is away speaking with the lawyer, who is, unbeknownst to Pepa, Iván’s new girlfriend Paulina Morales, Carlos and Candela discuss the Shiite plot to hijack the aeroplane leaving that night for Stockholm. Pepa’s visit to Paulina allows for the only ellipsis in the time of the story between the two sequences. Meanwhile at the apartment Carlos, who has fixed the telephone, makes an anonymous call to the police to report the terrorist plot. Soon Pepa returns after her failed attempt to get Paulina interested in Candela’s ‘case’. Angry about a new missed call from Iván, she yanks the telephone out again and throws it out the window and the second ‘real-time’ sequence in Pepa’s apartment begins. The sequence revisits Rope and the Madrid skyline in the background slightly changes its light pattern, from warm sunny gold to dusk red, to cool blues, indicating the passage of time and the arrival of evening. Also, like the oblivious dinner guests in Rope,

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Pepa’s apartment contains two real-time sequences in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Lucía arrives at Pepa’s apartment, accompanied by two plainclothes policemen who have traced Carlos’s call back to Pepa’s. The party is completed when the telephone repairman, who had been called early in the morning, also arrives. An interrogation follows with Pepa, Lucía, the policemen, Carlos and Candela, discussing the telephone call. Pepa explains that the telephone has been reported broken since the morning, so the tip about the plane hijacking could not have come from there. The ‘guests’ are all offered a glass of Pepa’s gazpacho. Holding her glass carefully (knowing it is drugged), Pepa finally ties up the loose ends of the plot: she realises that Iván is leaving for Stockholm with Paulina (having seen the plane tickets in the lawyer’s office) and that the Shiites coincidentally plan to hijack the very same plane. Like James Stewart in Rope, Pepa comes to a plot-solving epiphany. The single set, real time and Marisa’s ‘corpse’ in the background of the action, emphasise the Rope reference, which is then intersected by Spellbound. The policemen, the repairman, Carlos and Candela quickly

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react to the drugged gazpacho and begin to fall asleep, but neither Lucía nor Pepa drink. Lucía runs across the room and picks up the policemen’s guns and points them both at Pepa. Lucía confesses to her insanity and how she pretended to be cured in order to get out of the mental institution and return to Iván. Her glass in one hand, a gun in the other, Lucía says to Pepa ‘Now, let’s drink.’ She raises her glass and the gun. A shot of both objects shows the gun barrel in a tight close-up like at the end of Spellbound when the murderous psychiatrist, Dr Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) points the gun at himself and shoots. Here too, the topics are amnesia (which Lucía has also suffered), insanity and criminality (Lucía’s). Also like Dr Edwardes (Gregory Peck) in Spellbound, Lucía pretends to be ‘cured’ to escape the asylum. Almodóvar’s shot contains the two gazpacho glasses, which take the place of the drugged glass of milk in Spellbound that professor Brulov (Michael Chekhov) offers to Gregory Peck. As in Notorious and Spellbound, a glass of some harmless liquid can easily be transformed into something else, something dangerous; poison or sedatives. In Women on the Verge, Almodóvar even copies the shot of the glass of milk in extreme close-up (through which we see the intended ‘victim’) substituting the blood-red gazpacho for the milk. The significance of the Spellbound, Rope, The Birds and Vertigo citations in this sequence condenses and explains the function Hitchcock serves in Almodóvar’s cinema as a whole and in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in particular. Almodóvar’s films tend to revise and exploit the theme of traumatic relationships between men and women and between parents and children, since Spanish cinema after the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the Oedipal scenario, classic in Hitchcock, to suggest the need to resolve the traumatic past of the nation, symbolised by the absence of a ‘strong’ father, and the presence of unstable mothers.29 Psycho and The Birds give the characters in Women on the Verge a point of reference for signification that mediates the Oedipal relationship through what is already a recognised cinematic allusion. Comparing Women on the Verge to Rope and Vertigo underlines that link to Hitchcock with direct formal references (to lighting, composition, and temporal–spatial continuity). Spellbound emphasises both the need for a psychiatric or therapeutic

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solution and the ineffectiveness of that very solution since Lucía, like Dr Edwardes, is a psychiatric ‘impostor’ of sorts, and like Dr Murchison, a potential murderer. The gazpacho stand-off between Lucía and Pepa ends when the former, splashes the spicy drink on Pepa’s face, blinding her momentarily, and then hijacks Pepa’s biker neighbour at gunpoint to drive her to the airport. The film’s climactic sequence is a frantic pursuit as Lucía rushes to the airport to kill Iván while Pepa follows her in a taxi to prevent it. The race is made even more dramatic in form by the retention of the real-time structure: it continues the sequence that began with the reunion of Pepa, Candela, Marisa and Carlos, some thirty-two minutes before. We ride with them from Pepa’s apartment on Montalbán Street to the Madrid-Barajas airport. As in Rope and partly in Psycho – where the entirety of the acquaintanceship between Norman Bates and Marion Crane is contained within one temporary continuous sequence that is only briefly interrupted during Norman’s drive to the pond with Marion’s whole life stuffed in the trunk – the insistence on real time grants the entire sequence realism, intimacy and allows for a strong sense of identification. The most disturbing effect in Psycho is certainly Marion’s death, but not just because of its arbitrary violence, but because of the time, effort and formal elements invested in building identification with her before she is brutally and abruptly taken away. These strategies include her imagined scenario about the discovery of her crime (which we hear in voice-over as she drives) juxtaposed with the shots of the empty road and the candid reactions that we see on her face (in direct closeup) as she drives to her ‘private island’, or actually the Bates Motel. To cement this sense of identification that will make Marion’s death even more disorienting for the cinematic spectator, Hitchcock retains the ‘real time’ of the entire Marion–Norman meeting. Although Hitchcock dismisses his formal experiment in Rope as ‘a stunt’, the continuity of time and space in that movie also underscores the sense of danger and, upon the arrival of James Stewart, the inevitability of its own resolution.30 Equally in Psycho the temporal containment of Marion and Norman’s entire meeting in a single thirty-two-minute sequence has the effect of underscoring the sense of intimacy. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar’s staging

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of Pepa’s discovery and resolution of the ‘plots’ (both Iván’s and the Shiite terrorists’) in ‘real time’ allows for the character’s trajectory to be completely rounded; we see Pepa go from the ‘verge’ of insanity, from the frantic desperation of a jilted lover, into a full-fledged heroine. Unlike the Hitchcock heroines Pepa resembles, Marion Crane or Judy/Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo, who, writes Lesley Brill, breakdown or ‘shatter [. . .] their personal coherence’, becoming inarticulate as they swirl into their own ‘traps’,31 Pepa’s dramatic arc leads her from drug-induced incoherence, heartbreak and desperation to redemption, regeneration, the assertion of her subjectivity and desire, and the satisfying closure of her unresolved narrative. At the airport, like many Hitchcock endings, a last-minute resolution seems less satisfying than the MacGuffin itself: the sequence involves a motorcycle/car chase, a crazy woman with two guns and a thwarted terrorist plot. Pepa prevents Lucía from killing Iván; the crazy woman is quickly arrested after missing one shot; the flight to Stockholm is saved; and, almost as an afterthought, Pepa finally has the conversation with Iván that serves as the main narrative pretext. She informs him that she only wanted to speak to him and that she now wants nothing to do with him, not even revealing that she is pregnant. Like in Spellbound and even Rebecca (1940), the woman’s love and partial sacrifice saves the troubled man from death or the law (and the ‘madness’ of the ex-wife). But the climax turns out to be improbably elusive (we don’t even learn the fate of the Shiite terrorists) and Pepa emerges from the ‘verge’ to reconstitute herself, reconstruct her family and rebuild her whole life. In the end Pepa returns home, her apartment crowded with the sleeping policemen, Carlos, Candela, Marisa and the telephone repairman. In the background, the Rope-style skyline is now darkened, unrealistically compressing several Madrid landmarks. Pepa decides to keep the apartment, because, she says she ‘ loves the view’, while we hear birds in the background, now a reassuring sound. Marisa, finally awakened from her drugged sleep, becomes the first person to hear Pepa’s news about her pregnancy. The two women bond over the revelation and Marisa confesses she had an erotic, orgasm-inducing dream during her sleep, which has made her a dif-

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ferent woman. ‘I was a virgin when I walked through that door this morning, now I’m not sure I am,’ she announces. Maternity and sexuality are resolved in the epilogue. These two topics are initially the cause of the women’s ‘troubles’ and the mediating forces that repress Hitchcock’s heroines (Marion Crane, Marnie Edgar, Melanie Daniels, Constance in Spellbound and others), but in Women on the Verge they become ultimately liberating. The greatest revision of Hitchcock’s themes in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is that Almodóvar’s heroine does not cross from the ‘verge’ into full-blown hysteria, or dementia, or death, for that matter. Out of the chaos of her relationships and the shadow of her past, through a Hitchcockian crucible, Pepa emerges at the end as a well-adjusted, socially and psychologically functional woman. In his book The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films, Lesley Brill argues that many of Hitchcock’s characters are victims of the ‘traps’ of their own past (as Norman Bates would say), inevitably and fatally paying for their own and their parents’ crimes and sins. In reference to Vertigo and Psycho but also applicable to other characters, Brill writes that: The central figures [in Hitchcock’s films] struggle to understand and resolve destructive personal histories [. . .]. They fail. Their defeats reflect the unforgiving necessities of Hitchcockian tragic irony . . . Retribution replaces forgiveness. Confusion and ambiguity baffle resolution. [The] films give centrality to human illness and decay, not healing. . . .[T]he disease of the past is incurable . . .32

Pedro Almodóvar’s films since 1980, as Allinson, Edwards, Evans, Kinder, Smith and Vernon and Morris among others, suggest, stem from the trauma of Spain’s history since 1936, portraying a specifically Spanish strain of the ‘disease of the past’.33 While many Almodóvar narratives concentrate on negating that past, they are still very much under its implacable weight. In Spanish cinema and in Almodóvar’s films in particular, characters are forced to confront the nation’s mistakes and tensions arising from, first, Franco’s brand of Fascism (1936–75) and then from the bumpy road to redemocratisation in the 1980s. While Almodóvar’s early films began as irreverent satires of Spanish national history, cultural definition, politics, social and sexual relations (Labyrinth of Passion, What Have I Done to Deserve

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This!? and Matador for example), his later films (beginning with The Law of Desire and Women on the Verge) depict more positive, optimistic views of the nation’s psychological forecast, without ignoring or trivialising its troubled origins. The trauma of the past, expressed as stressed, criminal, incestuous or improbable relations between parents and children, mental patients, criminal nuns or serial killers (in Labyrinth of Passion and What Have I Done, Dark Habits and Matador respectively) ultimately leads to emotional and, by extension, psychological ‘healing’ in Women on the Verge, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels, The Flower of My Secret, and All About My Mother.34 But most importantly, in Almodóvar’s films ‘the disease of the past’ is curable, and must be cured, because on its healing rests the stability and survival of the nation. Almodóvar’s films, as Alejandro Yarza argues, are known for articulating Spanishness from a ‘camp’ perspective, re-appropriating cultural and historical symbols that had been adopted in Franco’s Spain and ‘recycling’ them in order to deconstruct, as a form of therapy, the mechanisms of cultural and religious repression.35 In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar allegorically extends his treatment of the national trauma into the convergence of genre instability (in this case mainly between Hitchcock’s thrillers, Sirk’s melodramas and Hawks’ screwball comedies) with the stabilising presence of Hitchcock as intertext. Hitchcock citations in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown serve to underscore the typical excesses of melodrama. Similar to the adoption of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All about Eve, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Elia Kazan’s film version of the Williams’ play in All About My Mother, the Hitchcock citations in Women on the Verge become symptomatic of the characters’ emotional trajectory. Furthermore, Almodóvar adopts Hitchcock as part of his own nationalist discourse. As I have argued elsewhere, Almodóvar’s use of different genres can be seen as a way of referring to the nation’s own process of coming to terms with its own cultural complexity and self-recognition as a rich, multicultural, even transnational space. All About My Mother settles ultimately as melodrama, reconstituting the national family and offering the promise of a new, redefined and redeemed social and cultural construct.36 In Women on the Verge, Almodóvar attempts to build stability and consen-

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sus out of the film’s chaos. In this case, however, even before treating the nation as a hybrid genre, Almodóvar goes directly to the characters’ psychological traumas, and with the help of the multiple, insistent, yet revisionist Hitchcock citations, allusions and references, he explores the nation’s ‘disease of the past’. Unlike the Hitchcock characters to whom they refer, however, Almodóvar’s women remain ‘on the verge’ of insanity. Unlike ‘Mother’ (a type of character that Almodóvar explores in Matador and High Heels as well), Pepa and the others ultimately reach some form of emotional stability. Relationships between mothers and their children are a recurring motif in Hitchcock’s films, but they point to ‘personal’ problems of identity and sexuality. Almodóvar mediates the same themes through Hitchcock, but his attention to identity and the family is allegorical of the nation’s process of reconstitution and recovery. At the end of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Lucía, the unstable mother, asks to be taken back to the mental hospital where she belongs, after her failed assassination attempt on her ex-husband. Unlike Norman Bates, for whom the idea of sending Mother ‘some place’ is a threat to everything his psychotic mind believes to be true, in Women on the Verge, it is acceptable to put the crazy woman away, the one that is ‘beyond the verge’, so that the others can recover from the effects of repression. In Almodóvar’s case of course, ‘repression’ is as much political as it is sexual and its resolution or containment is good for the individual and the collective mind. Almodóvar’s use of Hitchcock, especially in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (but also High Heels, Kika, Live Flesh, Talk to Her and Bad Education), allows for a kind of cinematic shorthand: every Hitchcock moment in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown deals with the psychological and sexual traumas of desire and repression, and their conflict with the law. But Almodóvar’s revision of those moments denies the fatal implications, or the ironic distance of how those relations are presented and resolved (or unresolved) in Hitchcock’s films. Almodóvar on the contrary suggests that even though ‘we all go a little mad sometimes’ (as Norman Bates so truthfully asserts in Psycho) the ‘disease of the past’ can be cured, or at least neutralised by understanding that instability (of form, narrative, genre) can be, paradoxically, a redeeming force.

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Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) Almodóvar’s beautiful sadomasochistic romance ¡Átame!, which translates better as just ‘Tie Me Up’, pays close attention to the allegory of bodies and families stressing the reconstruction of the body and the nation as one and the same thing. And like The Law of Desire, the movie also treats the recovery of memory and sanity as symbolic of contemporary national history. The film’s opening shot establishes the body motif with its close attention to a kitsch representation of the Catholic icons of the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary. The shot begins close on the quite literally ‘open hearts’, and tracks back to reveal the two images, reproduced six times in a sort or Warholian picture frame.12 At the beginning of the narrative, the young protagonist, Ricky (Antonio Banderas) is released from the mental institution that has been his only home since childhood. His psychiatrist, who, in a motif picked up from Matador is clearly too attached to her patient, enquires what Ricky’s plans are for the future. He does not hesitate to reply, sincerely, ‘To work and raise a family, like normal people.’ Paradoxically, this protagonist’s search for a ‘normal’ life is in contrast to Almodóvar’s frequent proposals of unorthodox family arrangements, but Ricky’s desire to build something like a family is consistent with the development of that topic in Almodóvar’s entire oeuvre. Almodóvar creates a sharp contrast between the solitude and isolation of the mental institution, with its large, empty halls, and Ricky’s fresh and happy face almost drowning in the crowded, vibrant streets of Madrid. It is Ricky’s first breath of real freedom; although he has escaped from state custody many times in his youth, he always returned to the hospital, his only home. For someone who has spent most of his life in state institutions and who has only now been released from a mental hospital, Ricky seems sure of what to do and where to go: he goes straight to a chocolatier, buys a tacky, heart-shaped chocolate box and steals a pocket knife from the counter. He then gets on a bus and, in a fan magazine, he finds out what he needs to know: the location of the filming of ‘The Midnight Phantom’, with Marina Osorio. Like so many of Almodóvar’s principal actors, Marina (Victoria Abril) is introduced in a dressing room, in this case, of a movie studio. In this particular scene, Marina and her sister Lola (Loles León) fix themselves up in

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front of the mirror before filming Marina’s next scene. The protective character of the older sister, Lola, important to the narrative later in the film, is comically introduced when Marina chooses to take off her panties because they are too visible under her skimpy, slip-on dress. Lola asks, sarcastically and protectively, ‘Would you rather show your panties or show your twat?’ The moment is significant since, as we soon learn in the story, Marina’s sordid past (of hard drugs, prostitution and pornography) is the source of much concern to her sister. Once again, as at the beginning of the narrative in The Law of Desire, Almodóvar shows the three principal characters whose lives the movie partially represents in one single frame before they get to know each other. As the sisters Marina and Lola walk off screen on their way to the set (like the ‘brothers’ Pablo and Tina in The Law of Desire), the shot lingers for a moment and we see Ricky sneaking into the studio in the background. Unlike The Law of Desire however, these characters’ relations do not end up being totally destructive but the process of building something out of destruction, especially a family, is equally essential in Tie Me Up!. Ricky again seems very resourceful; he goes straight into a communal dressing room and helps himself to a few props and other personal items: a set of handcuffs, a long-haired wig, a ‘Walkman’, some money and a cast-and-crew call sheet. Back on the set, we are introduced to the movie director, Máximo Espejo (played by Luis Buñuel regular Francisco Rabal of Nazarín, Viridiana and Belle de jour), a formerly ‘great’ director, in a final attempt at a comeback with a ‘sub-product of horror’. The director, in his seventies, whose name means literally ‘Maximum Mirror’, is confined to a motorised wheelchair after a series of strokes that have crippled him physically, sexually and probably emotionally and intellectually as well, as his unrequited and embarrassing attention to Marina suggests. Máximo, with his wheelchair and his nostalgia for past glory and power, seems like an obvious reference to Buñuel and a few of the directors of the1970s and 1980s (Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, José Luis Borau, Vicente Aranda and others) who, after redefining Spanish cinema in the 1960s, 1970s and in the immediate transition after Franco, seemed, to Almodóvar at least, frozen, crippled and painfully out of touch with the contemporary needs and direction of national cinema. Máximo Espejo explains to a reporter on the set (the set-up reminiscent of the Almodóvar scene in

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Matador, but the meaning is somewhat revised) his motive for a return to the cinema, which also sounds like a reflexive commentary on the need for Spanish cinema to rethink itself in the late 1980s. ‘After a stroke, you have to learn to do everything again,’ says Máximo. ‘To talk, to read, to write, but mostly you learn you want to go on living.’ For his comeback movie ‘The Midnight Phantom’, Máximo has chosen as his lead Marina Osorio, a former porn star who is also a junky. The relationship between the past, the present and the future of Spanish cinema, the ‘maximum mirror’ of self-reflexivity, here suggests that Spanish cinema needs to re-invent itself out of the stagnation of the 1980s to which Almodóvar’s cinema seems to be the only alternative.13 Máximo has declared the words ‘porn’ and ‘junky’ forbidden on the set, as he wants to avoid any mention of Marina’s past. Interestingly, while her recent past is actively forbidden, Marina nostalgically recalls a happy childhood growing up as a provincial circus performer and an incongruous connection to traditional knowledge proper to the country setting. Her sister Lola, too, was a flamenco singer in the past so the two sisters have in common a happy past of theatricality and ‘performance’, and a recent past of drugs, prostitution and pain. Through the new movie, her first non-pornographic feature, Marina also intends to re-invent herself. Almodóvar then takes us to the filming of the final scene of ‘The Midnight Phantom’. Marina is on the phone on the cheap set, telling somebody that she loves him, that they have their whole future ahead of them, etc., etc. Then, the plot of ‘The Midnight Phantom’ foretells in great part the story of Marina and Ricky in Tie Me Up! when the Phantom arrives through the window. He is an over-developed body-builder in a medieval iron mask and a breathy voice who promises to take Marina away ‘to a place with no tensions’ where they can be happy. But Marina demands that the Phantom reveal his face. The Phantom however, insists, ‘look at my body, it’s full of life’. Marina is however, adamant in her refusal: ‘You only offer me death . . . and death rarely brings happiness.’ Marina then inexplicably lassoes the Phantom over the neck with a rope and jumps off her balcony holding the rope and strangling the Phantom. In the final shot, Marina is still hanging from the rope over the balcony, as fake rain begins to fall on her. The whole sequence is deceptively self-reflexive, since it purports to

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‘Look at my body’: Victoria Abril as the director’s ultimate object of desire in Tie Me Up!

be the filming of the movie, but the mise en scène and editing are clearly removed from the actual conditions of production: the sequence is fully filmed, edited, synchronised and played as a finished product although in Tie Me Up! it is supposedly the scene from ‘The Midnight Phantom’ as it is being filmed. The shot of Marina hanging from the balcony tracks back to reveal the set in the mise en scène in its entirety, with camera, lights, crew, wind and rain machines breaking the deception, and placing us back in the ‘reality’ of the fiction. Interestingly, we are momentarily put in Ricky’s place, since he has been observing the filming while hidden somewhere in

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the set. Like us, Ricky seems to have been lost in the fiction and only now to become aware of the cinematic apparatus. After Marina is brought down from her harness and freed from her ‘performative’ state, Ricky intercepts her in the aisle and does a handstand, apparently with the intention of getting her attention. As we have seen repeatedly in Almodóvar’s films, characters’ feelings are often much more available in the context of fiction, representation and performance within the diegesis than they are in ‘real’ situations. But the moment shows Ricky’s emotional immaturity in his childish attempt to impress a porn star with an infantile display. Marina pays no attention to Ricky, but on her way out of the studio she manages to give some farmers, inexplicably standing nearby, some advice on how to cure their mule’s hoof abscess. Later at home, Marina is in the bathtub, playing sexual games with a little wind-up scuba diver, such as the ones found in aquariums. In the course of the game, as the little plastic figurine struggles around Marina’s pubic area, she removes her gold chain and crucifix momentarily. But there is no real contradiction in this Almodóvar heroine: she is traditional and modern, sexual and devout. And Ricky is infantile, dangerous and maladjusted. Their actual meeting is very violent: after Ricky sneaks into Marina’s building he fights his way into her apartment by knocking her down. She fights back and the two inflict their first physical wounds and bruises on each other, with a head butt and a hard punch on the face. The extreme violence of their first real meeting is significant since in the course of the narrative Ricky and Marina will rebuild themselves out of that violence. And, thus their absurd romance begins when he wakes her up (after knocking her out himself) with the stolen Walkman to the tune of ‘Resistiré’, a Spanish version by Dúo Dinámico of the song ‘I Will Survive’ made famous in the 1970s by Gloria Gaynor. Once again, Ricky’s instincts are infantile with the Walkman serenade and his clumsy apology to Marina once she has regained consciousness. Ricky’s confession to Marina (and to the audience) is touching and naive in a sweet and violent way. First he apologises sincerely for hitting her and tying her up. Marina goes to the bathroom, closely escorted by Ricky, and they immediately have their second fight: by the bathroom sink, she throws a glass into his face, cutting his eyebrow. This second fight shows how Marina and Ricky

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shift quickly from violence to tenderness and still manage to understand each other. After subduing Marina for the second time, Ricky tries to explain his absurd motives. ‘I had to kidnap you so you can get to know me in depth,’ Ricky says. ‘Then you’ll love me like I love you. I’m twenty-three years old, I have fifty thousand pesetas, and I’m alone in the world. I’ll be a good husband to you and a good father to your children.’ Ricky explains to the incredulous Marina that they met a year ago, at the ‘Lulú’ nightclub. After a one-night stand, he promised to take her off the street and take care of her. But Ricky is as emotionally under-developed as Marina is jaded, and she cruelly ridicules his offer, which she says she has heard from many men. While Ricky’s behaviour is constantly childish (the handstand, the chocolate box, a wig he wears as if he were a rock star) and Marina is too adult (the childhood memories, the drugs, the pornography), their mismatch is eventually overridden by their need for each other. Meanwhile, at the wrap party, Lola is obliged to perform by herself a tacky song-and-dance routine that she was supposed to perform with Marina. In the background, however, Marina’s mother (actually Almodóvar’s mother) and niece awkwardly accompany her. The scene is somewhat incongruous, as it creates a contrast between Marina’s ordeal and the innocuous wrap party, but it also shows how Marina’s family might be estranged but is real and, as Lola’s bolero so clumsily suggests, they have some cultural connection, in contrast to Ricky’s deep solitude. These three generations of women will ultimately provide the family structure so evidently missing in Ricky’s life. Back at home, little by little, Ricky and Marina begin to understand each other. Marina is suffering from an almost unbearable toothache, aggravated by Ricky’s punch, and her body, accustomed to hard drugs, is unresponsive to regular analgesics. Ricky makes relieving her pain a priority, which in the context of the movie is both a literal and metaphoric gesture, but consistent with Ricky’s paradoxical responses to Marina. Ricky agrees to take Marina to see her physician for a prescription. In front of the bathroom mirror for the second time, the two are getting ready to go out, Marina fixes her hair while Ricky puts on a false moustache. The motif of the bathroom mirror and of Ricky and Marina in some phase of make-up or dress-up, or in the process of healing or washing wounds (after

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each major fight), is soon identifiable as a mirror of the relationship stages. Every time Marina and Ricky are together in the bathroom, their romance moves a step forward, however small. Ricky and Marina try to purchase her drugs at an all-night pharmacy. The attendant, with a large handgun hanging from her neck, tells them that she does not have what they want (a strong, controlled sedative) but advises them that they can get it at Chueca Plaza. The pharmacy attendant gives us a good glimpse of the rise of violent crime in Madrid in the 1980s when allnight pharmacies were common targets for drug addicts and violent robberies. Before going to Chueca, Ricky takes Marina back home and ties her to the bed. While Marina is tied up and gagged in bed, Máximo Espejo is at home watching one of Marina’s porn videos. The image of Máximo in front of the TV, with a sad, longing look on his face, is reminiscent of Diego in Matador, watching his snuff films. Like Diego in Matador, Máximo is a sign of everything that is not just old, but stagnant. On the video, Marina seems to masturbate for the visual pleasure of an unseen observer, very much like the opening of The Law of Desire. Máximo calls Marina on the telephone, and proceeds to open his heart with a kind of poetic, exaggerated love declaration that paradoxically would have saved Marina if she were only able to answer the telephone. At Chueca Plaza, Ricky looks for the drug sellers among the plaza’s colourful fauna of male and female prostitutes, drags, trannies, drug addicts, dealers and other members of Madrid’s after-hours crowd who hang out at the Plaza. This is the only time in the movie when we see people on the streets (it is an August weekend night, when many madrileños, especially in the city-centre neighbourhoods, would have gone to their home towns or to the beach to be anywhere but the city). The Chueca neighbourhood, notorious for its criminality, drug dealers and prostitutes in the 1980s, has gone through a visible transformation and gentrification in the 1990s and is now a hip, popular area of Madrid’s upwardly mobile artistic, professional and affluent gay communities, displacing many of the former dwellers to Casa de Campo, and to the streets between Sol and Gran Vía. When Ricky meets the pills dealer (Rossy de Palma), he robs her of the pills at knifepoint. And yet back home he is surprisingly kind and tender with

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Marina, who feigns sleep. Ricky lies in bed next to her, and sweetly whispers: ‘If you only knew how many nights I’ve dreamed of lying with you like this . . .’. But when she tries to take the keys from his pants, they have another argument, typical of the schizophrenic quality of their courtship. Ricky is angry, disappointed, even discouraged. He asks Marina ‘How long before you fall in love with me!?’ and she is cruel in her reply: ‘Never, I’ll never, ever fall in love with you, you fool! Who asked you to love me, or to be my husband, or the father of my children!?’. Marina’s strong words bring Ricky to tears and, again in the bathroom, their relationship changes. After being the victim of extreme violence at his hands, Marina is sincerely baffled at Ricky’s emotional vulnerability. The next time Ricky goes out of the house, he buys softer tape to gag her, at Marina’s request, and is already taking on ‘man-of-the-house’ responsibilities, he buys a washer to fix a leaky kitchen faucet. Ricky never loses track of his mission: to keep Marina hostage until she falls in love with him. And when Marina, exhausted and drugged, falls asleep in bed, Ricky again comes to her with a loving gesture: he picks up a drawing book and sketches her sleeping image on it; the drawing itself, like a primitive possession ritual, prefigures their forthcoming union. Besides Ricky’s perhaps insane fixation in pursuing a dream and a lifestyle for which he seems ill-prepared, the other strong presence in Tie Me Up! is clearly Marina’s family. While Ricky is away and Marina is asleep, her sister Lola comes by the flat, leaves a note for Marina, and waters the plants next door (she is, by one of Almodóvar’s magical coincidences, house-sitting for the vacationing friend and neighbour). Lola is vigilant, even maternal, evidently concerned about Marina’s whereabouts and afraid that Marina may have gone back to her old heroin addiction. But after returning from the street and trying the new, softer gauze on his own mouth, Ricky decides to move Marina next door; he guesses, mistakenly of course, that nobody will come looking for her there. Ricky carries Marina, who is tied up, through the threshold and, like a newlywed couple, they settle into their new dwelling. He also allows Marina to make one phone call to her family, to calm them down. It is a very touching moment when Marina picks up the telephone and hears her mother’s voice at the other end of the

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line, with her provincial accent and her soft timbre. Once again, as Paul Julian Smith has written, Almodóvar reminds us of Madrid’s ‘provincial roots’, of the humble and quiet origins of the ‘most fun city in the world’. We get a very intimate look at Marina’s family: her mother and the niece are in the kitchen, making a traditional ‘pisto’, a type of Spanish ratatouille with Andalucia and La Mancha variations. Because of Almodóvar’s own upbringing and because Marina’s mother is played (as usual) by Almodóvar’s own mother, Doña Paquita Caballero, we must assume they are making the Manchegan version, and Almodóvar gives us one more personal, self-referential moment of intimacy. For one brief moment, Marina’s accent, her theatrical demeanour, rehearsed Madrid voice and diction are relaxed and she speaks to her mother in a much more natural, yet almost imperceptible provincial tone. As was the case with Grandma Blasa and Toni in What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, the current adult generation, Almodóvar’s generation, is the one that seems to have lost its roots, the one that needs to reconnect with the past. But for one moment Marina looks back, nostalgically, with tears rolling down her cheeks, at what family is like, sighing ‘ay, pisto’. In spite of all her straying, of all the excesses of the 1980s, Marina longs for home, as evidenced by her nostalgic thoughts about a traditional home-cooked meal, and by her final words: ‘I love you so much Mom.’ Unlike most of the mothers seen so far in Almodóvar’s films from Pepi, Luci, Bom to Women on the Verge, after Tie Me Up! mothers are redeemed, children come back home and families are either created or restored. In Tie Me Up!, Almodóvar introduces a television commercial that is a reminder of Spain’s historic past and a comical adoption of cultural clichés. As in Pepi, Luci, Bom this media intersection is introduced without context and it plays in full before it is situated as a television commercial. Almodóvar’s media intersections usually allow us a glimpse into a historical or cultural issue, an editorial commentary separate from the main narrative that explores or exposes a topic of interest for Almodóvar. In this instance, Marina and Ricky seem to be already home-making, eating lunch in front of the television, they watch a commercial for a retirement bank called ‘Geribank’. But the commercial exaggerates the differences between

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Spanish and German economic and cultural practices. While the Germans are shown, admiringly, dressed as Hitler Youth and opening bank accounts, a voice-over narrator disapprovingly contrasts ‘but the Spaniards, the Spaniards . . .’ and we see a couple dressed in belle époque style, dancing a tango, suggesting a staunch work and savings ethic in contrast to a culture of just fun and games. Then, while the German tourists are enjoying the discotheques of the Costa del Sol, an elderly Spanish woman is shown sadly peddling lottery tickets in front of Madrid’s colossal bullfighting arena ‘Las ventas’. However, behind the comical expression of misplaced cultural clichés (nothing really marks the gorgeous dancers as Spanish), the Geribank commercial does bring up the resentment many Spaniards have of German tourists, about Spanish retirement plans and the volatile 1980s’ economy and about the long-lasting difficulties partly resulting from Spain’s association with Germany in the 1930s, of the deals between Franco and Hitler before and during the Civil War. What the Geribank commercial ultimately suggests is that Germany, even after Hitler and World War II, somehow came out in a much better economic position than Spain after Franco who, by comparison, did not do so much damage. The Geribank commercial triggers Marina’s concern and curiosity about the future. Ricky’s plans, stated in the opening sequence of the movie, have not changed, of course. He answers, ‘to work, to raise two or three kids. We’ll go to Australia, they need people there.’ However, Ricky this time around adds another condition, another plan that ultimately is also of extreme importance in this family-making narrative. ‘But first,’ says Ricky, ‘we have to go to my village, I haven’t been there since I was three years old.’ As in What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, Ricky has some frozen nostalgic idea of the past, a ‘past’ that, like Toni’s in What Have I Done, is not really his. The idealisation of the rural past as a pattern in Almodóvar’s movies of the 1980s is usually representative not so much of a nostalgia for the past but more an idealisation of some essential innocence that is different from, and contrasted to, the crippling repression of Fascism and the hedonist excesses of the early 1980s. Thus Ricky’s imagined nostalgia and Marina’s real longing for the simple pleasures of her rural upbringing are perfectly synchronised, they just have not quite realised it yet.

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Later, Ricky goes back to the Chueca Plaza to get more drugs for Marina’s toothache. We first see a couple of African immigrants discussing the forthcoming elections, stating their opinions about candidates and choices. The scene seems gratuitous but it points to two things that were extremely rare or altogether nonexistent only fifteen years before: immigrants and free elections. It does not really matter that the two Africans are drug dealers; they are no less a part of everything that Spain has become in the late 1980s. Immigration, elections and a higher crime rate (albeit much lower than in countries like the UK or the USA) are all part of Spain’s deep transformation and evolution out of repression, Fascism and a highly controlled economy. Of course at Chueca, Ricky also encounters the drug dealer that he had robbed the night before. She chases him with her scooter and, with the help of two addicts, beats him brutally with a rubber hose, steals his boots, his money, the drugs and finally leaves him unconscious in the gutter. A street-washing truck awakens Ricky later and he drags himself home. Almodóvar, however, juxtaposes Ricky’s violent encounter with the drug dealers with Marina’s escape attempt. Because Ricky has relaxed his vigilance significantly, having grown to trust her more and more after each bathroom exchange, he has left Marina almost untied and she easily frees herself from the ropes, and unsuccessfully tries to break a window. But eventually when Ricky comes home wounded, bloodied, saddened and humiliated, the wounds hurt both of them. Ricky apologises sincerely for not being able to get Marina’s drugs. Marina is evidently touched by Ricky’s ordeal and his new show of concern for her needs and desires, and she leads him to the bathroom to take care of his wounds. For the fourth time Marina and Ricky find themselves in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, which in Tie Me Up! plays the same role as the theatre and club dressing rooms in High Heels and All About My Mother, allowing for access to real feelings. Once again in the bathroom setting, Marina and Ricky’s relationship evolves, but this may very well be the most defining scene of Almodóvar’s entire career. ‘Let me help you,’ says Marina as she prepares a hand towel with water and soap. Marina cleans Ricky’s wounds and this repeated motif is once again a bonding ritual for the two. Ricky’s lip is cut and bloody, and he has scratches and deep cuts all over his face, his eyes are still welling

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with tears. In this instance however, Ricky’s injuries are clearly symbolic of the nation’s wounds of the past when their presence in front of the mirror triggers one of Ricky’s fragmented memories. In medium close-up Ricky looks intently at their reflection in the mirror: they are both head-on actually facing the camera-as-mirror. Marina delicately and devotedly cleans his wounds with the moist towel holding his face in her hands. In the background of the shot there is a bright shower curtain with a seemingly handdrawn world map design in primary colours (they are at the neighbour’s apartment). Ricky says ‘Look, this reminds me of my parents.’ Marina too looks into the mirror: on screen left, right where her hand holds his face, is the little, unmistakable bright yellow shape of Spain. Ricky continues his memoir: ‘Mum used to shave Dad on the porch, back home. That’s all I remember of them.’ Marina’s reaction is of sadness and tenderness, leaning towards him, holding his face in a gesture of love, understanding, sympathy and empathy. She kisses his wounds asking if it hurts. But he says ‘Not at all.’ The shot then pans slightly to the left rearranging the framing as Marina comes around to kiss his lips in an embrace: for one furtive moment, that little shape of Spain is placed right between their two injured but happy faces. Almodóvar’s use of symptomatic mise en scène is perhaps most eloquent in this scene, as the mirror setting allows for a moment of reflexivity and deep intimacy between characters and spectators, and with the motif of healing and reconciliation achieved here, so to speak, ‘over the body of Spain’. Ricky and Marina’s physical and psychological wounds are in the process of healing and the longing of past memories and of the reconstruction of the national past is cemented. Moreover, in an already typically Almodovarian motif of intersecting secular and pious imagery, in Tie Me Up!, Ricky’s body, Christ-like, is sacrificed for the redemption of Marina’s sins. Naturally, the sequence cuts to Ricky and Marina’s first sex scene in the movie (although they had had sex before the story time) in what may be Almodóvar’s most believable and most beautiful love scene. The two kiss passionately in bed but are still in pain, so they are careful not to hurt each other, while their battered bodies join in joyful celebration. Marina takes the initiative and carefully handles the penetration. Marina and Ricky give

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‘Just add “The End”.’ Ricky (Antonio Banderas) and Marina (Abril) rebuild their lives in Tie Me Up!

themselves to each other completely and Almodóvar further celebrates the moment with a juxtaposed shot of the mirrored ceiling multiplying their pleasure eight times, along with the kitsch picture of the sacred hearts of Mary and Jesus from the opening shot of the movie reflected nine times. The motif of a heart’s exposure here combines the divine and the profane, in its integration of secular/sexual and Catholic/mystic motifs. But the kitsch appropriation of the sacred hearts also alludes to the Spanish process of cultural secularisation that Almodóvar has highlighted since Dark Habits. Still in her role of sexual leader, Marina continues to give Ricky instructions in between moans and shrieks of pleasure, asking him not to pull out, not to ejaculate, keeping the tempo, as they laugh and hurt at the same time. ‘I remember you now,’ says Marina finally of the one-night stand she had forgotten but which was a life-changing moment for Ricky, as he had so innocently told her upon meeting her again. Later after sex, Marina joins Ricky at a drawing table where he has traced a ‘map of [his] life’ (a returning motif from the last bathroom scene). Ricky explains to Marina what is really

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a condensation of his historic memory in the guise of a metro line. ‘First stop: orphan at three years of age,’ says Ricky. ‘Orphanage, escape at eight, reform school, more escapes and psych hospital at sixteen.’ Ricky proudly explains how he learned many trades at the psychiatric hospital, including locksmith, which allowed him to escape once in a while, but he would always return to the hospital, his only world. ‘In one of those escapes I met you at the Lulú. That stop changed my life. Since then I only think of you. Because I only think of you I behave well and they let me out: end of the line, Marina.’ Ricky’s life trajectory, traced as talented yet juvenile drawings, is a simplified narrative of the process of healing. From a traumatic past of death, abandonment, pain and mental illness, love and sex work as therapy and offer the possibility, as Ricky so often reminds Marina, ‘of [re]building a family’. And of course, the eloquent detail of staging the turning point in the bathroom with the added metaphor of the physical wounds and the background of the Spanish map also marks a turning point in Almodóvar’s career. Significantly, Almodóvar juxtaposes Ricky’s ‘narrative’, with its simple yet functional happy ending, to Máximo Espejo at the editing table, unsatisfied with the ending of his own movie. Máximo has left Marina hanging, literally, from her own balcony at the end of ‘The Midnight Phantom’ and he wants to shoot another sequence or two. ‘The film has no ending!’ he complains to his producer. This reflexive commentary on the cinema’s need for closure is doubly significant and ironic since through most of his career Almodóvar has been providing unlikely happy endings (mostly) to an unsatisfactory national narrative. Máximo’s producer, of course, refuses: ‘Just add “The End”.’ Shortly after beginning their relationship, Marina and Ricky are already acting like an old married couple. While Marina is cooking a meal, Ricky just loiters around drinking a beer. Mildly exasperated with the strangely domestic, machista image, Marina demands: ‘Do something! Set the table!’ At the dinner table Ricky shows Marina a map on which he cannot even find his little Extremadura town: Zarza de Granadilla, in the western-most province of Spain, Cáceres. But Ricky is insistent about his plans to go there, looking for a past that does not really exist any more, except idealised in his infantile memory. Ricky decides to steal a car so he and Marina can go to

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Granadilla right away when they hear Lola arrive (she was house-sitting, of course). Ricky fears a set-up and Marina herself is anxious, unsure, clearly torn between her new devotion to Ricky and her strong family ties. So, when Ricky leaves to find a car it is Marina who asks him: ‘Tie me up.’ Once in, Lola realises that someone has been in the apartment, and quickly finds Marina. The two sisters get ready to escape, but Marina comes back for her chocolates and Ricky’s infantile drawing of the ‘Granadilla-Marina’ metro line, sighing inexplicably (as far as Lola is concerned) ‘I love him’. Later, while she recovers, Marina tries to explain to Lola the whole experience, the violence, the tenderness and Ricky’s feelings, remembering his initial touching proposal: ‘I’m twenty-three years old, I have fifty thousand pesetas, and I’m alone in the world. I’ll be a good husband to you and a good father to your children.’ His dreams shattered, Ricky returns alone to his village of Granadilla. The town of his meagre childhood memories seems to be now little more than a few piles of rubble, a destroyed path. Ricky finds the ruins of the house of his infancy and sits at the doorstep from which he has created a strong memory of furtive happiness. Pedro Almodóvar grew up in Cáceres in the province of Extremadura, close to Ricky, from the age of eight to sixteen, so Ricky’s need to recover and reassess his life with a trip back to his origins seems a strangely self-reflexive moment in a movie that is seemingly more detached from Almodóvar’s life than The Law of Desire. Thus, Ricky’s need to retrace those steps and reconnect to a past long left behind suggests Almodóvar’s autobiographical and artistic desire to begin again his relationship to his troubled youthful, provincial past, a theme treated in a more directly autobiographical way in Bad Education. Ricky later walks around the town, listening, on Lola’s Walkman, to the song ‘Resistiré’, his love hymn to Marina, now, it seems, his mantra in the reconnection to his past. A small car approaches in the distance in a cloud of dust: of course it is Marina and Lola. She calls his name out and anxiously walks up a small castle turret to meet him, which strangely emphasises the village’s historic past, even more than Ricky’s overblown memories. The end of the movie then creates a touching and strangely subdued conclusion, in sharp contrast to ‘The Midnight Phantom’’s unsatisfactory, abrupt, truncated and hopeless

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finale. As in the end of The Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, this ending condenses and concentrates the movie’s topics of reconciliation and rebuilding the national ‘family’, emphasising compromise, history and the integration of a real and an adoptive family. In spite of their fragmented past, Marina and Lola are willing to open up their own family to Ricky, to adopt him as a son, brother and husband. When Marina introduces Lola and Ricky, it is with the offer ‘I’m here with my sister, she wants us to live at home with my family . . . and yours if you want to.’ Lola takes on a maternal quality too when warning Ricky that he must work and that the secret of the kidnapping shall remain between the three of them. Back on the road, as they return to Madrid after the provincial detour, Lola, Ricky and Marina share a beautiful bonding moment together, singing in unison their ‘love theme’ again, ‘Resistiré’. While the song’s tacky lyrics (‘I’m like the junco that bends over but remains on its feet’) are satirised in the movie, at the end they take on an upbeat feeling, that is, a final promise of rebuilding shared by these three characters. From that final moment on Ricky, Marina and Lola are a family and the process of healing begins in earnest. In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Almodóvar deals very directly with the theme of the difficulty of Spain’s cultural transitions in the 1980s. ¡Átame! has an unambiguously hopeful ending, with the trio of protagonists reconciled and driving into the sunset, while What Have I Done offers this only in a non-committal fashion with the return of the lost son and Matador denies us completely. But, like in Women on the Verge and The Law of Desire Almodóvar is evidently reshaping his stylistic and thematic concerns to emphasise the reconstitution and reconciliation of families, however unorthodox or mismatched, as more frank allegories of the nation. It is as if the country ‘always divided in two’ as Almodóvar so self-reflexively tells us himself in Matador is in the process of a sincere unification, which like Marina and Ricky’s family is also real and adoptive. In The Law of Desire and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Almodóvar is elaborating on the type of self-reflexive story and characters already present or promised in his earlier films that perhaps reached its most complex, or obscure state in Bad Education. Of the many types of self-reflexive, allusive and intertextual practices already discernible in Almodóvar’s style, his

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practice of borrowing and intersecting intertextual materials has had a complex development. From his use of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score in Pepi, Luci, Bom, to his re-creation of scenes, moments, composition and mise en scène of religious icons or art in Dark Habits and The Law of Desire, to his ironic exaggerations of romantic clichés in Matador, and his adoption of popular and classical music in almost all his movies, Almodóvar is deeply aware of the expressive potential of art and media allusions. These references and allusions, adoptions and re-creations, are often ways for Almodóvar to incorporate into his own style and form the topic of the fragmented identity of the Spanish nation after Franco, and the efforts to rebuild it, from whatever available means. And since Pepi, Luci, Bom, no other intertextual adoption is arguably of greater significance in Almodóvar’s oeuvre than Alfred Hitchcock’s films.

Three Figures of Desire: The Melodrama of Longing ‘Luckily for you, my son, it’s been a long time since we’ve been afraid in Spain.’

High Heels (1991) Almodóvar’s sincere shift towards more visibly melodramatic genre configurations beginning with What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, hybridised in his first screwball drama, The Law of Desire and further complicated in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown seems a logical result of his inevitable maturity both as a person and a film-maker. In fact, Almodóvar’s process of stylistic evolution from the ‘aesthetics of bad taste’ in his early 1980s’ movies, to the self-reflexive and self-consciously complex use of mise en scène in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! aligns his work more closely with classic melodrama. In Tacones lejanos, which translates better as ‘distant’ or ‘faraway heels’, Almodóvar pays direct tribute to his formative influences in Hollywood and European melodrama, and in the process reiterates his interest in the allegory of the reconstruction of the family as the reconciliation of the Spanish nation. In this most melodramatic of Almodóvar’s movies to date, an amalgam of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (itself a 1959 remake of a 1934 film by John Stahl starring Claudette Colbert), Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978) and Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), a woman has to confront and resolve the trauma caused by her mother’s extreme narcissism. But Almodóvar’s placement of the character’s childhood trauma in the transitional national phase, near the end of Franco’s regime, gives the melodrama an allegorical angle. The film begins with the protagonist, Rebeca (Victoria Abril) at Madrid’s Barajas airport, waiting for a flight from Mexico to arrive. As she sits bored in the waiting room, Rebeca entertains herself with some memories from childhood, from a vacation in Venezuela’s Isla Margarita in 1972. Almodóvar’s attention to Rebeca’s extreme attachment to her mother, and

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the mother’s crippling narcissism, introduced in this opening flashback, is really the essence of the film, setting up a scenario of an unusual, unresolved Oedipal complex and the character’s natural difficulty in settling her own identity, because of the deep disturbance caused by her mother’s lack of attention. At Isla Margarita Rebeca’s mother (Marisa Paredes), the actress and singer Becky del Páramo, buys herself a pair of horn shell earrings, and the little Rebeca (Rocío Muñoz) insists on getting herself a pair. She models the earrings for her mother asking anxiously ‘Do you like me? Really?’ But in spite of the mother’s positive reply it is apparent that Becky only has eyes for herself. The memory continues as the little Rebeca loses one of the earrings and in the process of finding it is slightly humiliated by her stepfather, Alberto (Pedro Díez del Corral). She runs away and Becky scolds Alberto for it: ‘You’ve traumatised her again!’ The memory ends with Rebeca running while we hear in the background Becky’s voice calling out to her. The shot of the little Rebeca running away dissolves slowly to a close-up of the adult Rebeca at the airport, still visibly upset by the memory, while we still hear her mother anxiously calling her name. Something about the memory is soothing, calming however, and Rebeca looks inside her Chanel handbag and brings out the very same pair of earrings and puts them on, ready to model for her mother again. Almodóvar goes straight into Rebeca’s second childhood memory, dissolving to the hum of a large spinning top. The setting now is ‘Madrid, 1974’ and Rebeca is reading a newspaper item about her mother’s plans to move to Mexico to make a film. Rebeca overhears an argument between Alberto and Becky concerning the move to Mexico. Alberto refuses to let Becky go stating that he is not ‘as modern’ as her ex-husband. The threat to Becky’s freedom posed by Alberto’s machista attitude is resolved when the little Rebeca switches the bottle of his sleeping pills for one of amphetamines: while travelling on the road, Alberto dies in a car crash. It is especially telling that the little Rebeca’s first victim is a father figure, the stepfather who, in her view, was interfering with her mother’s happiness. Rebeca and her nanny watch Alberto’s funeral on TV, and, at the end of the scene, the news anchorwoman announces that ‘the health of the Head of State is excellent, and you are all authorised to say that . . .’. The communiqué is interrupted by the next scene but we hear enough to know

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that it is clearly lying about Franco’s health; he was in fact ill and hospitalised in 1974. While Almodóvar does not reveal the entire content of the message, its presence alone is significant in the film’s extended opening sequence by placing Rebeca and Becky’s separation, the source of great distress for the girl as we learn in the film, at the precise juncture of Spain’s emergence from dictatorship. The implication is that the juncture of the death of the patriarchal figures (Franco and Alberto) and the end of the regime (for Becky and Spain) is itself traumatic. But the ultimate trauma comes from Becky’s broken promise to the little Rebeca, who was under the belief that she would be going to Mexico with her mother. ‘If you let me go to Mexico to make a very beautiful movie, when I come back we will never separate again . . .’. Becky’s manipulation is brutal when she tells the girl that if she does not go to Mexico she will be very sad. ‘Do you want Mom to be sad?’ Of course, when the sequence cuts back to Rebeca in the airport, we realise that Becky did not return until now. Our first visual symbol of Becky is her guitar coming out on the luggage belt while a few sad string notes are heard on the soundtrack. Becky and Rebeca are awkward around each other, and Rebeca cannot contain her envy of Becky’s secretary, who has been with her for the last ten years. ‘How lucky’, she says. But their first argument comes when Rebeca reveals that she has not allowed any journalists to come to receive Becky. ‘I wanted some more expectation,’ says Becky, to which Rebeca replies with tears swelling up in her eyes: ‘I was full of expectation.’ Becky’s return is also characterised by a real sense of nostalgia. On their way to the hotel they take a detour to the Alamillo Plaza, to look at a ground-floor flat that Becky has bought. The flat is the place where she was born and raised, in the porters’ quarters, and of course the place of origin of Becky’s memories. Paradoxically, while Rebeca’s childhood memories are all traumatic, Becky’s are sweetly nostalgic. Also at Alamillo Plaza, Becky and Rebeca find a bill advertising ‘Femme Letal: the Real Becky’, a transvestite who imitates Becky in her ‘pop’ phase. ‘Aren’t I the real Becky?’, she asks, rhetorically. But with that scene Almodóvar also introduces the theme of identity as a part of the character’s struggles, a topic that becomes increasingly complex as the film develops. There is, of course, identity confusion with the names

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of ‘Becky’ and ‘Rebeca’; the mother’s nickname, paradoxically, is the daughter’s diminutive. Also, it has already been revealed that Becky’s secretary, Marga (Anna Lizaran) is writing Becky del Páramo’s autobiography. And finally, there is the presence of Femme Letal who, in the guise of Becky, is a friend of Rebeca’s. ‘When I missed you,’ says Rebeca to her mother, ‘I often went to see him act.’ As if that were not enough complication in the two Rebecas’ lives, they share one more difficulty in terms of identity: Rebeca’s husband, Manuel (Feodor Atkine), is a former magazine reporter and photographer and the former lover of Becky del Páramo. The extended opening act of High Heels establishes melodramatic content, a historical context and the theme of sexual and familial identity complications. The first meeting between Becky, Rebeca and Manuel, the former mother’s lover turned daughter’s husband is tense and explicitly states that Manuel is still sexually interested in Becky; a flashback when they first reunite shows them young and passionate on a beach kissing and full of

‘Aren’t I the real Becky?’ A mother’s love and romantic desire are confused in High Heels

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desire. In that momentary flashback, the third in the first act of the movie, Manuel shows more desire for Becky than he ever does for Rebeca. Later, the three go to Femme Letal’s show in Madrid’s popular and notorious Club Villarosa, near Plaza de Santa Ana. The set-up is very self-reflexive as Rebeca, Manuel and Becky watch attentively while Femme Letal as Becky (Miguel Bosé) sings a torrid love song in what represents another kind of flashback in the film to Becky’s 1970s’ pop phase, and to Manuel and Becky’s relationship. The song itself, ‘One Year of Love’, is about remembering a past love, true in the case of Becky and Manuel, who cast furtive glances at one another during the performance. But equally self-reflexive is the setting, for in the background of the improvised stage where Femme Letal sings, dressed in 1970s’ fashion, miniskirt, big hair and tall platform shoes, there is a wall with a tile mosaic of flamenco dancers. For a brief moment, Femme Letal and the flamenco dancers seem to be sharing the stage and in similar poses. Thus the transvestite’s own identity, always being re-invented, is, like that of the flamenco dancers, a symbol of a superficial, invented cultural identity, and itself constructed and reconstructed in the course of the performance.1 After the performance Letal and Becky get to know each other, they exchange gifts (Becky’s earrings for one of Letal’s fake breasts) and Letal is both humble and embarrassed in the presence of his object of imitation. But Becky is flattered, her narcissism fed by the imitation and the homage. Manuel, however, misogynistic and homophobic, cannot contain his dislike for Femme Letal. The two at the table get a chance to size each other up: Manuel looking at Letal’s crotch, and Letal at Manuel’s pistol under his belt. Manuel is even more insulted when Rebeca accompanies Letal to the dressing room to help him change. Manuel makes an embarrassing pass at Becky, explaining that he has already presented Rebeca with a divorce suit. In the dressing room, Letal shows his true colours by effecting Rebeca’s seduction, while still in drag and make-up, or in other words, while still half-dressed as Becky. Their conversation is especially telling as Letal asks Rebeca if she minds his imitating women. On the contrary, replies Rebeca, ‘I like it when you imitate my mother.’ ‘Well’, says Letal, ‘I’d like to be more than a mother to you.’ Ultimately, Rebeca yields, although not without a struggle, to the

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‘I want to be more than a mother to you.’ Femme Letal (Miguel Bosé) performs as Becky

sexual advances of Letal as Becky, revealing the particular design of this Oedipal scenario: she has already killed a paternal figure (Alberto) and married another one (Manuel, a former lover of Becky, who called Rebeca ‘nena’ the one time he saw her as a child) and she later has a projected sexual relationship with her ‘mother’. Their awkward sexual encounter ends when, in the middle of their passion, Rebeca knocks down a red ceramic plate, which cracks into three pieces upon hitting the floor: the suggestion of Rebeca’s pregnancy is thus already planted. Once again, as in Tie Me Up!, in Women on the Verge and The Law of Desire, the dressing room is the space where actors and performers in their transitional stages seem to get in true touch with their feelings, here allowing Letal as Becky to seduce Rebeca, and revealing the true nature of Rebeca’s incestuous desires. Rebeca’s Oedipal complex is straightforward in the movie, with the sole variation that she is a daughter (instead of a son) in love with her mother. Becky’s narcissism and Rebeca’s unresolved Oedipal trauma become further complicated when, a month later, in the conclusion of the first act,

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Manuel Sancho, Rebeca’s husband and, as we soon learn, Becky’s past and present lover, is shot dead in their weekend villa near Madrid. The investigating officer, Inspector Eduardo Domínguez (also played by Miguel Bosé in glasses and fake beard) interviews the three apparent suspects, Manuel’s three women: Rebeca, Becky and Isabel, one of his employees at the television station where Rebeca also works as an anchorwoman. The investigation has already yielded the time of death, that Manuel was shot in the chest and that all three of the women came to see him at the chalet the night he died. Rebeca found him dead upon arrival, according to her story, while Becky had gone there before to break up with him, having re-initiated a relationship with him weeks before. Rebeca’s description of finding Manuel’s body to Inspector Domínguez is extremely detailed, happening, she says, after she went to the chalet to finally agree to give Manuel a divorce, as he had been requesting. The Inspector, Becky suspects, seems to believe Rebeca’s tale, which she tells with tears and conviction. Becky’s alibi, that it wouldn’t be prudent to kill a son-in-law two days before her theatre opening, seems however, convincing enough to Inspector Domínguez. However, going to the studio immediately after Manuel’s funeral, Rebeca then unexpectedly confesses to her husband’s killing during her newscast on television to the entire nation. As is customary in Almodóvar’s narratives, characters are better in touch with their true feelings while in stages or spaces of performance, and Rebeca in the television news studio is no exception. Everyone, including Inspector Domínguez and her mother Becky and her secretary Marga, sees and hears Rebeca’s tearful, sincere and remorseful confession to the killing of Manuel Sancho, while reading the news item on his death to the viewers. Disengaging for a moment from her professional posture, Rebeca uses Manuel’s first name, gives details of his life and confesses to the murder, while still presenting the news, looking into the camera and formally addressing her audience. For Rebeca then, as for many of Almodóvar’s characters, performance, ‘theatricality’ and true feelings are confused and trigger a moment of extraordinary candour. It is as if all inhibitions are superseded by honesty in the presence of an audience, live or on the air. The scene is made doubly self-reflexive by Rebeca’s straight look into the television camera, which is itself displaced by the movie frame. In

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the midst of her confession, Rebeca pulls out some photographs she took of Manuel’s belongings after the killing. That action, she explains, made her feel as if he were not gone, gave her final access to Manuel’s projected presence. The mediation of the photographic camera also poses the reflexivity of a visual apparatus (television, photographic and cinematographic image) of another potentially performative or representational medium as one that allows further access and intimacy to Rebeca’s feelings. It is as if she were explaining Almodóvar’s own practice of presenting a theatrical or performative mediation of characters’ feelings. As she is finishing her touching confession, two policemen arrive to arrest her on orders from Inspector Domínguez. Rebeca is taken directly to Inspector Domínguez’s office. The Inspector, who is clearly Femme Letal in disguise again, tries to make Rebeca recant her confession in the privacy of his office, going as far as suggesting that Manuel’s killer may be some fortuitous lover, like Femme Letal himself. But Rebeca refuses to be manipulated and denies ever having been unfaithful to Manuel. Inspector Domínguez challenges Rebeca, and it is now revealed to the spectator, if not to Rebeca that Inspector Eduardo Domínguez and Becky del Páramo impersonator Femme Letal are the same man: ‘I happen to know for a fact that is not the case . . . Who are you trying to protect?’ Although it is apparent that he is trying to help her, Inspector Domínguez sends Rebeca to jail. While the question of Inspector Domínguez’s identity is now also unresolved, Rebeca is put in a police transport van and taken to jail in the company of another detained woman, apparently a prostitute, played by Bibi Andersen. Again, Almodóvar places Bibi Andersen in his narrative as a kind of reflexive commentary on the question of identity so essential to this film; and once again, as in Matador and The Law of Desire Andersen, Spain’s most famous transsexual, plays a real woman. Almodóvar juxtaposes the scene of Rebeca in jail with Becky del Páramo’s debut in concert. As the prison gates are shut behind Rebeca with a loud clanking noise the soundtrack dissolves to the sound of applause and the image cuts to an overhead shot of the theatrical audience greeting the returning star enthusiastically. A reverse shot from behind Becky puts the camera on stage with her, making the moment even more reflexive of its

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own theatricality, giving the cinematic spectator privileged views of the star on stage in the first shot, and from the stage into the audience. In one singular, signature Almodóvar moment, Becky gets down on her hands and knees to kiss the stage. An extreme overhead shot shows Becky’s back arching to reach the stage floor and then a close-up reveals her bright red mark on the dark wooden floor. In many of Almodóvar’s movies, as we know, the stage has a special significance in its capacity to bring out genuine feelings rather than performance. Of course, it is in All About My Mother where this significant narrative practice reaches its most expressive representation, but High Heels prefigures that in an equally intimate and significant moment between performer, audience and stage, when Becky, in her first show of humility offers for the first time her heart and soul on stage. While the public greets the heretofore narcissistic star with loving applause, Becky silences them humbly. ‘Good evening, Madrid’, she says. ‘Tonight, my only daughter sleeps in jail, and no matter what she’s done, my heart, like any mother’s is broken. Please allow me to dedicate this song to her . . .’. The dedication to the previously abandoned daughter is eloquent for the song is perhaps Agustín Lara’s best romantic composition, ‘Piensa en mí’ (‘Think of me’). Given the context of Rebeca’s apparently unresolved Oedipal conflict, and her unusual attachment to her mother, the song’s lyrics are overly romantic and Rebeca’s reaction (due to the magic of live radio, she hears the dedication and the song in jail) is that of a broken-hearted lover.2 While Becky sings the song (with the voice of Luz Casal) Almodóvar cuts back and forth between Rebeca in jail and her mother on stage. They are both clearly heartbroken and in spite of their physical separation there is a clear emotional connection between the two that thus far we have not witnessed. Becky breaks down on stage momentarily, and Rebeca equally breaks down in the communal jail cell, the two brought together by the song on the radio. It is apparent that once again through the catalyst of the theatre stage, and the mediation of the radio, Becky and Rebeca are emotionally connected. Just like Rebeca’s television confession, the theatre performance allows Becky a depth of feeling that puts her in touch with her true emotional self. The addition of the radio medium intersection in this scene literalises the heretofore metaphoric meaning of all Almodóvar’s media intersections

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going all the way back to Pepi, Luci, Bom by not mimicking but actually representing the character’s feelings. Inspector Domínguez’s investigation is unexpectedly aided by his bedridden mother’s obsessions (played by Mairata O’Wisiedo). Mrs Domínguez keeps a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine items on the three objects of her adoration: Mother Theresa, Brigitte Bardot and Becky del Páramo. It is through the mother’s rearrangement of Becky’s scrapbook after the star’s return to Madrid that she discovers that Becky and the murder victim Manuel Sancho were former lovers. The significance of the scrapbook is apparent as it is a representation of the use and purpose of keeping some kind of historic memory, especially in the context of a narrative where memories are traumatic and emotions are mediated. In fact, Inspector Domínguez only confirms his (mistaken) suspicions that Becky is the killer, in spite of Rebeca’s confession, because of his mother’s obsessive collection of memories, even if they are about other people’s lives. When Inspector Domínguez visits Becky and confronts her with the information about her past with Manuel Sancho, she defends her lies with the rationale: ‘I have the right to forget . . . I refuse to keep picking at my wounds.’ Becky’s reluctance to ‘pick at her wounds’ seems to get in the way of this family’s process of reconciliation. Becky claims that she is afraid of Rebeca and has not the strength to confront her daughter face to face but explains to Inspector Domínguez that every day, all she does is hope to make it alive to 10pm, and do ‘the only thing [she] knows: perform’. Becky, like Rebeca in front of the television, needs the mediation of the stage or theatre, or some other performing context in order to discover her truth. In fact, Becky and Rebeca’s traumatic past has to be confronted if the family is ever to be reconstituted. Inspector Domínguez insists that Becky and Rebeca meet, and promises to facilitate the process by getting mother and daughter together outside the jail. In the women’s jail, Rebeca seems to be surviving OK, and Almodóvar makes the jail environment seem friendly, even cosy, after the first day’s shock, when a group of women led by ‘La Cimarrona’ (‘the Wild One’, Bibi Andersen) bursts into a spontaneous dance in the jail’s inner yard. Almodóvar stages the musical number according to the conventions of mise

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en scène of the classical Hollywood musical as the women seem to follow the music’s beat naturally into a well-choreographed salsa number performed directly and self-reflexively for the camera and the movie audience. It is the type of ‘showstopper’ number so common in the American musical.3 The musical number is interrupted when a fight breaks up between La Cimarrona and a drug dealer and Rebeca discovers, through another unbelievable coincidence, that Letal/Eduardo may also have been a junky snitch. The whole jail yard sequence carries a significant amount of formal and narrative information. For one thing, the musical number in the middle of Almodóvar’s most melodramatic movie to date, points to the director’s concerns with genre definition, to his self-reflexive treatment of the movie itself, like the characters of Rebeca, Becky and Letal, as going through a visible identity crisis. In fact, the genre (in)definition of the film, along with the presence of the ‘transitional’ body of Bibi Andersen, the many and colourful transitional phases of Femme Letal/Eduardo, and the identity confusions between Becky and Rebeca present us with a Russian dolls effect of identity crises that demand compromise rather than resolution. When Rebeca and Becky finally meet outside Inspector Domínguez’s office, Almodóvar recreates the stage scenario by placing the two characters’ confrontation in an empty courtroom. A variation of the performance motif, the courtroom allows for theatrics and emotions to be, once again, confused. Paradoxically, in the courtroom setting, Rebeca now denies having killed Manuel, and accuses her mother. ‘You didn’t even allow me to kill him, so I confessed to it.’ Rebeca then compares her relationship with her mother to one of the many intertextual references in the film. ‘Have you seen Autumn Sonata?’ she interrogates her mother. She then retells the plot of the Ingmar Bergman movie, making a direct connection with their lives. Rebeca’s (and Almodóvar’s) appropriation of the Bergman plot is told this way: It’s the story of a famous pianist who has a very mediocre daughter, a story like ours. One day the mother goes to visit her daughter, now married, who also plays the piano. After dinner, the mother asks her daughter to play something for her. The daughter is so embarrassed, but she plays a Chopin prelude. When she is finished, the mother, to be polite, tells her she did very well, but she cannot resist

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the need to give her a few pointers. And there’s nothing more humiliating for the daughter than to listen to those pointers. Because what her mother is saying is ‘You’re worthless. How dare you put your ordinary fingers over such a sublime score? How can you believe that my sensibility can stand it? How dare you imitate just one of my gestures at the piano? If you rehearsed for millions of years you could never be even a faint shadow of what I am. Your homage is an insult to me!’

But Becky seems baffled by Rebeca’s analogy, so the daughter explains that their own life is like the mother (Ingrid Bergman) and daughter (Liv Ullman) in the film. She, Rebeca explains, has spent her entire life trying to imitate her mother but with no success. Only once did she manage to come out the winner by marrying Manuel. ‘With Manuel,’ says Becky with tears in her eyes, ‘we both lost.’ But Rebeca’s accusations continue: ‘I knew that you could take him away from me, if you wanted to, but you had to prove it!’ Becky is sincere in her apology, and the violent argument is possibly Almodóvar’s most dramatically complex moment to date. The Bergman citation brings in a new level of intertextuality with the appropriation of a recognisable textual reference and establishes the genre as melodrama. Furthermore, the dramatic, even theatrical courtroom setting makes Rebeca’s accusations seem literal, aided by Almodóvar’s symptomatic use of setting and mise en scène. As with Almodóvar’s adoption and adaptation of Hitchcockian motifs in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the later Luis Buñuel citations in Kika and Live Flesh and the Tennessee Williams and Joseph L. Mankiewicz references in All About My Mother, the Bergman reference in High Heels is really a quotation in the scholarly sense of the word; the reference gives Rebeca and Becky’s relationship problems textual support, a clarification, an explanation, even meaning. Finally, having made her way to the accused seat, Becky admits her guilt and asks for forgiveness. Paradoxically, however, even though it is Becky who is situated as the defendant, it is Rebeca who confesses to the murder of Alberto, Becky’s second husband (whose sedatives and stimulant pills she had switched). The motive for that murder, Rebeca confesses, was to get her mother’s attention, to free her from the authoritarian husband, so that

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Anything for the mother’s love: Victoria Abril and Marisa Paredes in High Heels

mother and daughter could be forever together. But of course, with the newfound freedom brought by sudden widowhood, Becky abandoned Rebeca. All the years of resentment, of love and hate for her mother, have come to this moment for Rebeca, to this confession of a crime of passion committed, ultimately, for a mother’s love. Profoundly upset with the confrontation and the confession, Becky comes close to collapsing, takes a little pill out of a tin case, and puts it in her mouth, without Rebeca seeing her. ‘I wanted you to live your own life,’ says Rebeca finally, on her way out. ‘You promised me we’d enjoy life together, that we’d never separate, but you lied, and I think I’ll never forgive you for that.’ While Becky stays behind in the courtroom, groping her apparently failing chest, Rebeca is taken back to the jail, crying the whole way in the back of a police car. But Rebeca’s concerns get even more complicated when she faints as soon as she gets back to the jail and is told by the resident physician that she is pregnant. Based on her own comments to Letal on the night of their one sexual encounter, it is apparent that the baby is his, since she has not had

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intercourse with her husband for four months. She is shortly released after that, based on Inspector Domínguez’s judgment that there is not enough evidence against her. Once at home, Rebeca goes directly to the television set and with a screwdriver she removes the back cover; hidden inside the television is Manuel’s gun, the murder weapon, evidence against Rebeca that Inspector Domínguez thus far has failed to find. But Inspector Domínguez arrives at this precise moment, while Rebeca is holding the gun. She hides the gun underneath a chair cushion and lets him in. He is here to tell her that Femme Letal is back at the Villarosa and has a great need to speak with her. All the coincidences are finally lined up: Rebeca’s release, Letal’s return, and the news of her pregnancy. It is evident to all but Rebeca that Inspector Eduardo Domínguez and Femme Letal are the same person. But Rebeca seems to believe that Letal is also Domínguez’s snitch, and Domínguez says that he wants to talk to Letal and find out what he has to say. Now, it seems that what Domínguez really wants is to believe that Rebeca is innocent. Yet, out of all the chaos in Rebeca’s life, her relationship with her mother is the most pressing issue for her. She writes a letter to her mother asking for forgiveness for the courtroom drama, and promising to run to her side, after she speaks to Letal. Significantly for Rebeca, making up with Becky is essential, more important than solving the mystery of Femme Letal’s identity, even though it is clear that he is the father of Rebeca’s baby. First, Rebeca wants forgiveness and she promises Becky that they ‘still have time’. After the promise of reconciliation, however, Rebeca goes to the Villarosa to see Femme Letal, a projection of Rebeca’s filial and sexual desires. Once again, Rebeca watches Femme Letal disguised as Becky, singing to her the same song that Becky had dedicated to her daughter at the theatre debut, Agustín Lara’s ‘Piensa en mí’. Letal is even wearing the same earrings Becky gave her on the first night at the Villarosa, so that Rebeca’s real desire for her mother is further emphasised as a romantic/sexual confusion. The earrings motif, which goes back to the traumatic Isla Margarita incident, in which Rebeca, perhaps for the first time, felt the threat of her mother’s abandonment, returns here as a kind of reassurance, but also as further evidence of Rebeca’s real, ultimate object of desire. As Letal, kneel-

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ing in front of Rebeca’s table, lip-synchs the words ‘your childish mouth . . . being so youthful taught me how to sin . . .’ in the background there is the poster of Becky in the same red dress and green elbow-length gloves she wore at the theatre; her image presides over Rebeca’s seduction. The next scene cuts directly to Letal’s dressing room, which as we know, and like the stage or the television studio, is one of the places privileged by Almodóvar for the resolution of conflicts and access to real feelings. And in there, finally, Letal’s secret, that he is also Inspector Domínguez, and even a few other characters, is revealed to Rebeca. Finding evidence of Eduardo’s other disguises (in order to infiltrate the cases he was investigating, Eduardo ‘invented’ his own informants), the fake beard, the coloured contact lenses, Rebeca is dumbfounded. Still wearing his eye make-up but with his fake beard, Eduardo confesses that he has brought Letal back to confess everything and to ask Rebeca to marry him. ‘You?’ she asks, ‘Who? Hugo, Letal, Eduardo?’ and he replies ‘All three of us.’ It is especially telling that in the midst of all the identity confusion posed by the characters in High Heels that Eduardo, in one of his transitional stages (in the process of removing and putting on a disguise) and in the dressing room setting, is finally speaking his truth to Rebeca. And as hard as the truth is, it is ultimately what Rebeca wants to hear. Eduardo’s practice of ‘inventing’ his own informants in order to infiltrate the cases he investigates is itself a sign of his own identity crisis; even his mother does not really know his standard persona. And yet, that very same stage of confusion seems to be what holds the characters together. When Rebeca admits that she went to see Letal because she is expecting his child, that otherwise she would have gone to her mother, it also apparent that the theme of building a family is revised in High Heels. Letal, now Eduardo without the beard, leads Rebeca to his hideout, a garage where he and his mother keep all the remnants of their former lives. Rebeca, he says, is the first person he has ever taken there, to this space full of old furniture, pictures and a whole past that does not seem to belong to them any more. His mother, he says, is insane, and she too is unaware of Eduardo’s triple life. ‘How can you live like that, lying to everybody?’ she asks. But Eduardo promises that he is done with lying. In the midst of the

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identity crisis (once again, Eduardo is putting on his fake beard, because that is part of the Inspector’s personality) and surrounded by the relics of his own and his insane mother’s past, Eduardo again asks Rebeca to marry him. She is reluctant to even listen to him but he replies, ‘Whether you want to admit it or not, you and I have already formed a family.’ The moment is very significant and very much a summary of the film’s topics: amid the identity crisis and the troubled, cluttered past, in spite of the criminal background and the sexual confusion, Eduardo and Rebeca have in fact, ‘formed a family’. Just like Spain in the process of democratisation and reconciliation, with her cluttered historic past and her traumatic ‘childhood’ it is time for the nation to ‘form a family’. While they are still dealing with their own confusion in Eduardo’s hideout, Rebeca turns on a television to see her mother, once again, singing ‘Piensa en mí’, the signature love song that frames their relationship. A news anchorman then announces that Becky del Páramo, who had secretly suffered for years from angina, has collapsed on the stage of the María Guerrero Theatre in the middle of a performance and has been rushed to hospital. The theatre stage and the television screen are once again the site of an emotional and narrative turning point for Becky and Rebeca. Eduardo and Rebeca rush to the hospital together. At the hospital Becky is in intensive care and all she asks is that her daughter tell her the truth. Rebeca then confesses to her dying mother that she did, in fact, kill Manuel. Becky then asks for Inspector Domínguez and falsely accuses herself of the murder. ‘Rebeca accused herself to protect me . . .’, Becky says. But then Becky asks to see the hospital chaplain and, in the guise of the last rites, confesses to the Catholic priest that she lied about confessing to the police. While Almodóvar has treated the Catholic Church in Dark Habits, Matador and Bad Education as a source of repression and abuse, in High Heels, the Catholic sacrament of confession allows Becky to do good. ‘While alive,’ says Becky, ‘I gave [my daughter] nothing. Let my death be of some good use to her.’ Becky as a sinner is not absolved, because she does not repent, but she does redeem herself by showing remorse ‘for having caused so much pain around me’. Becky is determined to pay for her real sins by paying for a crime she did not commit, her daughter’s. Rebeca prepares Becky for the confession, giving her the type of forensic details the

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police will need to know, thus enabling her mother’s paradoxical redemption through guilt. When Becky is brought home to die, Rebeca moves in with her mother for the remainder of her life. Rebeca comes in with her bright red suitcase and goes straight to the bedroom, where Becky awaits her death while Inspector Domínguez waits outside the room for some kind of actual evidence to surface against Becky. In their last moments together, Becky and Rebeca have their much awaited reconciliation and reunification: together at last in a tender reunion of forgiveness and love. Rebeca then produces the gun from her purse, wrapped in a bright red silk handkerchief, and hands it to Becky, who proceeds to press her palm and fingerprints on it, for the police to find. Finally Becky asks Rebeca to open the windows, claiming she wants to see the street. As Rebeca makes her way to the ground-level windows, Becky dies quietly, while we see the shadow of the high heels of a woman on the street, passing by the window. The vision of the high heels through the windows triggers a childhood memory in Rebeca: when she was a little girl, when they lived together last, she couldn’t go to sleep until she heard Becky’s heels in the distance, walking away from the room after looking in on her. So, in that final instant together, mother and daughter are finally reunited in a real and projected return to childhood. Of course, as we know, Becky grew up in this very apartment, maybe in this very room where she has just died. And Rebeca has longed for this moment for most of her life, so in a way they have both returned home; and they are reunited in the maternal home. In her final gesture, in fact, Rebeca climbs into bed with her dead mother and, while still speaking to her, holds her tight and curls into a foetal position. Rebeca’s fifteen-year journey seems to culminate in this one moment where, however briefly, her longing for the final reunion with her mother is so strongly symbolised by her brief return to the womb. It is telling that in the process Rebeca kills two men (Manuel and Alberto), both paternal figures that in her view were standing in the way of her and her mother’s happiness. From the opening sequence that led to the two extended flashbacks of little Rebeca’s childhood trauma, separation anxiety and first crime, to the final reunion in bed, with Becky already dead, Rebeca’s obsession with her

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mother is, it seems, the guiding force of her entire life. It is an unresolved Oedipal trauma with a homosexual twist but it allows for an analogy with the nation that is equally eloquent. On the one hand, Rebeca’s desire is ultimately to re-form her family, to be reunited with her mother and to regain the childhood lost to her because of her mother’s narcissism and celebrity. On the other hand, Rebeca does re-form her family through her affair with Letal, who she first desires in the image of her mother. So by conceiving a child with Letal, Rebeca fulfils, at least in a projected fashion, both her longings: to create a family and to be united with her mother. As brief as the moment seems, it is however important to point out that Eduardo’s hideaway, in which the two protagonists really come together for the first time (in a romantic more than sexual way), is evidently symbolic of the nation’s past, like his mother’s insanity. Letal/Eduardo’s own identity crises, his own desire to create and re-create his past and present (by inventing his own informants) and his longing for a family too, are similar to the ways in which Ricky in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! tries to recreate his past out of chaos and gain a sense of belonging to a family. Finally, in High Heels, Almodóvar seems more concerned with adopting a recognisable genre: melodrama. By invoking films like Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, by copying some stylistic practices of the American 1950s’ melodramas of Douglas Sirk with his adoption of a bright primary-colours palette, by using a score heavy with strings,4 and even by alluding to the mother-daughter-rivalry-leads-to-dead-lover plot as in Mildred Pierce, Almodóvar enriches the melodramatic form and his intertextual narrative strategies. As in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, these references and allusions have the apparent dual purpose of calling attention to the film’s own genre identity crisis (here aided by the musical number) and of serving as a kind of analogy to the characters’ and the nation’s crises. But while the film’s emotional depth and ultimately tragic plot define it more closely as melodrama than anything else, making it a closer relative to All About My Mother and Talk to Her than any other film, the national analogy of rebuilding the family seems to take a secondary role in High Heels. As we will see in The Flower of My Secret, the films of this period then, with the exception of Kika, are first and foremost seeking generic identification in the process of building national reconciliation.

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The Flower of My Secret (1996) Almodóvar’s melodramas of longing continued in 1996 with La flor de mi secreto in which Marisa Paredes again plays a woman yearning to rebuild her emotional life. As in the beginning of Kika and All About My Mother, The Flower of My Secret opens with the Almodóvar motif of a rehearsal: in this case, medical personnel are being trained how to tell relatives someone has died and to raise the topic of organ donation. After a brief musical background of Andalusian zapateo (the hard-stepping dance peculiar to flamenco dancing), Almodóvar opens the film with a session in which two physicians try to explain the concept of brain death to a reluctant mother (Kiti Manver), while simultaneously trying to request that she allows them to harvest her son’s organs. The arbitrary introduction however, as we have seen, an Almodóvar motif, allows for a strangely in medias res melodramatic moment which, while irrelevant to the story itself, deals with the question of grief up front, allowing a perspective into the character’s future pain. Almodóvar then reveals the artificiality of the moment, like he does later in All About My Mother, showing a video camera and operator, the scene as seen from a television monitor, revealing that it is in fact a training session for medical personnel. With no transition, since the narrative explanation will follow later, the scene cuts to a central Madrid apartment where, in the middle of the afternoon, a woman (Marisa Paredes) sleeps quietly in her bedroom, surrounded by books by Spanish and international authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Julio Cortázar, James Ellroy, Juan José Millás, among others). Quickly, in a scene reminiscent of The Law of Desire, the soundtrack and melodious string score (by Almodóvar regular composer Alberto Iglesias) are invaded by the clickety-clack of a typewriter and the shot shows in extreme closeup the process of copy editing, while the woman’s voice corrects a line from the page: ‘defenceless against the lurking of madness’. In the sweeping shots of the apartment that succeed each other in numerous dissolves, we learn more about this woman, Leo; she is a writer and her loved one is absent, suggested by the many photographs of a handsome man in military uniform (Imanol Arias) cluttering many of the tables and surfaces. This woman’s longing, it seems from the beginning, is for this man. At the end of

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the opening sequence she is sitting at the typewriter, which we have heard but not seen, writing him a letter about missing him and about dealing with his absence by wearing something of his every day. Today, she explains, she is wearing a pair of leather boots he gave her two years ago, which are too tight and she cannot remove. The shoe motif, begun with the sound of the zapateo in the opening credits, continues when the woman attempts to phone a flamenco school, but the sounds of a demonstration (by the celebrated flamenco dancer Joaquín Cortés) drown the rings of the telephone. Almodóvar resolves the narrative confusion of the opening sequences when Leo makes another telephone call from a bar on the street and tries to reach her friend, Betty (Carmen Elías), who is the seminar instructor from the opening scene. Back at the seminar, the actress in the seminar (Manver) continues her scene, repeated in All About My Mother, while the physicians finally get to request permission to harvest the organs. The actress, named Manuela (like the principal character and transplant nurse in All About My Mother) adds an unexpected twist when she requests that the organs are not given to an Arab, in an usual reference to Spain’s increasing racism in the face of high immigration rates in the 1990s. This scene became the genesis of All About My Mother and of Almodóvar’s eventual elaboration of the body metaphor to speak of national reconciliation issues, as we will see in Chapter 4. At this point, while Betty, Manuela and the physicians discuss the results of and the emotions aroused by the session, which is the point of the training, as is explained in All About My Mother, Leo arrives, sheepishly, drenched from the rain, looking for her friend Betty. Leo looks needy, confused, wet from head to toe, and admits that she is looking for Betty to help take off her boots. Once this is taken care of, the friend has a piece of advice: ‘Leo, you can’t go on like this, so fragile.’ There is a visible contrast between Leo’s problems, her difficulty dealing with her husband Paco’s absence and the training session for transplant personnel ran by her friend Betty. But Almodóvar’s point is eloquent since both situations, while different in scope and meaning (as we will also see in All About My Mother) are circumstances in which people have to deal with grief, and Leo’s story is one of understanding, negotiating and finally con-

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Another woman ‘on the verge’: Marisa Paredes as Leo in The Flower of My Secret

quering her state of grief. Meanwhile it seems like Leo’s life is centred on the eternal wait for a furtive visit or telephone call from the absent and seemingly estranged husband, who is a Spanish officer stationed at NATO headquarters in Brussels while serving in the Bosnian conflict. At home, her Andalusian maid, Blanca (the great flamenco dancer Manuela Vargas), and her son, Antonio (Cortés), are planning and rehearsing Blanca’s return to the tablao, the professional flamenco dancing stages of Madrid, where she was a formerly great dancer. It is an interesting plot development for Almodóvar, whose films often reveal the diversity of the migrants in Madrid’s microscosmos, to include the famed pair of dancers, Manuela Vargas and Joaquín Cortés. In spite of the implications of flamenco dancing as a cultural cliché, and as something designed primarily for tourists, Almodóvar emphasises in The Flower of My Secret the power of flamenco dancing as a real and moving cultural expression. Ironically, however, the dancing pair of mother and son, regardless of their talent, are, like so many Andalusian immigrants in Madrid, relegated to positions as servants, or

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treated like criminals because of prejudice, suspicion, racial and social bias. But the story of these two dancers, a seemingly arbitrary subplot, eventually emerges as an integral part of Leo’s emotional recovery and their show of dignity turns out to be an example for everyone around them. Thus, in The Flower of My Secret, Almodóvar re-appropriates flamenco dancing to give it its rightful place in Spanish culture. Leo, like the character Sister Sewer Rat in Dark Habits, is a novelist of trite romance or ‘pink’ novels, as they are pejoratively known in the Hispanic world, the type of popular literature made famous by Barbara Cartland, for example. As part of her emotional crisis, Leo is seeking an outlet, a writing experience in which she, the heartbroken, estranged wife, does not have to lie, to invent happy endings while in reality she is ‘defenceless against the lurking of madness’. Her friend Betty sets her up to meet the editor of the literary supplement at El País, one of Madrid’s foremost and most liberal newspapers, for a writing assignment. Leo offers her services to the editor Ángel (Juan Echanove), who is ignorant of the fact that Leo Macías is the real name of the author of the ‘pink’ novels, the mysterious ‘Amanda Gris’. Here, Almodóvar introduces what is perhaps his most daring statement about art, literature and authorship. In her interview with the editor, Leo expresses her interest in writing about women’s literature, ‘adventurous, suicidal, demented’. Her list of focus figures, Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Dorothy Parker, Jean Rhys, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Isak Dinesen and Janet Frame, are all women who write about heartbreak, madness, desperation. ‘I write about them in my article, “Pain and Life”’, Leo explains. Leo also says that she will need to use a pseudonym and acts shocked when Ángel enquires about ‘Amanda Gris’. The real identity of Amanda Gris is unknown; and no one even knows if she is a woman. Ángel’s assumption that ‘Amanda Gris’ is a woman, while accurate, is exposed as a prejudice that ‘that’ type of literature ‘appeals’ to women. Leo dismisses Amanda Gris: ‘There’s no pain or grief,’ she says ‘just routine, complacency and sentimentality.’ Ángel then insists that Leo write her first review about Amanda Gris’ latest book, an anthology of stories. Leo refuses and walks out of the interview. The episode is very telling in its selfreflexivity since once again, as in Dark Habits, Almodóvar seems to be

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addressing some opinions about his own work and analysing the irony of the creative process that he so closely addresses in The Law of Desire. As always, there is conflict and madness between the creative process and the author him/herself and, as we see in The Flower of My Secret, Leo’s experience, like Almodóvar’s, centres on reconciling the ‘lurking madness’ and the potentially healing power of art and melodrama. In a more familiar setting, Almodóvar introduces Leo’s sister, Rosa (Rossy de Palma) and mother who share a tiny Madrid apartment. Mother, just like Grandma in What Have I Done To Deserve This!? has the desire to return to her village (and of course is played by the same actress, Chus Lampreave). The recurring motif of the ‘return to the village’, which we also saw in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, is contrasted again to ‘life in Madrid’ which, for the older generation, is always a struggle. For Leo’s mum, Madrid is full of ‘skinheads and yuppies’, and they are in her view equally offensive. The provincial roots of the city are always in evidence, but Almodóvar also points out the parallel processes of diversification and gentrification that the city saw through the 1990s. But there is a very close and touching bond between the two sisters who show maturity and understanding in dealing with their mother’s unhappiness, making coffee together in the small kitchen. ‘She is used to her village,’ Leo explains, ‘here, she drowns.’ And her sister adds her suspicion that their mother will end up like their aunts, uncles and grandfather. ‘She’ll end up mad, it’s in her blood.’ The madness motif, which goes back to the opening montage in a poetic, mysterious manner (since we still don’t know where the line is written) continues in a much more literal setting with their mother and her generation’s madness, and the supposedly curative powers of village life. ‘One of these days,’ their mother says in the middle of an argument with Rosa, in which they accuse each other of madness, ‘I’ll go back to the village and not be a nuisance . . .! I hate Madrid . . .’. The bickering and the generation clash are ultimately essential to the film, for eventually Leo too finds the need to ‘return’ to the village for a soothing contrast to Madrid and her heartbreak. Leo is, as she writes in her notebook quoting Djuna Barnes, ‘a woman created for anxiety’. In contrast to Ángel’s sincere interest in Leo’s writing

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(he even offers his help to publish her new novel), an enthusiastic midnight call to Paco in Brussels meets with lack of interest and doubts about her sobriety; Leo is once again dealing with an estranged relationship with a man who is unresponsive to her emotions. And a call the next day remains unanswered. Contributing to Leo’s anxiety is an argument she has with her editors; they are unhappy about the latest Amanda Gris novel, which they judge to be in breach of their contract due to its sordid content, unglamorous, seedy setting and unhappy ending. Leo protests that the story is actually based on a real event but her editors are unyielding. Amanda Gris is supposed to deliver romance novels set in exotic locales or rich suburbs, to celebrate upwardly mobile matches, to stay away from social problems, and to always, unequivocally, provide a happy ending based on romance. But, Leo claims, she has lost interest in the romantic ‘pink’ novel; everything she writes, she argues, comes out ‘dark’. Almodóvar once again resorts to the very self-reflexive scene of the main character at the typewriter, which goes back to Pepi, Luci, Bom and The Law of Desire, and to the use of extreme close-ups of the words on the sheet of paper and the character’s voice-over. The triple self-reflexive method in Flower is further complicated by the narrative fact that Leo is writing a review of her own work, the novels written under the pseudonym ‘Amanda Gris’. The review is later published under the new pseudonym ‘Paz Sufrategui’, a choice that extends the self-reflexive content since that was the name of a real Almodóvar press agent and publicist (1993–2004). Leo provides a reliable detached criticism of ‘her’ own work, which brings to the forefront again Almodóvar’s concerns about his own work and its form and function. The final words of the review are very telling in the context of Almodóvar’s interest in the creative process and its meaning, present in so many of his movies. Leo writes: ‘Amanda Gris writes “fiction”. This should not be confused with literary creation. When I say “fiction”, I mean lies.’ Almodóvar is a director who has always put much emphasis on the form, function and purpose of the creative process. He visits the theme repeatedly in Pepi, Luci, Bom, Dark Habits, What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, The Law of Desire, High Heels, The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother and Bad Education, and sets many scenes highlighting emotional depth and the character’s affective arch, in the cre-

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ative context of the theatre or some kind of performative space. In The Flower of My Secret however, it seems as if the whole narrative turns on the resistance of the main character to allow herself access to her own feelings. Yet in this film, like in Live Flesh and All About My Mother, Almodóvar openly exploits the manipulative ‘lies’ of melodrama in order to make a sincere emotional point. The major situation in The Flower of My Secret is Leo’s inability to connect with her emotional self. While classic film melodrama is almost always about the repression of feelings, this repression comes to the main character, usually a woman, through some external force. But in Flower, Leo is her own repressor, ignoring the signs of crisis around her. So, for instance, when it seems that by chance her husband Paco finds her at her friend Betty’s house to announce an upcoming twenty-four-hour leave, Leo does not seem baffled at all by the telephone call to the friend’s house. But it is obvious from Betty’s awkwardness that the call was intended for her, not Leo. The topics of authorship and self-reflexivity are developed when Leo’s critique of her own work as Amanda Gris is finally published with her nonfiction pseudonym ‘Paz Sufrategui’, with a reply signed with the even more suspicious pseudonym of ‘Paqui Derma’ (pachyderm). It is soon evident that the new mysterious author, defender of Amanda Gris, is none other than Ángel himself. In a visit to the newspaper to discuss their new assignments, Almodóvar creates a telling mirror effect against a glass sliding door, where the two reflections of Ángel (‘Paqui Derma’) and Leo (‘Amanda Gris’/‘Paz Sufrategui’) are merged into a number of self-reflections. In other words, we see on the glass, the image of Leo repeated three times, and one superimposed image of Leo and Ángel together. As in a similar shot of Antonio Banderas and Eusebio Poncela in Matador (see Chapter 2), this shot of these two characters dramatically interprets their relationship for us: they are forging a significant bond that brings them together intimately. In fact, without a moment’s hesitation, Ángel confesses to Leo his new literary ‘identity’. Ángel also, upon the mention of Paco’s imminent visit, casually but unequivocally suggests that he is in love with Leo. But, as often in Almodóvar, the love confession is presented in the form of a film reference. While Leo and Ángel walk towards his office, Leo comments that the news-

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paper offices remind her of Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment (1960). Ángel takes advantage of the non sequitur to comment how in that film, ‘Shirley MacLaine is actually not in love with the person she believes that she is in love with, but with someone else.’ But Leo is clear in her belief: ‘I am in love with the person I think I’m in love with.’ Leo is nervously expectant as she awaits Paco’s visit. Leo’s Andalusian maid, Blanca, and her son Antonio have an argument about Blanca’s need to rehearse for their flamenco recital. Blanca hesitates in leaving Leo alone with the responsibility of the paella on the stove, but Leo, who wants to feel domesticated, urges Blanca to go with Antonio to the recital. While the flamenco recital subplot is somewhat under-developed, in time it gains affective and narrative importance, as it becomes a melodramatic vehicle in Leo’s emotional journey. With the paella and the tension cooking simultaneously, the bell finally rings and Paco is at the door. Leo has changed into a sexier outfit for her husband and when she opens the door the two embrace and kiss. However, Almodóvar denies us the voyeuristic pleasure of the kiss by framing the shot as a mirror reflection in which we do not see their lips together and where Paco’s face is broken up in four separately framed small mirrors. It is an eloquent use of symptomatic mise en scène, emphasising the fragmentation of this couple, especially since the glass sliding door shot of Leo and Ángel actually brought them together. In the one instance, though they never come too close physically, Ángel and Leo are fused into one image, in this opposite version, also using reflections instead of the direct image of the characters, Paco and Leo, who are actually kissing, seem to be distanced, broken. Their exchange right after the warm welcome kiss turns immediately cold. Paco wants some shirts to be ironed and when Leo lies about having made the paella all by herself, he tastes it and simply says ‘It’s cold.’ Leo, disappointed, disillusioned mutters to herself: ‘I’m not.’ Paco is elusive, distanced, speaks in short, curt sentences and, in spite of Leo’s advances, is unresponsive. Paco insists that they have to talk and Leo reacts dramatically, yelling, asking for an explanation. As soon as the conversation turns dramatic, Almodóvar once again employs the mirror motif. A shot of the two characters facing each other, with a swift pan, turns into a fragmented shot containing Leo’s face only inside a small

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shaving mirror: fragmentation and separation is revisited as a visual motif.5 The argument escalates when Paco announces that he does not have twentyfour hours, that instead he has to leave in two hours for a new military assignment. Leo curses the Bosnian conflict and in the process makes a statement about Spain’s important and controversial entry into NATO, which greatly divided national opinion in the 1990s. Politics aside, Leo and Paco are really arguing about their own relationship, but initially refuse to address it. Leo finally brings up how Paco’s request for the NATO assignment was only an excuse to get away from her. He turns his back to her and even refuses to listen, rejects the offer of a meal and coldly and cruelly walks away. She pleads for him to give her twenty-four hours, to talk to her and pathetically asks if there is any possibility of saving their marriage. Paco sincerely responds in the negative and resorts again to a military metaphor: ‘There’s no war that compares to you.’ Leo, destroyed, cries desperately and goes directly to the bathroom where she takes a bottle of pills from the medicine cabinet, pours a glass of water and brings a pill to her mouth, determined, it seems, to commit suicide. The telephone rings and she stops for a moment but continues after realising the call is not from Paco. She takes five or six pills, and gets into bed, presumably to await death. A slow fade-to-black suggests that perhaps this is it for Leo but, in an uncharacteristic turn, a new phone call brings back the shot of Leo in bed. It is her mother’s voice on the machine, complaining about an argument with her daughter, Rosa, and announcing her determined plans to go back to the village. Leo awakens and responds faintly ‘Mama . . .’ and soon vomits the pills she had taken on an empty stomach, her life saved by her mother’s voice. This character’s connection to her mother, essential to this movie, is something that Almodóvar had begun to explore in some depth in Tie Me Up!, where Marina, although estranged from her family, shows a deep connection with her mother that ultimately brings her back home. Equally for Leo, who has not seemed too close to her mother until her mother’s voice saves her life (mediated by the telephone answering machine, as so many other emotions in Almodóvar’s films, of course). In a strategy familiar in Almodóvar, the scene of Leo’s recovery is comically intersected by two television intertexts, the type of media intersection so common and often so elo-

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‘There’s no war that compares to you.’ Mirrors foretell Leo and Paco’s (Imanol Arias) breakup

quent in his films. While Leo is at the neighbourhood bar having a ‘carajillo’ (coffee spiked with cognac) to recover, Almodóvar interrupts the scene to show two television clips that clearly mimic her situation. One is a broadcast of a screaming contest in the town of Colmenar de Oreja, where two women are shown in succession on the television screen uttering loud, long screams, followed by the incongruous enthusiastic applause of a crowd of spectators. Leo is visibly upset, and the barman offers to change the channel. He turns, however, to a show featuring the emotional break-up song ‘En el ultimo trago’ in the moody, low voice of the singer Chavela Vargas, in which the woman announces her plans to drown her sorrows in ‘the last sip’ of her drink. The blunt juxtaposition of the suicide attempt, the screaming contest and the break-up song serves as brief but necessary comic relief in a movie devoid of humour. Like High Heels before it, and later Live Flesh and All About My Mother, The Flower of My Secret defines itself as essentially melodramatic. While this media intersection has a comical effect, as often in Almodóvar’s films, it is also consistent with the melodrama convention of employing

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symptomatic mise en scène; of having the environments, moods and even aspects of design comment upon, or reflexively mimic, the characters’ feelings and states of mind.6 Leo seems to get the message too and exits the bar quickly. On the street as Leo tries to make her way home, she encounters a massive demonstration of medical students, asking for improvements of their stipends and their working conditions and threatening to strike with the chant: ‘Ahora la gripe la va a curar Felipe’ (‘Now Felipe will cure the flu’). The compact crowd of jumping, screaming students drowns Leo, who seems at the brink of collapse when, out of nowhere, Ángel appears, rescues her and takes her away. The scene is strangely political for Almodóvar in one aspect: it is directly addressing an immediate, real and specific crisis in contemporary Spain that does not affect or change the character’s life and situation. While Almodóvar’s films are always political, his employment of allegorical forms makes the political content indirect so that it is often overlooked by critics and audiences outside Spain. It is unusual for Almodóvar to include a scene of such immediate topicality, allowing Prime Minister Felipe González to be mentioned by name and adopting the protest chant from the actual demonstrations.7 A similar effect follows from the references to NATO and to Spain’s position in that organisation, which was also controversial and caused much resentment and division under the government of Felipe González. While moving towards establishing itself as a melodrama, The Flower of My Secret pauses, however momentarily, to make a social and political point. The chant of the medical students is also prophetic since in 1996, and in great part as a response to the PSOE’s stagnant policies and economic failures, Felipe González and his party were voted out of office in favour of the conservative, right-wing Popular Party. In fact, it is as if Almodóvar very self-reflexively is violating the terms of Amanda Gris’ contract where, as we saw above, she is specifically obliged to stay clear of politics. Yet politics seem to keep appearing in unexpected places, for instance, the middle of a melodrama. Ángel, who we know has a romantic interest in Leo, nurses her back to health in his apartment overlooking Plaza del Callao in the very centre of Madrid, only two blocks from Puerta del Sol. Outside, a big poster on the

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side of a building advertises Amanda Gris’ anthology. Ángel playfully tells Leo that, in her drugged and drunken stupor, she has revealed to him ‘the flower of [her] secret’, that she is Amanda Gris, and makes her promise that she will not attempt suicide again. In the confusion of her recovery and under Ángel’s ‘guardianship’, Leo is finally confronted by Betty with the news of her long-term affair with Paco. Betty is blunt in her confrontation: what can one do to make Leo face reality? Ironically, of course, Betty’s career involves helping people to confront painful situations and giving bad news but, blunt as she is with Leo, she is also honest. And Leo seems to respond to that. The whole argument takes place in front of Ángel, who as guardian is vigilant but does not interfere. Betty also announces that she has broken up with Paco. The curious moment of bonding between the rivals is made even softer by Almodóvar’s composition in the final shot when Betty and Leo are sitting together but looking in opposite directions of the frame, both evidently affected deeply, reconsidering their own relationship in view of Paco’s betrayal, so they are on even terms, but looking away from each other.8 Almodóvar is very deliberate about his mise en scène and specifically about symptomatic compositions that dramatise characters’ feelings, as is common in classic Hollywood and European melodrama. However, the colour palette and lighting design in The Flower of My Secret by cinematographer Affonso Beato is visibly softer than the work of Almodóvar’s previous cinematographers, Alfredo Mayo and José Luis Alcaine. In tune with Almodóvar’s homage to Hitchcock in Women on the Verge and to Douglas Sirk in that film and in High Heels, Alcaine and Mayo respectively offered brighter, more dramatic colours and lighting contrasts, but The Flower of My Secret is softer, more personal. The film fits more closely the genre of melodrama; Beato’s lighting and colour schemes are appropriately subdued. The effect is magnificent in the sense that the characters’ emotional arch is more evident in them than in the mise en scène around them. The softer tones of the confrontation scene between Betty and Leocadia under the benevolent vigilance of Ángel, are consistent with Leo’s sudden maturity. Previously crippled by something as banal as a pair of tight boots, Leo is surprisingly strong in her moment of extreme emotional devastation, seeming to cope even better than Betty who is, paradoxically, the ‘cri-

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sis management’ psychologist. The film’s visual design, in which Almodóvar often shows human figures fragmented by their own repression, reflected on mirrors and other surfaces, suddenly turns more solid and unexpectedly Leo, previously broken, pulls herself together in a metaphor maintained by the composition. At this point, in the middle of her own crisis, Leo takes a desperate and angry telephone call from her mother who, fed up with Madrid and her younger daughter, states her intention to go ‘back to the village’. Leo decides to take her mother there and to stay too, to rest and recover. Like other Almodóvar characters before her, Leo’s trip to the village is both a physical return and an emotional regression to her origins. On the car journey to the town, Ángel drives and her mother tells the story of Leo’s difficult birth, how the large baby, unable to breathe, was made to take her first breath outside in the cold winter air, by her paternal grandmother. Leo, of course, does not remember the story, but is on her way to a rebirth. The movie’s rare quiet, nostalgic tone is emphasised by the mother’s connection to the village of her past. Unlike Ricky in ¡Átame!, Leo returns to the village in an effort to find an anchor for her fragmented existence, for the frantic creative and romantic crisis of her city life. As they enter the village, Leo’s mother recites a playful, anonymous little poem celebrating the bucolic setting and dedicated directly to Leo: How beautiful is the morning, Leo, The sunlight shines bright The flowers offer their perfumes And the trees their rustling sounds. From branch to branch singing The birds flutter around, And their chirpings captivate me. You can hear the soft bleating Of the flocks of sheep Which like snowflakes Stand out against the grass. Here, there is a hut

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‘Take me back to the village!’: Rossy de Palma and Chus Lampreave in The Flower of My Secret

In which shepherds live Over there is a white little house Whiter than a lily flower Up there, there is a farm Next to the farm, there is a garden Next to the garden, a house And next to the house, there is the church. The hill is covered with oaks, The valley is full of fruit The river is flanked by trees. Don’t you know it? It is my village.9

The scene intercuts Mother inside the car reciting the poem with views of the beautiful Manchegan red soil of Almodóvar’s past, the quiet little setting and Leo’s sad but hopeful face. The sequence ends, paradoxically, literally

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with the last verse from the poem coinciding with the establishing shot of the town square. Almodóvar chose the town of Almagro in La Mancha for the shoot, some twenty kilometres away from his real birth town of Calzada de Calatraba which he thought had changed too much.10 But the contrast is effective, not only with Leo’s emotional instability but also with the frantic pace and political turmoil of Madrid. Unlike the city, which is in the middle of protests and chaos, with strikes that threaten to bring Parliament to a halt, in Leo’s little town there is no sign of crisis, only the streets free of traffic in the bright sunny morning and a lonely old woman sweeping the pavement. In Almagro, Leo and her mother, whose name we learn is Jacinta, are received joyfully by friends, relatives and neighbours, and the two women have a chance to heal emotionally and physically after their respective turmoil. The quiet tone of the film is further emphasised in the village sequences, where Almodóvar frames a number of shots, already desaturated in comparison to earlier films, through lace curtains and other translucent fabrics. The result is somewhat alienating but softens the atmosphere. When Leo tells her mother that she is probably going insane, like her aunt and grandmother, her mother is wise and quick in guessing that her daughter’s problems are due to her husband, Paco. There is, it seems, no secret between these women, once they have retraced their steps back home. While Leo is in bed, convalescing emotionally more than physically, her mother keeps guard by her bedside. The scene is very much reminiscent of the end of High Heels where Becky and Rebeca also return to their roots. But unlike that mother–daughter pair, who at the ancestral home get to heal their wounds at the moment of dying, Leo and Jacinta, also at the ancestral home, go through the process of rebirth. Jacinta is wise in her advice: when a woman is left alone by her husband she has to go back to her village, to her place of origin and reconnect with her past, with the women of the town. Almodóvar juxtaposes this with a scene of the quiet, afternoon practice of women in the process of making hand-made lace, bolillo. Sitting outside in a group, the women of the town give themselves to this fading, traditional cultural practice which for Almodóvar has a soothing function and serves as a symbol of a female world, a matriarchal arrangement with no men and no

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suffering.11 An extreme close-up of the intricate lace and the hands of the women holding the threads and passing them through the pins marking the pattern is accompanied by an explanation to Leo of how the lace is made. In this traditional setting, where the women speak in parables and sing their feelings about the town (‘Soy de Almagro’), everyone seems to have poetic answers to every question and ‘Leo’ responds to her more traditional full name of ‘Leocadia’. Interestingly, it is Leo who is supposed to be the writer but, like her mother, the women of Almagro are connected to the ‘word’ and to the earth and in this time-capsule are evidently calmer, if not happier than Leo in her contemporary setting. A strange call from her editor in Madrid brings Leo suddenly back to the present: the editors are ecstatic with Amanda Gris’ two latest novels, recently submitted and evidently written by someone else: Ángel of course, confesses to being the new Amanda Gris. When Leo and Ángel reunite in Madrid some time later, Leo is rejuvenated, beautiful and happy, and they attend a recital where Leo’s maid, Blanca, and her son, Antonio, dance a fiery flamenco version of Miles Davis’s ‘Soleá’, the moody, Spanish-style piece Almodóvar had already used in High Heels. Ángel intends to keep writing Amanda Gris’ novels, saying he always wanted to be a romance writer. In the Spanish original, Ángel uses the noun ‘writer’ in the feminine form (escritora) to refer to himself. Already slightly feminised in his ‘literary’ pursuits, Ángel also feminises himself through the gendered noun, aligning himself with Leo’s female-surrounded healing, while retaining some romantic interest for her. After the dance recital, for instance, drunk with love and alcohol and dancing in the middle of the Plaza Mayor, Ángel confesses again his love for Leo, invoking Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, reminding her how they met, how he will never forget that day. But Leo is both astonished and embarrassed, evasive even, confused with memories of Paco and a newfound desire for Antonio, and she firmly rejects him with a show of strength and resolve only seen before in the turning point of her confrontation with Betty about Paco. ‘How strong you’ve turned,’ remarks Ángel. The dance recital itself is a revelation. Rather than Blanca and Antonio, it is Manuela Vargas and Joaquín Cortés who perform for the theatre audience and the filmic audience and, like so

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many theatrical scenes in Almodóvar, the sequence serves as an emotional juncture. After the show, in the symbolic setting of the dressing room, Blanca is removing her make-up when Leo comes to see her, astonished by this talent, this new ‘flower of a secret’, unknown to Leo. ‘I’ve been taking advantage of you,’ says Leo, sincerely apologetic. But Blanca reassures her that Leo has been more help than she knows. Soon we learn that Blanca’s son, Antonio, has been stealing a few things from Leo here and there, a pair of earrings, an unsold novel, in order to finance the recital. The energy of the recital seems to be contagious and Antonio comes to Leo’s flat after the show to confess the thefts, offer his apologies and suggest the exchange of sex for the debt he and his mother have incurred with Leo. But Leo is happy to help, she is grateful because the show has brought back, it seems, a certain joie de vivre that we have not seen in Leo so far. In fact, between the journey back to the source and the flamenco recital, the Manchegan plain and its red earth, along with the connection to a re-appropriated cultural cliché, cure Leo from heartbreak and the ‘lurking of madness’. At the end, Leo pays an unexpected visit to Ángel and the two, like a pair of girlfriends, cement their bond. They are reminded of the final scene of Rich and Famous (George Cukor, 1981) in which Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset toast their newfound, man-less happiness.12 Leo and Ángel’s kiss and toast are also less romantic than friendly and, while there is the potential for romance, what remains with us at the end of The Flower of My Secret is a sense of emotional fulfilment. As one of his ‘melodramas of longing’, in this film Leo’s quest for an answer to her romantic and mental pains is diffused by friendship, by family and heritage and finally by culture. Leo’s romantic longing is substituted by those external but ultimately stronger new connections and bonds in her life. Interestingly this film contains some of Almodóvar’s most directly political content to date. So, while Leo’s pains are initially very intimate and personal, the movie puts them also in a very specific cultural and historical context. Thus, by showing the way to Leo’s emotional and mental healing, Almodóvar also revisits his theme of the creation and reconstitution of family and cultural bonds. Surprisingly, Almodóvar’s follow-up to The Flower of My Secret, while being based, paradoxically, on a foreign source, is deeply nationalised in the process of adaptation.

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Live Flesh (1997) A very loose adaptation of British mystery author Ruth Rendell’s 1986 novel, Almodóvar’s Live Flesh is, however, dramatically overhauled and effectively transformed into a very Spanish story.13 In fact, Almodóvar opens the film with a title screen of big block letters with the legend of the Spanish government’s declaration of a state of emergency (‘estado de excepción’) throughout the national territory in January 1970, suspending constitutional freedoms and protections. In this highly politicised context of the 1970 state of emergency, Almodóvar places the birth of the film’s protagonist, Víctor, forever tying the character’s history to the nation’s history in the most direct political and historical analogy of his career. It is January and, while the Christmas lights are still on, a young prostitute named Isabel (Penélope Cruz) painfully gives birth to a baby boy on a bus, en route to the hospital. The eerie setting is emotionally effective since the streets of Madrid are uncharacteristically deserted because of the curfew. Isabel finds strange support in her landlady, Centro, and an anonymous bus driver who, risking his job, also co-operates. It is a strangely touching scene of sympathy between strangers, under the cold Christmas street lights and in the middle of a city killed by repression, the way Centro and the bus driver lend a helping hand to the lonely young woman in need: Centro even bites off the umbilical cord. So Víctor is born in the middle of a political crisis, surrounded by strangers, and literally, in transit. As the bus drives away with the four passengers, we can see on the wall a graffiti message reading: ‘Liberty. Down with the state of emergency.’ While Isabel is rushed to the hospital, Centro picks up the baby, and shows him out the window, ‘Look Víctor: Madrid.’ It is the Puerta de Alcalá, the legendary entrance to the city since 1778: it is Madrid all right. In the opening sequence even before the credits, Almodóvar contextualises the story in a way that denies its British mystery origins and makes it a critically Spanish historical tale. The sombre tone and content of the text declaring the state of emergency, straight out of the nation’s history, stresses the importance of that context with reference to a specific moment in the country’s history, as we have not seen previously in Almodóvar, with the exception of the medical students’ strike scene in The Flower of My Secret.

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Víctor is ‘adopted’ as the city’s favourite son, and given a lifetime bus pass from the city transport system, promising, says a publicity announcer, ‘a life on wheels’. Almodóvar then cuts to a shot of the pavement that tilts up to reveal, ‘20 years later’ Víctor Plaza (played by Liberto Rabal, the grandson of Buñuel regular Francisco Rabal), on a motorcycle, riding at the same intersection, with the Puerta de Alcalá’s monument to King Charles III in the background. Incongruously the shot cuts to two unhappy men, seemingly police detectives, inside a car in what seems like a stake-out. In contrast to the opening sequence of desolate streets and Franco’s minister Manuel Fraga’s announcement of the state of emergency, the streets of Madrid are now full of people, teeming with life, traffic, motorcycles (Víctor among them), ‘stealing, scheming, betraying and corrupting each other’, says the older detective, Sancho (José Sancho). A remnant of the repressive past, Sancho, a drunk and abusive husband, certain that his wife is unfaithful, hates these liberties of Spain, acquired over the last two decades (like Almodóvar’s first police detective character in Pepi, Luci, Bom), while his younger partner, David (Javier Bardem) seems to understand and cope better. In a parallel development, the young Víctor, now twenty and handsome, makes a telephone call to the beautiful but troubled junky Helena (Francesca Neri) who he had met and had sex with a week before in a club. Víctor is very excited, but Helena, who is nervously waiting for her drug dealer at home, does not really pay attention to him, ignores Víctor on the phone and rudely asks him not to call again. Helena hangs up and turns to the television, where Luis Buñuel’s 1955 Mexican crime drama The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz has just started. The reference to Buñuel’s ‘Rehearsal of a Crime’, as the film is called in the original Spanish, seems reflexive in its foretelling of ‘the crime’ we are about to witness in Live Flesh (also foretold by the vigilant policemen in the car nearby). Víctor, disappointed and discouraged by Helena’s dismissal, boards a bus with his lifetime pass and begins to roam the city, having nowhere to go. In one of his many circles around the city, Víctor finally drives by Helena’s apartment again and gets off the bus. Seeing her out on the balcony, he is angry at her for dismissing him earlier and rings the

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doorbell. Thinking her drug dealer has finally arrived, Helena buzzes Víctor into the building carelessly. But Víctor is both angry and apologetic, explaining he has come to see her because after their fortuitous sexual encounter the week before they had made a date. That encounter was Víctor’s first sexual experience, helping explain his sudden attachment to this woman who is otherwise a stranger. Helena comes out of the bedroom holding a handgun, threatening Víctor, clearly less affected by their previous meeting, and accusing him of being sexually inadequate, of having ‘come between her legs’ without properly penetrating her. As the two struggle, a shot is fired and Almodóvar intercuts the scene with Buñuel’s film on television at the precise moment when the young child Archibaldo de la Cruz sees his governess accidentally killed by a random bullet from a street skirmish outside. In the Buñuel film, the young Archibaldo forever associates the governess’s death with his own sexual awakening (emphasised by a cut from the victim’s wound to her bare legs, and the excited expression in the boy’s face), and ultimately with the adult Archibaldo’s sexual inadequacies.14 The parallel in Almodóvar’s scene is especially telling, for the twenty-year-old Víctor will now also associate a criminal and a sexual memory, which leads to a severe trauma, like Buñuel’s character, but as Gwynne Edwards argues, perhaps without the ‘obvious Freudian implications’.15 Víctor is also reminiscent of Ángel, the young bullfighting student in Matador who is sexually immature, traumatised and in need of guidance and healing. While the two policemen, Sancho and David, make their way to the scene of the crime (summoned by the radio dispatcher), Víctor sits calmly on Helena’s sofa watching the Buñuel film, while Helena has passed out on the opposite couch. Víctor is watching a scene in which a mannequin resembling one of Archibaldo’s ‘victims’ comes apart as he tries to burn it in a ceramic kiln.16 While Helena and Víctor struggle again (she is upset that Víctor has interfered with the drugs drop-off) in a scene reminiscent of Ricky and Marina in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, David and Sancho arrive and make their way to the apartment, arguing about the right procedure. A stand-off ensues between the two policemen and Víctor who, threatened and cornered, now holds the gun to Helena’s head. In the sequence most faithful to Rendell’s

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novel, David, the young policeman, tries to reason with Víctor and avoid a violent ending to the stand-off while they all point guns at one another. In an unexpected turn, knowing that Sancho is drunk and is acting unreasonably, David points his gun at his superior officer and takes his gun away. While Helena is taken to safety by David, however, Sancho tries to take Víctor’s gun and in the ensuing struggle a shot is fired and David is wounded; David and Helena lock eyes as she walks away from the scene and David falls to the floor wounded; how badly we do not know. This is however, just about as far as Almodóvar’s attention to Rendell’s novel goes. In the book, Victor Jenner is a serial rapist, who, in an attempted getaway from the scene of a crime while holding a young woman hostage, wounds the young policeman David Fleetwood and leaves him paraplegic. There is no real plot involving the older policeman, who is treated only marginally in the first chapter. In the novel, Victor, after his release from prison, eventually befriends Fleetwood and his girlfriend Claire, gets involved with the woman, but is killed by the police when, in another plot, he kills his elderly aunt. None of this has anything to do with Almodóvar’s story. Almodóvar complicates the cast of characters from the Rendell original by multiplying them into two couples: Sancho and his wife Clara (Ángela Molina, another Luis Buñuel actor who appeared in his 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire), and David and Helena, all of whom are tied up, either emotionally or sexually, with Víctor. After David is shot, the film cuts to Barcelona, 1992, where at the Paralympics David de Paz, the former policeman, is now the star of Spain’s winning wheelchair basketball team. In prison, Víctor watches the games on television and learns about David’s triumphs and celebrity, and about his marriage to a clean-and-sober-looking Helena Benedetti. As in Ruth Rendell’s novel, in Victor’s view, David and Helena (Claire in the novel) have robbed him of time (the years he spent in prison), of his freedom and his dignity. He now looks defunct, depressed, with his shaved head and his prison bruises. ‘I want you to suffer as I have suffered,’ thinks Víctor bitter and lonely watching David and Helena celebrate on television the former policeman’s new life. All that Víctor has in prison are his mother’s letters, his anger, his Bible reading, workshop classes and an improvised workout routine.

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The criminal life of Víctor Plaza: Liberto Rabal and Francesca Neri in Live Flesh . . .

Another screen intertitle announces Víctor’s release from prison, four years later, so it is now 1996. Almodóvar juxtaposes Víctor’s sad life, in the little beat-up house left to him by his dead mother, to David’s nice flat, well furnished and fixed up with hoop and board for his basketball practice. Even more heartbreaking is Víctor’s visit to his mother’s tomb. He has been to the bank and collected his inheritance of 150,000 pesetas. ‘I was trying to figure out,’ he says, ‘how many tricks you’ve had to turn to save 150,000 pesetas. At least a thousand . . . It’s not fair that I get that money without really having fucked once.’ So, it turns out, at the centre of Víctor’s trauma is his sexual inadequacy, his forced virginity, at least from the active male perspective; he feels cheated and betrayed by everyone in his life. By the magic of a purely Almodóvarian narrative coincidence, David and Helena are also at the cemetery, burying Helena’s father, and when Víctor sees them he approaches the couple. He gives Helena his sympathies and a provocative kiss and later steals some flowers for his mother’s tomb. At the cemetery he also finds Clara, the abused wife of the drunken policeman (David’s partner) Sancho. The beautiful forty-something woman, also lonely, needy and

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sad, seems to sympathise with the handsome and beat-up former convict, and they become friends. With Víctor’s words still resonating in her mind (‘Ti sono molto vicino, molto vicino,’ the common Italian sympathy thought of ‘I’m very close to you’), Helena at home first bathes and later makes love with David. His strictly oral performance, while seemingly appropriate, comes on the heels of her memories of Víctor. While he is engaged in cunnilingus, Helena arouses suspicion by mentioning that she saw Víctor Plaza at the cemetery. Although their cemetery encounter was purportedly due to chance, Víctor has no intention of staying away, and goes spying on Helena at her place of work, a children’s daycare centre. (Another departure from Ruth Rendell’s novel in which Victor tracks down David Fleetwood and then meets his fiancée Claire, Almodóvar makes Helena the real focus of Víctor’s attention.) It is David who goes looking for Víctor to warn him to stay away from them. David’s warning is serious, sincere: ‘If you come near my wife again, I’ll crack your skull.’ Víctor inevitably challenges David; looking at the wheelchair and the opponent’s obvious limitations he asks sardonically,

. . . six years later, Víctor, scarred at his mother’s tomb

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‘Really? How?’. And David hits him with a resolute punch to the groin, bringing Víctor to his knees. But a rare moment of bonding occurs when somebody scores a goal in the football game on TV, and the two men are equally excited and even happy to share the moment. Yet, before departing, David restates: ‘You are warned.’ Almodóvar takes his time to show us the laborious process of David getting in his car, disassembling and putting away his wheelchair. By the time he is done, however, Clara arrives and David witnesses the secret friendship that he believes is also at the heart of his re-encounter with Víctor Plaza. Once again, chance intersects David de la Paz and Víctor Plaza’s lives in an unnatural but precise fashion, in a plot twist introduced by Almodóvar seemingly to further ‘Spanishise’ the story as we will soon see. Clara brings Víctor a futon, and he, in a childishly touching way, shows her his health reports from the prison, stating that he is healthy, HIV-free and ready for love. Víctor is, as we know, ‘practically’ a virgin, having failed to properly make love to Helena years before and spending the following six years in prison. Víctor’s friendship with the beautiful forty-something Clara is suspicious, since she is still married to the policeman who is, in Víctor’s paranoid view, guilty of his disgrace. But Víctor’s real sexual initiation with Clara is less an act of revenge than an act of psychological healing. In their first sexual encounter, on the futon Clara has brought, Víctor lingers in bed, staring at Clara’s genitals with curiosity and fascination. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he says. When he climbs up to her for intercourse, it seems as if he is about to ‘re-enter’, like a child trying to get back into the mother’s womb for protection. Víctor’s lack of sexual experience, his childish ways and his significant age difference from Clara clearly infantilise him as a character. It is as if this ‘favourite son’ of Madrid, born in the midst of political crisis and ‘transition’, who grew up riding the streets while his mother walked them, has always really been motherless. Meeting Clara, significantly while visiting his mother’s tomb, further analogises this relationship as a potentially Oedipal conflict, similar to Rebeca’s in High Heels. Unlike Becky in High Heels however, Clara agrees to adopt him so to speak and, still in a motherly fashion, instructs him, point by point, in the complicated science and technique of lovemaking.

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Víctor’s plans for Helena and David, however, become much more transparent when Helena discovers that he has applied for a maintenance job at the daycare centre she administers. She discovers him playing with the children in a games’ room wearing a rubber wolf mask. Helena is exasperated and wants Víctor to give up pursuing her. But his argument sounds almost logical, they live in the same city, he has done a correspondence course in jail and his disgrace was her fault. He quotes a passage from Deuteronomy 28, about damnation, about being unwanted, about the curse to his seed, before leaving her alone to go back to Clara. As they resume their love-making lessons and while David continues to spy on them with the help of a camera and telephoto lens, Clara suggests that she is falling in love with Víctor. He is clear, however, in his resolve not to allow her that kind of intimacy, warning her not to do that. But she replies, resigned, ‘You should have warned me before.’ At home, Clara and Sancho are evidently estranged; they are celebrating their twelfth wedding anniversary but Clara does not even remember. Sancho’s pretence that they can rebuild their relationship meets with Clara’s suggestion that they separate. His response is a hard slap on her face and the assertion that as long as he loves her they are not separating. As so many patriarchal figures in Almodóvar’s world, Sancho is abusive, and blind to the realities around him, violent and irrational. Clara’s desire to escape from him grows with each instance of abuse. She warns Sancho with words that have a prophetic value in the movie: ‘One day I’m going to stop being afraid of you.’ Almodóvar draws an analogy between Clara’s domestic fears and the nation’s own process of recovery and reconstitution in the 1990s. Towards the end of the sequence he suggests the bipolar nature of Clara and Sancho’s relationship, when, while she is still on the sofa with tears and a bruise on her face, the shot pans to reveal a painting of Clara in her former flamenco dancer costume, bright and smiling. Sancho has repressed Clara’s desire to go back to teaching and dancing flamenco, which, as in The Flower of My Secret, has a sort of curative power. Later in the film, Almodóvar employs again the fear metaphor to address the changes of the twenty-seven years of Víctor’s life. The analogy between Víctor’s life and the country’s development becomes more evident when we see David, who continues to follow Víctor

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around the city, driving by Víctor’s neighbourhood of La Ventilla. The sight of Madrid’s rundown, low-income marginal section where Víctor’s mother has bequeathed him her humble prefabricated house is now in the shadow of the unusual KIO towers, another ambivalent sign of Madrid’s development in the twenty years of transition between dictatorship and democracy. David’s chase leads him to Helena’s childcare centre, where he discovers that Víctor is volunteering. David and Víctor finally have their tête-à-tête in Helena’s office. David’s resentment about his life as an invalid meets with Víctor’s insistent claims of innocence: Víctor now claims that it was Sancho who fired the gun that wounded and crippled David. ‘And it wasn’t by accident’, Víctor says; Sancho knew that David and Clara were having an affair. Clara has told it all to Víctor, and he tells David, ‘That’s why Sancho shot you.’ David, significantly, does not argue or deny the accusation. The revelation is as new to David as it is to us and the effect is very emotional. Ultimately, these characters, like the nation itself, need to confront the truth about their violent history. The conversation has a life-altering meaning for David, who later confesses to Helena the old affair with Clara and the logic of Víctor’s claims of innocence. Even Helena and Víctor become closer after the revelation of everyone’s past sins. Past events (David’s betrayal of his partner and best friend, Clara’s infidelity, Helena’s addiction and cruelty to Víctor) mediate these characters’ current relationships. And Víctor’s whole life has been one long struggle to recover from his own history, from the anger of the past. He even tells Helena of his plan, elaborated in prison, to become the world’s best lover; to make love to her non-stop one night and make her fall in love with him, only to leave her afterward and thus cause her similar pain, suffering and humiliation to that she caused him (by ridiculing his lack of sexual experience that night back in 1990). Víctor immerses himself in studying the Bible and working hard at a fish market, in order to forget his hate and his love of Helena. Sancho too, is somewhat transformed and stops drinking in an effort to recover Clara, who is, of course, in love with Víctor. David demonstrates a new attitude of honesty and some resignation to his own emotional and psychological pains, so that all the principal characters, except Clara, seem to make an earnest effort to transform themselves. What Clara wants is a relationship and

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Víctor cannot, or will not, give her that. Clara’s heartbreaking plea for Víctor’s love is violently and dramatically interrupted by a kitchen fire that foretells the volatile resolution to this relationship. But it is Víctor’s relationship with Helena that takes an unexpected turn when one night at the childcare centre (where Víctor volunteers as a night watchman), Helena arrives, undresses and practically demands that Víctor make love to her. He has been practising with Clara, and in theory with the Song of Solomon. She only demands that he never look for her or meet with her again. While David is away at a basketball match, Helena and Víctor make love at the childcare centre, the location itself symbolic in view of Víctor’s fragmented past and the Almodóvar motif of building a family. Helena and Víctor’s love-making scene in Live Flesh is probably Almodóvar’s most realistic and tender sex scene since Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Between moans of pleasure, smiles of disbelief, slow-motion close-ups of the actors’ bodies, and Chavela Vargas’s moody contralto voice on the soundtrack, the scene is an homage to the motif of love-making, as a promise of life and centre of these relationships. As in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Víctor and Helena ultimately decide to build a relationship around a life-altering sexual experience. David doesn’t need to confront Helena about having spent the night out; she volunteers that she’s been having sex all night. In fact at the centre of all relationships, there seems to be equal amounts of sex and violence. So, in order to go with Víctor and, she hopes, build a relationship, Clara shoots Sancho with his own gun and runs away from him, ignorant of the new developments between Víctor and Helena. Interestingly, in a sort of reverse motif to Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, in the scene when Clara fires a gun at her husband, Sancho, Almodóvar places a big topographic map of Spain in the background. While Sancho attempts to plead with Clara for another chance, the map in the background inevitably invites us to draw a comparison with the national history and the need to face the difficulties and violence of the past. While the implications of the map in Tie Me Up! are of reconstruction, as in the bathroom scene discussed in Chapter 2, in Live Flesh it suggests both the acknowledgment of a violent past and the renewed need for reconciliation. But the rupture and the process of Spain’s twenty-something year path from dictatorship to democ-

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racy is also a difficult one. And in 1997, with the Popular Party coming to power in the national elections, Almodóvar is also warning us that the stability of democracy and the progress of these years (also the metaphor of Víctor’s life) is still potentially fragile: a regression to the violence of the past must be avoided. Helena confesses to David the details of her infidelity and, after an initial violent reaction, he agrees, at least for the moment to stay with her. She promises that she will never do it again, and David acknowledges that she does not lie. Honesty is, it seems, the new anchor in the characters’ lives. After everyone’s attempts to rebuild their lives, the new crisis brought up by Víctor’s entanglement with both women threatens to bring down the momentary and flimsy stability. The analogy to Spanish politics and to the potential regression represented by the election of the Popular Party and José María Aznar in 1996, it would seem, is precise. David’s vengeful anger leads him to reveal to Sancho the news of Clara’s affair with Víctor. All the photographs David has taken while spying on Víctor and Clara finally show their purpose: humiliating the old friend, partner and rival. At Víctor’s, Clara too faces the discovery of her lover’s past and present. Inside Víctor’s Bible she finds a photograph of him as a toddler, in his mother’s arms, and Clara has a strangely maternal, incestuous moment of longing as she utters ‘my child’. But she also finds Víctor’s memoirs of Helena, including the bar coaster on which, many years ago, she had printed a kiss and written her telephone number. Clara, facing for the first time Víctor’s real desires, leaves him a suicidal farewell note, asking him to stay away from Sancho, to leave Madrid. Sancho and Clara finally face each other in Víctor’s house, when Sancho arrives with the intention of killing Víctor. They point their guns at each other seemingly determined not to budge. At the last moment, Clara sees Víctor through a window approaching home; she cocks the hammer and fires the revolver. Outside Víctor hears the two gunshots and runs inside, to find that Clara and Sancho have fired at each other. Sancho is still alive and blames Víctor for taking Clara while Víctor accuses Sancho of taking six years of his life, Sancho turns the gun on himself and shoots. After the bloody climax, with Clara and Sancho dead in a pool of blood, and Víctor witness to the suicide, Almodóvar offers one of his most hopeful

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endings. David withdraws and leaves Helena and Víctor free, with each other. In the epilogue, some time later, it is Christmas again. Víctor and Helena are together, on their way to hospital, and she almost gives birth in the car. But unlike the opening of the film, it is not a gloomy, empty Madrid under a state of emergency, but a lively beautifully lit city, full of people and freedom. Víctor and Helena take a taxi to the hospital and it seems that everyone is out, happy and the promise of new life (of Víctor and Helena’s baby) is also a promise of a new Spain. Seeing that Helena is about to give birth in the car, Víctor speaks to the unborn child. ‘Don’t be so impatient,’ he says. Twenty-six years ago I was in the same situation, about to be born. But you are so much luckier than me you little bastard. You don’t know how much everything’s changed. Look at the sidewalk, full of people; when I was born there wasn’t a soul in the street. People were locked up in their houses, scared shitless. Luckily for you, my son, it’s been a long time since we’ve been afraid in Spain.

And so, Almodóvar’s film addresses both the acknowledgment of the violent past and the real and immediate promise of a new beginning. Not only is the baby an indication of that promise, but the boldness of Almodóvar’s reference to a very specific historical past (beginning with January 1970) and present is as directly political as his message has ever been. As in The Flower of My Secret, where the protests against the socialist government of Felipe González allowed Almodóvar to interpose contemporary politics as analogy to melodrama, in Live Flesh the contextual references make this melodrama of longing a political and historical statement. Víctor’s life is in part an allegory of the past twenty-six years of Spain’s history. Beginning with the state of emergency in 1970, when Spaniards lost their last lingering civil liberties to an increasingly anxious and fading Fascist regime and ending in the current anxieties of urban development, poverty and crime in the 1990s, Almodóvar warns of the dangers of ignoring the lessons of the past. The nation’s transformation, like Víctor’s birth on the city bus, has been both vertiginous in pace and insecure in outcome. But Víctor’s trauma of a troubled childhood and youth is by no means hopeless. As with other troubled youth in his movies, from Ángel in Matador to ‘Tina’

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in The Law of Desire to Ricky in ¡Átame!, Almodóvar’s Víctor Plaza has to undergo some traumatic and painful processes in order to heal and rebuild himself. In Live Flesh, Víctor has to overcome the fear of sexual inadequacy and the reality of sexual innocence, the blemishes of his mother’s imperfect and, paradoxically, overtly sexual past, the troubled inheritance of an unknown father and the threat posed by those in positions of power, like Sancho and David. He must overcome his anger and confront his enemies if he wants to recover something of the past that has been lost to him. Víctor must go through the process of reconstructing himself first, with the aid of Clara’s sexually maternal guidance and the meagre but tangible petty estate left to him by his real mother, in order to confront the past and build a future. And, of course, he does all these things while forcing the other characters, David, Helena, Clara and Sancho, to confront the mistakes and the violence of their past. None of the characters in this film are totally innocent or totally guilty; everyone is guilty of something and victimised by someone. The important thing is that there is a possibility of redemption, so that even the years that Víctor spent in prison are not lost; they too can be rebuilt. The simple and satisfying ending offers that unequivocal promise of reconstruction. It has been a long time since people have been afraid in Spain, but the past is not over, it is not forgotten, and it must serve as a lesson to all of us. After the past of prostitution, deception, adultery, lies, maimed and crippled bodies, domestic abuse and political repression, Helena and Víctor’s new baby, also born in a symbolic transition, is evidence of life substituting for death, of hope overcoming fear, of the nation regenerating itself. It is also relevant to look at the significance of the multiple Luis Buñuel references and citations in Live Flesh. Liberto Rabal’s presence (and resemblance) is an homage to his grandfather Francisco Rabal, star of Buñuel’s Nazarín (1958), Viridiana (1961) and Belle de jour (1967). Ángela Molina, Buñuel’s ‘obscure object of desire’, even plays a latent continuation of her role as Conchita in the Buñuel film, where she is also a flamenco dancer. And of course, the direct citation of Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, serves to emphasise the importance of Víctor’s sexual trauma to the plot. By drawing an analogy between Archibaldo de la Cruz’s and Víctor’s turning point, Almodóvar dictates that the character’s present state of mind

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is, at least partially, to be found in the trauma of the historic past. In fact, the childhood sequence in Archibaldo de la Cruz, like the birth sequence in Live Flesh, is very much historically determined. Buñuel emphasises that the bullet that killed the nanny, causing little Archi’s traumatic and erotic introduction to death, was fired outside the house, during a street battle in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. Almodóvar places Víctor’s birth in a seemingly arbitrary yet equally significant historical and political context for the Spanish people. Furthermore, as in Tie Me Up! and Talk to Her, Almodóvar’s appropriation of Luis Buñuel, whether directly or not, is always self-reflexive of the evolution and state of national cinema. The extra political context evident in The Flower of My Secret and Live Flesh is unusual in Almodóvar to the extent that direct historical references occur in the midst of what is really always allegorical political content. In these films Almodóvar seems to be reaching out to the international critical community that, after The Law of Desire and Women on the Verge, embraced him as the representative of Spanish cinema, while also replying to Spanish critics who saw his films as becoming more and more ‘international’ and less national. His future career, however, peaking in the crowning achievement of All About My Mother, re-addresses and reconsiders the topic of national identity and reconstruction in extended body metaphors that, as we will see in Chapter 4, equally address Almodóvar’s national and international critics and audiences.

Volver (2006) After the self-reflexive and autobiographical transparency of Bad Education (see Chapter 4), Almodóvar returned to the quiet, sensible content of earlier films such as The Flower of My Secret and also to a mostly female cast ‘returning’ as the title suggests, to the familiar territory of women making families. In his latest film, Volver, women are central, family is foregrounded, and love returns to the core of the narrative, a visible variation from the male-centred and arguably loveless story of Bad Education. Volver is the first Almodóvar film to be widely marketed in the UK and the US under its original Spanish title. Unlike the approximations in translations of titles such as All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Bad Education, Volver’s

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title, taken from the tango by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera made famous by Gardel in the 1930s, remains untouched, its meaning to be unfolded by the narrative and discovered in its context by its audience. And, as in The Flower of My Secret and High Heels, at the heart of Volver lies a series of mother–daughter relationships that retrace family history in an attempt to survive and strengthen family ties. Significantly the film begins in a cemetery, in the fictional village of Alcanfor de las Infantas in Castilla La Mancha (actually shot in the town of Almagro), where women gather to clean up, bring fresh flowers and maintain the graves of their relatives. The cleaning ritual in the windy cemetery is one of respect and love but also an act of memory-keeping. The wind, responsible for one of the film’s tragedies, is also an eloquent way of referring to the flightiness and potential dangers presented to memory and history, to the threat of forgetting. Thus, in Volver Almodóvar reminds us of the importance of family, memory and history, in what he has reportedly called his most ‘autobiographical’ film. In his own web journal on the production of the film Almodóvar writes ‘my films are getting progressively more autobiographical . . . I am much more aware of how my memories stroll along the sets, like the breeze along the streets of Alcanfor de las Infantas, in the night.’17 Alcanfor de las Infantas’s winds, in fact, are the first and most evident presence in the film’s opening sequence where all the town’s women, it seems, are contained in the long, travelling shot that reveals the long succession of tombs and their diligent visitors dusting, scrubbing and washing away the ravages of the elements. The connections between generations of characters are made clear in the next shot where the camera tracks back from the photographs of a man and woman on their grave, where three women, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), her fourteen-year-old daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas) carefully do their work. The three have come from Madrid to perform this specific task; although work and life have taken them away from the village, the act of ‘returning’ is cyclical, customary, a periodic journey back to their origins. Evidently, the tomb is their parents’ and Sole explains to her niece why all the cemetery visitors are women. In Alcanfor de las Infantas, she says, women live longer than their husbands. While this information may be true for the rest of the

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town’s families, it is not true for Sole and Raimunda: their parents, it is revealed, died together, in each other’s arms, in an accidental fire, fuelled by the stubborn winds, that destroyed their house four years ago. The revelation is important, since the film goes on to concentrate on these women and their ways of coping with the absence of their parents, as they try to strengthen the ties that still bind them to their village. These ties are signified by the presence of their Alcanfor de las Infantas neighbour Agustina (Blanca Portillo) and their Aunt Paula, played by one of Almodóvar’s most iconic actors, Chus Lampreave. A common representative of Almodóvar’s roots and of his own mother, Francisca Caballero, Lampreave has served as an inspiration for the director’s own rural roots in various films, most prominently as the mother/grandmother figure who longs to return to the idealised village in What Have I Done to Deserve This!? and The Flower of My Secret. When, after the cemetery visit, Raimunda, Sole and Paula visit their aunt they immediately face the devastation of time and memory loss, since Aunt Paula, old, alone and almost blind behind her thick spectacles, does not even recognise her namesake great niece. ‘This is my Paula’, Raimunda announces proudly and the aunt replies ‘Like me!’ with sincere surprise. The three generations of women sit at the table to enjoy Aunt Paula’s barquillos, the local wafers that were in fact baked by Almodóvar’s own sister María Jesús for the film. Dinner-or-kitchen table scenes are rare in Almodóvar’s films. When they appear, they are often scenes of tension or conflict between generations as in Matador and High Heels. But in Volver this first table scene is one of bonding and true understanding between these women. The ritual of eating the barquillos comes across as natural and simple, more like Ricky and Marina’s in Tie Me Up!, which also features the return to the village as a memory-keeping action. Unlike Tie Me Up!, where Ricky’s stubborn desire to return to the village in order to create a memory, a time and place that essentially no longer exist, in Volver memories are real, they are everywhere, and they surround the characters to the point of overwhelming them. In fact, at the table, the seemingly senile Aunt Paula, commending her nieces for cleaning the tomb, speaks of their mother, Irene, in the present tense, as if she were alive. And when Paula excuses herself to go upstairs, she can sense, vividly,

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her mother’s smell in the rooms of the house and around a stationary exercise bicycle, almost as if Irene had just been using it. A photograph of Irene resting on a rocking chair even commands Sole’s attention in a natural gesture, just like seeing a real person that must not be disturbed in her sleep. Later at Agustina’s house, just across the street, Almodóvar emphasises the strength of family and memory between these women. Carrying the traditional barquillos and ratatouille that Aunt Paula has given them, a further reference to tradition and family ritual, Sole, Raimunda and the young Paula walk across the interior patio, placing the food on a table where they sit again as a family. The shot of the four women is carefully composed to include all the family elements: the patio with its worn yet strong columns occupies the middle ground of the shot. In the extreme foreground, a marijuana plant adorns the righthand corner of the screen, next to the bench where Raimunda and Sole sit, with their close childhood friend across the table. And in the background sits young Paula, in front of a wall of old photographs. The shot suggests the strength of tradition and family: the four characters, the house and their ancestors coexist comfortably, warmly in the welcoming space. Stylistically, Almodóvar continues to use long takes and fluid camera movements to soften space and time in soothing ways, as we have seen in The Flower of My Secret, particularly in the village sequence when Leo goes to her mother’s house to recover from her depression and suicide attempt. The connection is cemented when Agustina walks up to young Paula to show her, on the wall just behind her, a picture of her disappeared mother, ‘the only hippie in town’ who no one has heard of for four years. Agustina’s mother mysteriously disappeared the same fatal day when Raimunda and Sole’s parents died in the wind-fuelled fire. The two women stand in front of the photograph, but are also reframed by a side mirror, where, of course, young Paula comes off as a reflection of the past women of her family. When Agustina offers Paula one of her mother’s plastic rings, the teenager accepts it eagerly, in what constitutes an initial acceptance of her identity and history. In a further gesture of a family bond recovered even in the absence of a lost one, Agustina offers her two friends, with whom she behaves more like a relative, a joint, having grown the marijuana herself as her mother taught her.

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The end of the first Alcanfor de las Infantas sequence in Volver presents Raimunda, Sole and young Paula on their way home, driving across the Castilla-La Mancha plains, through a landscape full of modern, power-generating windmills, a poetic reference to Almodóvar’s and La Mancha’s cultural past and present. These windmills, however, unlike Don Quixote’s more famous ones, are passed by without consequence, without even being acknowledged by the women. Unlike Don Quixote, Raimunda, Sole and Paula are not in a quest for the fiction (or insanity) of dreams, but rather for the reality of the past. Uncharacteristically Almodóvar begins this film in the village, unlike What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, Tie Me Up! or The Flower of My Secret where returning to the village, and to the comforts, real or imagined, that it represents is a stated, clear goal. On the contrary, in Volver the characters begin their journey and are introduced to us in the past, in the village context where we see them naturally. It is Madrid, and Raimunda’s working-class neighbourhood that are presented as a contrast to the village. The town of Alcanfor de las Infantas, along with its women, its roots, its history, its winds, is less a utopia than a reality, and Madrid’s working-class suburbs come across as a detour in the characters’ trajectory. The real detours, the real disruptions in family continuity are Madrid, and men. Upon arriving at their apartment in the city, Raimunda and Paula’s natural balance of a world made of women seems to be interrupted by the presence of Raimunda’s husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre). In his first close-up, Paco is seen illicitly attempting to break through the protection of the female characters when he slyly glances at young Paula’s crotch. Raimunda scolds and corrects Paula immediately, more annoyed than angry. But the father’s transgression is as significant as the women’s bond. Paco has evidently been ejected from the feminine familial space, and his attempt to reenter, so to speak, is not only transgressive but potentially criminal. Paco, like many other father figures in Almodóvar’s universe, is useless, marginal and threatening. Recently unemployed, he seems to spend his time drinking beer and watching football on television, with little sign of any paternal instinct. When he later spies on young Paula as she undresses, the shot keeps him in the darkened hall outside the room, as a looming, dangerous presence. Almodóvar connects Paco’s furtive glances at

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the daughter directly with sexual desire when, later in bed, Paco makes an attempt at sexual activity with Raimunda. But she is angry, tired, worried about her relatives in the village and rejects his advances. Almodóvar closes the sequence with a telling reference to the complete disconnection between female needs and male desire. As Paco masturbates in bed next to her, Raimunda, thoughtful and disillusioned, cries in silence. The disconnection and misunderstandings between male and female desire, essential to Almodóvar’s narrative world in previous films, from Pepi, Luci, Bom to Women on the Verge, Kika, All About My Mother and Talk to Her, is in Volver made more dramatic and more literal with the association of women and family and with the exclusion of men from this world. Even Paula, in her youthful naivety, folds herself in her mother’s protection from the threatening paternal figure. One evening as she returns from work, Raimunda finds Paula expecting her at the bus stop, looking confused and worried. Upon arriving home Raimunda discovers her daughter’s secret: she has stabbed Paco to death. Paula confesses to her mother that when Paco tried to rape her in the kitchen, insisting that he was not her father, she threatened and then killed him. Almodóvar presents Paula’s confession mostly as an address directly to the camera, giving it an intimacy and immediacy that puts the spectator in the mother’s position. Raimunda, without hesitation, gives Paula a protective, understanding embrace. The murder confession is somewhat undone by Paco’s crime and the moment of understanding between the two women. There is not one moment of hesitation from Raimunda who immediately suggests that she will blame herself for her husband’s death. The murder of a father or father figure is a repeated motif in Almodóvar’s films, in particular in What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, High Heels and Bad Education. In Volver, this narrative device is a revisitation of the mother–daughter connection strengthened by a patricidal episode seen previously in High Heels. In the latter film, as we may recall, after some initial hesitation, the Oedipal detour of the two Rebecas and their sexual connection to the father figure of Manuel, ultimately Becky, the mother, accepts falsely the responsibility for the murder. In her confessions to the police and a Catholic priest, Becky explains that ‘in life’ she gave nothing to her

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daughter and she would expect her death to be of some use to Rebeca. Equally, in Volver, though without any hesitation, Raimunda extends her protective gesture towards her daughter’s guilt. In the following sequence, a direct yet reversed homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho, it is the mother who cleans up after the daughter’s crime. Raimunda’s reaction is identical to Norman Bates’, her hand to her mouth represses a scream on discovery of the body. The mop dripping with blood, the disposal of the murder weapon and eventually the body all echo Norman’s clean-up of the crime scene after ‘Mother’ has murdered Marion Crane in the shower. But Raimunda, like Becky in High Heels and Gloria in What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, does not treat this so much as a crime scene than as a penance ritual in which she pays for the father’s sins. A phone call from her sister Sole interrupts Raimunda’s work. Almodóvar intersects the moment of crisis with the reassertion of the women’s family bond. Sole announces that Aunt Paula has died. The two sisters console each other over the telephone, and young Paula, sitting next

Crimes of the father: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Paula (Yohana Cobo) come closer after the daughter’s patricidal episode in Volver

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to her mother during the phone call, extends the moment by placing a single, quiet kiss on her mother’s shoulder. It is a healing gesture of understanding, of real sympathy and shared grief, and also of gratitude. Paco, dead on the kitchen floor is not even referred to, while Raimunda, Sole and Paula, contained in middle close-ups seem to be closer than ever. At the end of the sequence, when Raimunda hides Paco’s body in a meat freezer, mother and daughter embrace again, closing with their strong hug a bond that is now, literally thicker than blood, stronger than death. In what arguably constitutes Almodóvar’s self-reflexive detour in Volver, Raimunda finds herself ‘saved’ by the cinema, at least to a certain extent. A movie crew shooting a film nearby hires Raimunda to cook lunch for them, and she seems to take it as a refreshing new start. While house-sitting her neighbour’s restaurant, Raimunda has access to the kitchen, dining room and equipment (including the meat freezer now containing Paco’s body), and she agrees to feed the company of thirty for € 300. The prospect of the money and the work seems to blow a breath of much-needed fresh air in Raimunda’s moment of confusion and desperation. On her return from the market, confidently walking down the street, we see Raimunda smile for the first time since her visit to Aunt Paula. On her way back to the restaurant Raimunda meets two neighbourhood friends, a Cuban immigrant prostitute (María Isabel Díaz) and a woman from the village who has moved to Madrid (Nieves Sánz), both of whom agree to help her with supplies for the new enterprise. More importantly, these women all treat each other like family using informal, endearing terms like bonita (‘cutie’) and querida (‘dear’). They are part of an extended female family that is ready and available to support and protect one another. In Volver family is made of women; it is first and foremost blood, but it is also, just love. The film’s theme of ‘returning’ to one’s source, roots and even life itself is foregrounded after Sole returns to the village for Aunt Paula’s funeral and finds her mother’s ghost calmly occupying the house. As Paul Julian Smith commented in his Sight & Sound review, ‘Volver . . . finds the director exploring themes about mothers and other ghosts of the past.’18 In her role as Irene, Raimunda and Sole’s dead mother, Almodóvar’s most emblematic actor of the 1980s, Carmen Maura (Pepi, Luci, Bom, Dark Habits, What Have I

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Done!?, The Law of Desire and Women on the Verge), with whom the director had not worked since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is equally ghostly and refreshing. Irene is an evasive presence at Aunt Paula’s wake, where all the women of the town gather in support of each other, while the men stand on the street outside the house. And in this new all-female space, death is a part of life itself, and even the long-gone Irene is able ‘to return’ home. Agustina is certain, as she tells Sole, that Irene has come back from the dead to take care of her ailing sister Paula and nurse her in her final months because, it seems that the caretaking responsibility of family women goes beyond their natural lives. Initially incredulous, it is ultimately not that hard for Sole to believe in the supernatural: ‘These things happen’, says Agustina naturally, and Sole replies: ‘I know.’ Almodóvar employs the motif of the windmills every time that Sole and Raimunda make the trip from Madrid to Alcanfor de las Infantas and back to Madrid, reminding us that time too is in a constant circular motion. On her return to Madrid following Aunt Paula’s funeral, Sole finds Irene, her dead mother, very much physically present, alive in the trunk of her car and, after little hesitation, welcomes her as a stowaway. Surprisingly, it turns out that it’s Irene who offers company. When Sole tells her mother that she can stay because ‘I’m alone, as always’, it is Irene who responds ‘Not any more.’ When it comes to men’s company the three women now cherish their apparent solitude. Keeping the truth to herself, Raimunda explains that Paco has left her, and Irene and Sole conclude that they have all three had bad luck with men. Sole is disturbed to hear such a thing, arguing with Irene that their father loved her. ‘You were lucky you died in his arms . . . Papa adored you’, says Sole. Yet Irene insists that her daughters simply do not know: ‘In life’, she says, ‘I kept everything to myself’. Thus, Sole and Raimunda’s dead father, Sole’s missing husband and Raimunda’s Paco, still locked in the refrigerator, continue Almodóvar’s motif of dead, absent or estranged fathers and father figures seen in Labyrinth of Passion, Dark Habits, What Have I Done!?, Matador, The Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, High Heels and All About My Mother. And Volver allows the possibility that women can find solace, comfort and love in a reconstituted family without men. The thing ‘to return’ to in Volver is the

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maternal dwelling, the maternal instinct (which Irene soon recovers as a caretaker once reunited with her daughters), and ultimately the matrilineal genealogy, as it is later revealed that Paco was in fact not young Paula’s father. Stylistically, Volver is a quieter, slower moving film than Kika, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and even Bad Education. Its colour palette, again under the photographic direction of José Luis Alcaine, is also more sombre with darker settings, night-time sequences and earth tones, reminiscent of Talk to Her, The Flower of My Secret and What Have I Done to Deserve This!? which are Volver’s closest narrative relatives. And again in Volver, Almodóvar’s use of mirrors, frames-within-the-frame and make-up or transformation scenes (like when Sole dyes her mother’s hair in front of a triptych of mirrors reminiscent of similar scenes in Kika and The Flower of My Secret) underscore certain turning points in the characters’ narrative arcs. In this case, Sole and her mother in front of the mirror, marks the defining point of the new relationship between these women: Sole and Irene work out a strategy to deceive Sole’s clandestine hair salon customers when they see Irene around. While it is logical that they come up with something to justify the new presence around the house (Irene will pretend to be a Russian immigrant assistant), it also demonstrates how the potential conflict of dealing with a ghostly presence from the past, is no longer an issue. Already, in Sole’s mind, Irene is simply not dead. The hair-dying sequence is, of course also one of transformation, one in which Irene must, at least temporarily, reinvent her own identity. The reinvention of such identity, as in All About My Mother, The Law of Desire and Bad Education, might be traumatic but can also lead to the healing of the hearts and minds of the characters. When Sole is washing her mother’s hair, Almodóvar employs a hand-held Dutch-angle shot, unusual in the director’s career, which seems to acknowledge the other new theme in this film, the return of the dead. The supernatural theme, an Almodóvar first as Smith has commented in his Sight & Sound review, justifies the use of a formal feature also seen in his films for the first time.19 In spite of her slightly recreated identity as the Russian assistant to Sole, deep inside, literally, Irene is the same woman that her daughters have

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always adored, just like Agrado in All About My Mother who, no matter what superficial changes have occurred, is still what she ‘has dreamed to be’. When Raimunda pays an unscheduled visit to Sole’s apartment, where Irene is hiding, it takes her only a moment to feel her mother’s presence. In Almodóvar’s own representation of an odorous Proustian madeleine, Raimunda senses her mother alive by the smell of Irene’s farts. Raimunda sniffs around the apartment in search of Irene, tracing her through the rooms and closets following a filial instinct that comes, literally, from her mother’s entrails. Like Leo’s return to life after her suicide attempt in The Flower of My Secret, as if she had been revived by the voice she knew from the womb, Raimunda is inevitably, powerfully linked to her mother’s memory. Hiding under the bed, Irene silently participates in her daughter’s and her granddaughter’s silly, giggly moment when they celebrate the memories that have just been triggered. Quoting himself, Almodóvar then cuts to a shot of Irene’s point of view, as she follows from her hiding place, Raimunda’s high wedge heels towards the closet. In form, the shot is a repetition of two similar shots in High Heels seen first when Becky and Rebeca visit the Plaza del Alamillo apartment where Becky grew up and which she plans to reoccupy, and later when, at the instant of her mother’s death, Rebeca sees outside the window a similar pair of high heels that remind her of her childhood longing for her often absent mother. Raimunda explores the articles brought home after Aunt Paula’s funeral: in a suitcase she finds a familiar doll, a leather-bound photo album (similar to young Esteban’s notebook in All About My Mother), a jewellery box and other mementos that are at once refreshing and upsetting, like all memories. But Raimunda leaves angry, initially suspicious that Sole has stolen these things from the recently dead Aunt Paula. Naturally, Raimunda is also upset about the real dead in her life: Paco, still locked in the meat freezer, looms as a weight that presents a significant contrast to the dead women (Aunt Paula, and as far as she is concerned, her mother Irene). It is as if, even in death, men and women are entirely different beings; they not only die differently, they are different in death itself. Young Paula is moody and traumatised by her crime. ‘Mom’, she tells Raimunda, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have killed your father.’

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Raimunda, of course, takes advantage of the context to disclose her biggest secret to her daughter, that Paco was not her biological father. As in All About My Mother, a father’s identity and his crimes against his children are in conflict at this juncture in Volver making it necessary to resolve another Oedipal complication, this one about the adoptive father and the victimised daughter. And, also as in All About My Mother, young Paula’s curiosity makes her demand to be told the truth about her filiation, in other words, to be told ‘all about the father’. Yet Raimunda is not ready and instead promises to reveal the truth to Paula at some other time. This type of melodramatic disphasure in which a kept secret can be the key to a great mystery, emphasises Volver’s relation to Almodóvar’s melodramas of longing (High Heels, The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh, All About My Mother) where the characters’ traumas are posed as generational, Oedipal conflicts. But for now, all Raimunda is willing to say is that Paula’s father is someone from the town, who is now dead. The truth will have to wait. Meanwhile Raimunda, Paula, Sole and even Irene are rescued once again from death, from men and from the past and cement their ties after the loss of Aunt Paula with a cinematic intervention that is typically self-reflexive in Almodóvar’s history. Raimunda has continued her catering business with the film crew, and throws a humbly lavish wrap party at the neighbour’s restaurant that she is now clandestinely managing. At the party, Raimunda, Sole and young Paula are reunited for the first time since Aunt Paula’s death and Irene’s return. As they greet each other at the bar with hugs, kisses and wide smiles two musicians from the crew attract Raimunda’s attention when they begin to play their guitars. The moment is transparently self-reflexive: when Raimunda turns towards the music she sees the two musicians through a window sitting in front of each other. Frames-within-the-frame, as previously mentioned, are repetitive motifs in Almodóvar’s melodramatic features, and as in most forms of classic melodrama, they often represent some form of repressed female desire. But here, the two musicians seen by Raimunda and her family through the window are in fact the manifestation of desire, Raimunda’s liberation from Paco, from repression and from solitude. Clapping and following the music, Raimunda begins to sing, first for Paula and Sole, the tango ‘Volver’ that lends its title and its theme to the movie. When Raimunda begins to sing,

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she and Sole recollect happier times. Sole remarks that she he has not heard Raimunda sing in years, but it is Paula, who says she has never heard her mother sing, who surprises Raimunda and triggers the performative scene so essential in Almodóvar’s films as an emotional turning point for the characters. Raimunda prepares herself, as if to gather her strength and confidence, with a sip of her mojito and goes to talk to the musicians. The shot through the window is now repeated but from Paula and Sole’s perspective. The new shot includes Raimunda speaking to the musicians and thus marks her as the object of desire for her family. It is an important moment: the cinematic reference to the representation of desire in the movies and the association of music with the expression of that desire are stylistically Almodóvarian themes since his first features of the early 1980s. This performance shows Raimunda in an entirely different light, a new person who is happy around an audience and ready to express herself freely for the first time in many years. With a slight flamenco flavour provided by the rhythmic clapping of the men sitting around her, Raimunda makes an introduction, separating, however briefly, the contexts of life and performance, and then begins to sing ‘Volver’ (voiced for the film by Andalusian singer Estrella Morente). Like many performance scenes in Almodóvar, Raimunda’s rendition of the song ‘Volver’ gives the characters access to their real feelings. Raimunda’s eyes well up as the lyrics refer to the anxiety and desire to return to and be reconnected with that which we have loved: To return . . . with my forehead wilted, the snows of time add silver to my temples. To feel, that life’s just a breath, that twenty years is nothing, how feverish is the gaze that errand in the shadows looks for you and names you. To live, with your soul attached to a sweet memory for which I cry again. . .20

Irene, listening from Sole’s car where she has remained in hiding, reacts with tears of joy and sadness to her daughter’s voice, a reversal of the mother–daughter voice connection seen between Leo and her mother in The Flower of My Secret. But the result is the same: the act of performance allowing the characters to connect with their own emotions, paradoxically, more than their natural state allows them. The relationship between stage, per-

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formance, mirrors, dressing rooms and other stages of mediated representation in Almodóvar’s films almost always accompanied with a media intersection in the form of a popular song, amplifies characters’ feelings and their emotional state. And in particular, when it comes to the relationship between mothers and daughters, from The Law of Desire to High Heels, from The Flower of My Secret to All About My Mother and Volver, the mediation of song, poetry or stage is an emotional force which the characters cannot resist or escape. The final reckoning, however, comes after Agustina announces that she is in hospital in Madrid suffering from terminal cancer. The hospital intersection so typical to the classic and revisionist melodrama that Almodóvar often quotes (Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) returns in Volver with Agustina’s final request to Raimunda to help her find her own long-lost mother. Paradoxically for these two friends, a dead mother is present and the live one is gone. Now Agustina tells Raimunda that Irene in fact has returned from the dead to help care for Aunt Paula, that she has been seen around the town, and that she might help find her missing mother. Raimunda is naturally incredulous and even defensive about Agustina’s appeal. This is the request of a dying relation; it would be cruel of Raimunda to refuse. As with the hospital reunions of Tina and Pablo Quintero in The Law of Desire, the two mother and daughter Rebecas in High Heels and the two mother and daughter Rosas in All About My Mother, this hospital scene offers the characters a last chance of redemption, to face the reality of their lives and to make a final conciliatory gesture with an estranged or misunderstood family member. Meanwhile, Irene and young Paula have reconnected and like Sole, Paula does not act as if there was anything strange about her grandmother’s return from the dead. Skipping one generation, the two women bond in front of the television (a media intersection that soon takes on even more meaning) and Irene has the chance to make up for the lost time between her and her teenage granddaughter. In fact Irene and Paula have a conversation that Irene never had with Raimunda about the estrangement and distance that developed between mother and daughter during the latter’s teenage years. There is something that Irene does not know, something that she has come

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to discover about her daughter Raimunda. And yet she is able to breach the subject at first with Paula, as if a generational mediation was also necessary. ‘Your mother didn’t love me,’ explains Irene, with her deep, dark eyes fixed on Paula; ‘It’s very painful,’ she says, ‘when a daughter doesn’t love her mother.’ Irene finishes by exhorting Paula to love her mother a lot, and make sure she knows it. It is as if the grandmother wants her daughter Raimunda to have the relationship that she herself was unable to have with her own daughter. The reconciliation between Raimunda and Irene is inevitable, knowing Almodóvar’s penchant for insisting on the reconciliation and reconstitution of the family no matter how painful. But first Raimunda must, quite literally, bury the (other) ghosts of her past, so she makes preparations to rid herself of Paco’s body, the weight of whose life and death is still heavy on her shoulders. In another Hitchcockian allusion, Raimunda rents a van and buys rope, adhesive tape and a pick and shovel at the local hardware store (tended, as in Tie Me Up!, by Pedro’s brother Agustín Almodóvar), and engages, or rather buys, the help of her neighbour, the Cuban prostitute Regina. They find a few other women of the neighbourhood to help them load the freezer containing Paco’s body into the rented vehicle. Once again, the women come together to resolve a problem in a moment of need, and even though they are not aware of it, the women together resolve the masculine problem. After agreeing on financial terms, in which they call themselves both ‘accomplices’ and ‘partners’, Regina and Raimunda drive 180 kilometres east to the banks of the Júcar river near Valencia, a favourite childhood haunt of Paco’s. Over several hours they dig a hole and bury the freezer, covering it as carefully as possible in the dark night. As in Hitchcock’s Psycho, it is essential for these criminals to get away with what they, or rather, young Paula has done and, as like Norman’s relief upon seeing the car sink into the swamp with Marion Crane’s body in the trunk, we are relieved to see Raimunda and Regina succeed in hiding this other crime of Oedipal passion. Significantly, however, the criminal father figure is allowed to rest in his place of origin, so that maybe even he can find some solace in death just like the occupants of the Alcanfor de las Infantas cemetery where the movie’s action begins.

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Agustina (Blanco Portillo) looks for her lost mother on television, ‘wherever you are . . .’

The remaining conflicts to be solved are between mothers and daughters. Agustina still insists that Irene’s ghost might help find her lost mother, while Raimunda is yet to learn that Irene has returned to reconcile with her estranged daughter. The family history is more tainted and complicated than anyone suspects as we learn that the disappearance of one and the death of the others are related: Agustina’s mother and Raimunda’s father were lovers. Unable to engage Raimunda and Irene’s help, Agustina appears in the television show Wherever You Are, the type of daytime programme that exploits peoples lives, à la Jerry Springer, that the Spanish refer to as ‘telebasura’ or ‘telegarbage’. Upon hearing their old friend on television, Raimunda, Sole and Paula gather in the bedroom where the TV is on, while Irene spies from her usual hiding place under the bed. But Agustina’s pleas for help once again fall on deaf ears, as the television host and her audience are only interested in the potential scandal of lovers, murder, insanity and her disease, not in offering any help, so she walks out of the set offended and discouraged. In Almodóvar’s films, television

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intersections are commonly used to shape a character’s dramatic arc, as Rebeca’s experience in High Heels and Kika and Andrea’s in Kika demonstrate. Unlike Kika, for whom seeing her own rape on television in Andrea’s show The Worst of Today makes her experience it even deeper than in reality, in Volver, the television intersection fails to deliver any kind of reality, because what Agustina wants cannot be mediated, it has to be confronted directly. Finally, with Paula in their minds, Sole takes advantage of the juncture to confess to her sister the truth about Irene’s return, not only that Irene has returned, but that it was she who cared for Aunt Paula, that it was she who made the barquillos they ate and loved at Aunt Paula’s house, as a final attempt to reach out to her daughters. Their eyes fixed on each other, Irene finally comes out from under the bed announcing to Raimunda: ‘I’ve returned to ask for your forgiveness.’ As in High Heels where Becky holds on to life, momentarily, so that she can give life back to her daughter Rebeca and, as in All About My Mother where Doña Rosa and her daughter, and even Esteban and his mother/father the transsexual Lola/Esteban are able to reconcile through an act of contrition, Irene cannot rest in peace, so to speak, while there is an unresolved conflict with her daughter Raimunda. Irene has, continuing with the theme of bodies and healing in Almodóvar’s films since The Law of Desire, Tie Me Up!, Kika and All About My Mother, rebuilt or reconstituted her own mortal body as a way of rebuilding her family and her daughter’s life. But all Irene gets to do at this point is ask for forgiveness, excuse herself even, by saying only ‘I didn’t know what was happening, I couldn’t even imagine it’ before Raimunda loses control of her emotions and walks out on her mother. Too little too late, Raimunda’s reaction is typical of the disphasure proper of melodrama when characters are emotionally disconnected even when related by blood. It would seem as if Raimunda’s reaction is not so much surprise at the presence from beyond the grave but rather of the revelation that her mother is guilty of an unforgivable offence: the failure to protect Raimunda from her father’s predatory sexual advances. Raimunda is a victim of incest and rape, and Irene is guilty first of ignorance, later of murder. It is the young Paula who insists in the reconciliation, asking Raimunda to listen to Irene. It is as if there is no crime that cannot be for-

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given between these women, no offence that their matrilineal bonds cannot resolve. The final revelation is that Paula was in fact born as a result of the father’s rape of Raimunda, that they are mother, daughter and sisters. Interestingly, what this supposes is not only that the abusive Paco was not Paula’s father, but that the line of genealogy is all matrilineal: Raimunda, Sole and Paula are sisters, daughters and nieces, Irene is mother and grandmother, and the men are either physically dead (like Irene’s and Sole’s husbands) or excluded from the bloodline (like Raimunda’s husband). As a result of the men’s crimes against their daughters’ bodies, the women’s relations are metaphorically and literally strengthened. The only exception is Agustina’s mother who was in fact Irene’s husband’s lover and the woman who died with him in the fatal fire, set by Irene in a jealous rage upon discovering them in bed together. Always the outsider, the town hippie ultimately pays for the part she has played in this drama of estrangement and reconciliation. In the climactic scene of the movie, Raimunda and Irene sit side by side on a street bench after a confessional walk together. The tones are dark and sombre, the conversation devastating, the emotions extreme. ‘All these years,’ says Irene, ‘I have lived in an authentic purgatory.’ But, like the souls of purgatory, Irene too can find forgiveness. While the two women sit on street bench together, the shot tracks back slowly as they embrace for the first time in four years, no more mediation, or lies or estrangement between them. The final ‘return’ in the film is back to Alcanfor de las Infantas one more time. As in Tie Me Up!, The Flower of My Secret and Kika, we see Raimunda, Sole, Irene and Paula in the car driving ‘back’ home. In Kika the title character has one last chance at life and love when she rescues the stranded stranger from the road and agrees to take him, to the family wedding in the country he’s going to and be his date. And in Tie Me Up!, Ricky, Marina and her sister Lola, after re-encountering themselves in the devastated village of Ricky’s past, reinvent themselves in the drive home as a viable family unit, that, as the final song clearly states, ‘will survive’. In Volver, the four women in the final drive to Alcanfor are clearly seen as a fully reconstituted family with more emotional and biological bonds than logic or the law dic-

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tates. There is an inviolable pact between them, sealed with love and the blood of the men murdered by Irene and Paula, a complicity similar to that of Rebeca and Becky in High Heels. When they stop by the road for a snack, they have reached the river bank site where Paco is buried ‘in his favourite spot.’ The family reunion is at the same time a recovering of their own past and ancestry: they reclaim and reoccupy Aunt Paula’s house and gather in the kitchen to cook a meal together. And thus we see them once more at the table, having dinner in the type of rare Almodóvar moment when dinner is in fact a time of joy. But even then, as if it were an instinct, Irene later goes across the street to Agustina’s house with the intention of taking care of her ailing friend until she dies. The caretaking responsibility cannot be ignored and Agustina is happy to welcome Irene, to have the soothing maternal presence of Irene for comfort, care, and even joy. Like very similar scenes in All About My Mother, The Flower of My Secret and High Heels, Agustina and Irene are shot together in the bedroom, Irene holding her sick friend’s hand, and offering comforting words, finally watching over Agustina as she

Women’s ties are strengthened over the blood of dead men: Irene (Carmen Maura) and her daughter Raimunda forgive each other’s crimes in Volver

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‘Muchos regresos . . .’: Almodóvar ‘returns’ to his original inspirational actor, Carmen Maura

sleeps. But unlike the Rosas, the Rebecas and Leo and her mother, Agustina and Irene are not in fact related, but they are equally bonded, and Irene is even more maternal with her neighbour than Becky and Doña Rosa are with their real daughters. It is Agustina who needs care and Irene is a mother, a caregiver. But for now, as the film ends, Irene and Raimunda acknowledge that there is much they still have to say to each other, that there are still very deep wounds, but also that they will see each other now every day. Unlike Rebeca and Becky in High Heels and Doña Rosa and Sister Rosa, her daughter, in All About My Mother, for whom death comes too soon after reconciliation, we know that Raimunda and Irene still have a real chance at fully rebuilding a relationship. Forgiven and reunited, the mother and daughter can build from here, a possibility that the premature deaths of Rosa in All About My Mother and Becky in High Heels do not allow. This is a new kind of mother–daughter narrative. Almodóvar in Volver insists in arranging and erasing the difficulties that separate these characters, but he is not content with just allowing them to reconcile. They also have to have time, unlike the Rosas, the Rebecas and even the Estebans, to love each other.

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Almodóvar has said that Volver is his most autobiographical film, that the maternal presence of Chus Lampreave (as Aunt Paula) and Almagro (as Alcanfor de las Infantas) are his own way of reinventing his childhood and youth, of returning to the maternal warmth and the ancestral dwelling now lost, especially after the death of his mother, Francisca Caballero, in 1999. Volver marks, as Paul Julian Smith wrote in his Sight & Sound review ‘many returns’ for Almodóvar.21 The return of Carmen Maura, his first great inspiration, the immortal Pepi, of his first feature, Gloria in What Have I Done!? and Pepa of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It marks a return to his native La Mancha, so longingly revealed in The Flower of My Secret, to the classic forms of melodrama, and to motherhood itself as the most decisive force of his narrative. Motherhood, sisterhood, friendship between women, as seen in All About My Mother, The Flower of My Secret and High Heels are the most reliable organising and structural principles of this film, a strategy seen also in the film’s formal simplicity. Unlike the flashy, vertiginous and sometimes dizzying narratives of earlier films like Labyrinth of Passion and the more recent Kika and Bad Education, Volver is a straight, linear narrative about the experience and bonds that unite women, where characters get to confidently and soothingly grow into themselves, and by extension, into a family. The rest of the director’s films, however, peaking in the crowning achievements of All About My Mother and Talk to Her readdress and retake the topic of national identity, family and reconstruction in extended body metaphors that, as we will see in Chapter 4, equally address Almodóvar’s national and international critics and audiences.

Four The Body and the Nation1 ‘One is more authentic, the more you resemble that which you have dreamed of yourself.’

Kika (1994) In contrast to his melodramas of longing, in which Almodóvar’s characters search for ways to rebuild their emotional lives in family allegories of national identity, as we saw in the previous chapter, this section examines a new cycle in the director’s career in which the problems of personal, sexual and national identity are represented in body metaphors. In these films of the 1990s, the experience of central or marginal characters involves the reconstruction (or re-destruction) of a physical body which also works as an allegory of the family and the nation. Perhaps Almodóvar’s most controversial movie until Bad Education, Kika is at once a summation and an excessive reflection of the director’s own style and concerns in the first decade and a half of his career. In fact, Kika offers excess as a sign of the nation’s obsessive relationship with its past and present: an equally pornographic look at sexuality and violence and their presence in the core of national identity issues. Because of its focus on media figures and various forms of mediation, it is also one of Almodóvar’s most self-reflexive films, falling somewhere between The Law of Desire and Bad Education. In Kika, Almodóvar self-consciously addresses his own obsession with the media, with celebrity, with authorship and, as in Tie Me Up! and High Heels, with family ties that bind literally and symbolically. The movie opens with a credit sequence already reminiscent of The Law of Desire, with a theatrical spotlight being shone on a rough-looking surface. The shot promptly pans to reveal, through a cut-out of a keyhole, a young woman in profile, undressing. The theme of voyeurism is thus firmly established before the narrative actually begins. The credit sequence is intercut

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with pictures of women undressing cut out from magazines, lingerie advertisements and other printed media, while a young photographer gives instructions to a model and takes photos of her in lingerie. They are making a lingerie advertisement for a magazine and the man instructs the young woman to ‘make love’ to him, while the still camera’s long lens is treated as a transparent phallic allusion. The scene cuts to the photographer, Ramón (Alex Casanovas) driving in his car towards the country outside Madrid, listening to a flamenco version (by Fernanda and Bernarda de Utrera) of the popular song ‘Se nos rompió el amor’ (‘Our Love Was Broken’). Ramón arrives at a beautiful country villa named ‘Youkali’ (a name from a Kurt Weill composition, used by Almodóvar again in Talk to Her) only to hear two gunshots and find his mother (Charo López) dead on the bathroom floor, supposedly after committing suicide. Ramón uncovers his mother’s chest exposing a bleeding wound, while her husband, Nicholas (American actor Peter Coyote), calls the local police. Nicholas explains that he tried to prevent his wife’s attempt and was shot in the arm in the struggle. The tension between Ramón and Nicholas is evident, as the husband shows little concern for either his dead wife or his recently orphaned stepson, and the two look at each other with sincere contempt. The intriguing opening sequence, combining voyeurism with sexual desire and death, ends with the suggestion of potential conflict between the two men, and the second sequence begins with the beautician Kika (Veronica Forqué) in a Madrid beauty clinic, conducting a demonstration of the uses of long false eyelashes. Significantly, she compares the effect of long lashes to ‘slashing’ the eye: a direct reference to Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929), acknowledging Almodóvar’s debt to Buñuel as well as the root of the type of voyeuristic violence that Almodóvar exposes in Kika. In a flashback near the beginning, we see Kika meeting Nicholas for the first time. Kika had been making up Nicholas Pierce prior to a TV appearance in the show, We Must Read More. Once again, Almodóvar uses his mother, Doña Paquita who, practically playing herself, hosts the ludicrous literary segment. Nicholas explains that he went to Spain to write an article about hunting but fell in love with Spain and a woman, and decided to stay. ‘There is nothing quite like Spain’, replies Doña Paquita. The new book, I Married a

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Fraud tells a familiar story about a writer who gets away with the murder of his wife. ‘There’s a tradition among writers to kill their wives’, says Nicholas, offering as examples William Burroughs and Louis Althusser. Ultimately, Doña Paquita admits that, paradoxically, she can’t read any more and in a very reflexive move admits that she is there to see her son, ‘director of this programme’, who is too busy to visit her in La Mancha. Almodóvar thus includes biography, self-reflexivity and parody in the flashback, which inadvertently returns to the previous scene, where Kika concludes the story about her first meeting with Nicholas Pierce. The interruption of the narrative by the flashback is similar to Almodóvar’s practice in Bad Education where the memories and flashbacks of several real and created characters continue to intertwine in a confusing and even obtuse way. In Kika, the opening first flashes forward to ‘Three years later’ and then Kika herself returns to three years earlier to her meeting with Nicholas. It seems unusual to take a temporal detour in order to return to the same point only two minutes later; Almodóvar is already violating expectations and layering the narrative in a baroque, purposely elaborate game. In fact, Almodóvar again returns to the flashback of Kika (which she recounts to her students at the beauty clinic). Kika narrates in flashback how, after becoming sexually involved with Nicholas, he once called her to the Villa Youkali, to make up the recently deceased body of his stepson, Ramón, who had died of cardiac arrest, before he is taken to the morgue. In a set-up that Almodóvar would revisit later in Talk to Her, Kika applies make-up to the dead body of the handsome young man, while talking incessantly to the beautiful corpse, not only as if he were alive but in fact, like in Talk to Her, as if they were engaged in some sort of relationship. Surprisingly, little by little, as Kika talks and applies make-up, Ramón comes back to life, awakened by her caring words and the warmth of her brush. As with Leo’s mother in The Flower of My Secret and Benigno’s rape in Talk to Her, Kika’s loving intervention transforms the temporarily dead body back to life, an insistent motif in Almodóvar as we have seen (in The Law of Desire, for instance). Ramón’s temporary ‘death’ due to cardiac arrest, like the presence of his mother’s dead body earlier in the movie, point directly to Almodóvar’s death motif in this film.

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In the course of the narrative in Kika, wounds, self-flagellation, death, mutilation and rape become the organising principle, especially with the introduction of the enigmatic character ‘Andrea Caracortada’ (‘Scarface’). Played by Almodóvar regular Víctoria Abril (Tie Me Up! and High Heels) Andrea is the host of a sensationalist exploitation news magazine called ‘The Worst of Today’, centring exclusively on bizarre, lurid and bloody stories. The presence of Andrea Caracortada’s show, incorporated into the form of the film with conventions of television coverage and documentary video, allows for a critique of contemporary Spanish media (increasingly sensationalist in the 1990s) and for a good degree of self-reflexivity since Andrea speaks directly to the cameras and often reveals the apparatus of the medium. Her empty soundstage and theatre seats, accompanied by a prerecorded applause track, the accidental look of her own hand-held footage and other formal strategies help to raise questions about representation, sensationalism and the guilty voyeuristic pleasures of our own spectatorship. In the first episode of ‘The Worst of Today’ seen in Kika, for instance, Andrea begins the broadcast by showing footage shot by herself of a man known as ‘El portugués’ shooting his wife, who has accused him of sexually abusing their child, on camera. Andrea then proceeds to interview the murderer’s mother, purely it seems for the purpose of torturing the woman. Structurally, Almodóvar juxtaposes Andrea’s continuous search for exploitation with Kika and Ramón’s story: they are now a couple, in love, living together. When Nicholas returns after a Latin American tour, Ramón allows his stepfather to stay in his former studio upstairs. We know that these two narrative tracks will eventually converge, but the details are still scattered. There is so much going on in Kika that it comes to seem like a self-reflexive experiment in which Almodóvar is too conscious of his own obsession with representation. So Andrea Caracortada’s ‘Worst of Today’ is perfectly comparable to Ramón’s voyeuristic profession which has its own violent slant, as evidenced by a poster from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), the disturbing Psycho precursor about a photographer who kills women with the feet of his tripod. Andrea suggestively wears cameras on top of her head and spotlights on her breasts that give her cyborg characteristics, as Smith has also argued, that seem to negate the distinction between

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people, machines of recording and the general media.2 The complications of these relationships continue to be revealed as we learn that not only is Kika, Nicholas’s former lover now with his stepson, Ramón, but that Andrea has also been formerly romantically linked with both men. Andrea’s relationship with Ramón, however, ended badly and is the reason for her scarred face. Kika’s plot becomes increasingly Oedipal, as the trio of lovers of Ramón, Kika and Nicholas share a house, and as Ramón’s romantic interest in Kika is transparently maternal. When he asks Kika to marry him, her immediate nonchalant response is to point out their age difference; but Ramón insists that he has always liked ‘older women’. The Oedipal implication is complicated by the fact that, in a manner of speaking, Kika gave life to Ramón when she miraculously revived him three years before and that he makes the proposal with his mother’s engagement ring. She takes care of him in a maternal fashion, feeding him his heart medication (and some type of erectile dysfunction remedy) before leaving for work in the morning. But she is, of course, already having an affair with Nicholas and feeling guilty about the impulsive proposal. Like everybody else, Nicholas is deceiving Kika with her friend and model Amparo (Anabel Alonso), as well as being involved in an affair with the mysterious Susana (Bibi Andersen). Once again, Almodóvar puts Andersen in the role of a ‘real’ woman, this time in a narrative that includes a female ‘cyborg’ and another woman whose job centres on the re-construction of women’s faces. Arguably Almodóvar’s focus in Kika is on the character’s oscillation between forms of representation and mediation: photography, television, modelling and written narrative, between making and remaking bodies, faces, images and words. We are later introduced to Kika’s supposedly lesbian maid, Juana, played by Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma, she of the famously ‘Cubist’ features. Teasing Juana for not being very feminine, Kika makes up Juana’s face to make her look more attractive. The two women stand in front of the mirror, inspecting Juana’s new face: a recurring image in Almodóvar’s world as we see in All About My Mother, The Flower of My Secret, Tie Me Up!, The Law of Desire, Matador and other films. It is again a double mirror image showing us Juana and her reflection in the same shot, with Kika beside her inspect-

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ing her own accomplishment. In the background, a wall of multi-coloured tiles seem to mimic the odd beauty of Rossy de Palma’s face (who was in reality a model), while Kika promises Juana that she is ready for the catwalk. But Juana states that she would rather be a prison matron, surrounded by women all day. Juana, always playing the lesbian, alarms Kika a little bit with her confession that the conversation has sexually aroused her; she stares at Kika desirously. Kika, embarrassed, asks Juana if she has ever been with a man, to which Juana replies, ‘only my brother’. Juana’s story is revealing and traumatic. Her brother, she says, was ‘abnormal’ and practised bestiality and rape in their village until Juana, to prevent him from raping others, allowed him to rape her. Kika replies, ‘No wonder you’re so traumatised’, but Juana is nonchalant: she is fine, as long as there are women around. Interestingly, Almodóvar again treats homosexuality as a ‘problem’ for others, but not for the individual concerned. On the contrary, despite her past suffering, Juana insists that she is not traumatised and that she is very ‘authentic’. The claim of authenticity in the fiction of Kika is particularly paradoxical since the film emphasises, on the contrary, mediation and representation. ‘Authenticity’ is the last thing on Kika’s, Ramón’s and Nicholas’s minds, but it is Juana’s way of defining herself (much like Tina in The Law of Desire and Agrado in All About My Mother). Yet in Kika all the major characters seem to want to escape their own selves or get lost in their own making and representation. The fascination with voyeurism and representation in Kika is further emphasised in the second intersection of Andrea Caracortada’s ‘The Worst of Today’, which Kika, Ramón and Juana sit down to watch together after a most tense dinner. Andrea introduces the segment ‘Bloody Ceremonies’ and shows extremely violent footage of a bizarre religious ritual, the ‘procession of the picaos’ (or ‘pricked’ ones). In the town of Villaverde de los Ojos, men in hoods, members of a cofradía (a type of secular and religious brotherhood) flagellate themselves severely on the lower back, and then are pricked hard with a pair of metal tips until blood drains from the purpled wounds. The astonishing footage is actual television documentary and its realism is as sensational as it is disturbing. Almodóvar accompanies the footage with the frantic percussion beats of Dámaso Pérez Prado’s

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‘Concierto para bongó’ adding a sense of gusto and paroxysm to the representation of this particular violence that borders on the pornographic. Almodóvar’s trick with the very real footage of the picaos procession is ultimately on us. Mirroring the cinematic spectators in the voyeuristic darkness of the theatre, Kika, Ramón and Juana in front of the television cannot look away. With gasps of horror and protests of indignation, the three characters intently watch the television without as much as a blink. There is of course, no exploitation, no sensationalism without the voyeurs, ‘a race of peeping toms’ (as Hitchcock calls them in Rear Window) and in this case, Almodóvar embarrassingly reminds us, they are you and me. After the broadcast of the picaos footage, Andrea Caracortada announces the fictional part of the story, the justification for this particular media intersection. We learn that, while at the procession and on leave from prison, the notorious sexual criminal Pablo Méndez (Santiago Lajusticia) and former porn star ‘Paul Bazzo’ has escaped. We soon learn that ‘Paul Bazzo’ is Juana’s rapist brother.3 Very significantly, Almodóvar aligns the

‘The Worst of Today’: Victoria Abril as Andrea Scarface in Kika

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morbid pornographic display of violence to the body seen in the picaos footage with Pablo’s former profession of sex performer. Almodóvar seems to suggest that there is no difference between these types of pornography; they are equally repulsive and scopophiliac, Pablo’s former profession and his masked self-flagellating persona, both rely on the existence of a consuming public. But Ramón is not even that far away in his own pursuits: he takes photographs of Kika fellating him and them having intercourse, pointing the camera at their faces and their joined genitals. Ramón’s fetish is thus revealed to be more important than sex itself: he is satisfied with the photographs and does not even ejaculate while having sex with Kika. Upstairs in Nicholas’s quarters, a parallel love-making session between the stepfather and Susana seems to be going much better. Kika walks off to the balcony dissatisfied, curious about the oscillating chandelier above her. The camera tracks upwards from Ramón’s bedroom balcony, where Kika stares at the familiar artificial Madrid skyline seen in Women on the Verge, to Nicholas’s balcony directly above where a nude Susana mouths the words to the Chavela Vargas song ‘Luz de luna’ (‘Moonlight’), apparently much happier. In Vargas’s voice, a deep, textured alto, the Carrillo song sounds strangely homoerotic, as it is a heartbreak song sung to a long-gone-butstill-loved young countrywoman. Lip-synched by Bibi Andersen, the song equally reminds us of the deceptive focus of all forms of identity and representation in the movie as the typically ‘straight’ couple is incapable of having proper, satisfactory sexual relations, unlike the ‘projected’ homosexual couple of Nicholas and Susana. Like Juana’s ‘authenticity’, Susana’s sexuality is more resolved than Kika and Ramón’s which is not only unsatisfactory, but is also always mediated by an apparatus (the camera) and representation (their faked photographic enthusiasm). It is apparent that Nicholas too has some sort of identity secret (Susana never knew his real name, for instance). Like other characters in Almodóvar’s films, like Leo and Ángel in The Flower of My Secret, like Sister Sewer Rat and her sister in Dark Habits, like Pablo Quintero and ‘Laura P.’ in The Law of Desire, and like Becky del Páramo and her secretary in High Heels, Nicholas is also struggling with some form of authorial crisis as a writer. He is writing a novel, entitled ‘A Lesbian Killer’ and also a script for Andrea’s

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show called ‘We Are Doing Fatally’. In her office at home, Andrea is surrounded by posters of classic exploitation films like The Sadist (James Landis, 1963) and Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960), ‘B’-type relatives of Ramón’s favourites like Peeping Tom and Psycho.4 Nicholas and Andrea have a meeting to discuss both texts-in-the-making introduced in Kika. Almodóvar sets up their meeting to talk about the sensational, lurid and morbid ‘pulp’ written by Nicholas at the elegant and historic bar at Bellas Artes in central Madrid. The bar itself is a landmark of Madrid’s cultural history and elite, a place where famous peñas were held by the intellectual class of the generation of 1898 poets and writers (like Miguel de Unamuno and Benito Pérez Galdós) and later the generation of 1927 that included Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel. By setting the meeting at Bellas Artes, Almodóvar is ironically appropriating and equating the distinct concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture in a specifically Spanish type of cultural sacrilege. Perhaps, Almodóvar suggests, there is no real distinction any more because this is what Spanish culture has become, with no significant separation between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Later, when Pablo shows up at Kika and Ramón’s house looking for his sister Juana, she unsuccessfully tries to get rid of him. It is Juana’s own initiative that turns the movie’s plot: Juana instructs Pablo to tie her up, gag her, punch her and steal Ramón’s cameras and video cameras kept in the studio. But Pablo, the former ‘Paul Bazzo’, is much more interested in the voluptuous sleeping Kika than in the video cameras. Upon finding Kika in bed, Pablo bends over her, brings his nose close to her rolled-up skirt, and sniffs her between the thighs, like a dog would. He undresses himself and speaks to the sleeping woman, displaying his strong, young body. After initially retreating and trying to wake Juana, who’s promised him sexual favours if he doesn’t rape anyone, Pablo returns to the bedroom and begins to caress Kika with the soft, wet inside of an orange. Still asleep, Kika initially seems receptive and Pablo finally climbs on top of her and penetrates her. Kika first yawns and then awakes to discover she is being raped. When she starts screaming, Pablo covers her mouth and threatens her with a knife that was lying on the nightstand. In yet another pointed reference to Luis Buñuel, the brief shot shows Pablo’s hand grabbing the knife that was

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on top of a picture of a woman’s eye. The second instance of this eye-slashing motif is doubly significant here: as in Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, which it directly references, the voyeurism theme also connects the eye-slashing to the danger of voyeurism. Like Powell’s Peeping Tom and Hitchcock’s Psycho, sexual violence is analogous to other types of violence and it emphasises the perverse pleasures of the cinema. In what is perhaps Almodóvar’s most controversial move in this film, Kika is generally friendly to the rapist and even tries to save herself by offering some type of counselling to her attacker. As in the early scene where somehow her constant monologue revives Ramón from the dead, Kika seems to believe that she can also offer the talking cure to Pablo. But a voyeur across the street who has been spying on the sleeping Kika (another reference to Hitchcock of course, as his built-up lenses are reminiscent of L. B. Jefferies in Rear Window) calls the police to report the crime and the fugitive Paul Bazzo’s whereabouts. Back in the bedroom, Kika continues to argue with Pablo who’s attempting to break his own record of ejaculating four times without pulling out. Kika’s rape scene, which lasts for more than eight minutes on screen, ends when the cops indeed arrive in the flat and forcibly pull Pablo away from Kika. Pablo runs off to the balcony and finishes himself off, ejaculating, by chance, right on Andrea’s face, who’s down on the street having just arrived at the scene of the crime. The implications of this most offensive of Almodóvar’s scenes, Kika’s rape, the voyeur across the street and the shot of the drop of semen on Andrea’s face are paradoxically excessive and necessary. Almodóvar’s narrative and (melo)dramatic excesses in Kika logically lead to the literally pornographic content of the sequence so that, in its selfreflexivity, it addresses both our voyeurism and its possible consequences. Not unlike the scene of Kika, Ramón and Juana in front of the television, our own fascination with exploitative content alters its meaning from horribly offensive to magnetically pornographic. Almodóvar continually reminds the spectator that, as with Andrea’s ‘The Worst of Today’, the worst of Almodóvar also counts on the fidelity of its audience. For all the narcissism surrounding the characters, Kika shows an unusual amount of modesty when Andrea, sporting a video camera on her

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Andrea’s cyborg costume: the ‘eye’ of the camera

helmet, insists in interviewing her after the rape. Andrea’s questions surrounding the experience are as insensitive as they are significant: Andrea even suggests that Pablo’s escape might have been ‘a manoeuvre by the opposition’ to make the government look bad. Kika stoically resists and never answers Andrea’s questions, so the self-described TV psychologist concentrates her attention on the informant, the voyeur across the street who called the police in the first place. Andrea steps out onto the balcony and scans the buildings opposite her with her camera-helmet. The reverse shot of the buildings in the afternoon, presumably as seen with Andrea’s camera, dissolves into the same image at night and a close-up of the moon dissolves into the window of a washing machine. Another reference to Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, the elaborate sequence (from Andrea looking at the buildings to the dissolves of the building, the moon and the washing machine) suggests the nightmarish effect of the events in Kika’s life. Yet, while drinking herself silly, Kika explains the traumatic episode in a faux nonchalant way to Ramón and adds that, while the rape was horrible, it’s

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‘best to forget’. But Kika does need help, as indicated by her anger at Ramón’s lack of interest in the story and her sincere shame that evening when her rape is featured in Andrea Caracortada’s show with video provided, evidently, by the voyeur informant. Kika is also disturbed by Ramón’s revelation that he was Andrea’s patient when she was a psychologist. ‘I did it for my mother’, he says without really explaining. The tension mounts when Nicholas drops by and the two men gang up on Kika for her excessive drinking. There is a tense and strange alienation around these characters and a brilliant moment of symptomatic mise en scène when Kika vomits in the bathroom and the elaborate cupboards separate Ramón and Kika in a similar effect to a later scene in The Flower of My Secret. Kika takes advantage of Ramón’s sudden tenderness to confess that she has been having an affair with Nicholas, who soon finds out that both Ramón and Nicholas have been sexually involved with Andrea. In a strangely comical scene, Nicholas calls Andrea to issue a warning to stop airing material related to them, since it is evident now that the voyeur has access to both Ramón’s and Nicholas’s upstairs rooms (in fact as they talk Andrea watches on television a video of Nicholas in his room with Susana). Kika, Nicholas, Ramón and Andrea are all on the phone listening to the conversation at the same time and the effect paradoxically emphasises the alienation among these characters whose relations are all, once again, excessively mediated by all sorts of apparatus. Ramón and Nicholas agree that Andrea’s vengeful ways are related to her bad break-ups with both men. And Ramón reveals to Nicholas that he is the voyeur himself, that he informed the police, made the video, but did not give it to Andrea. Nicholas watches the videos and accuses Ramón of spying behind the door when he made love to Ramón’s mother. This particular disclosure is interesting as it puts in perspective Ramón’s Oedipal trauma. Ramón’s animosity towards Nicholas and his inclination to keep him around reveal that Ramón is somehow dependent on this unlikely paternal figure and links together the trauma of the lost maternal object of desire. After all, not only did Nicholas possess Ramón’s mother sexually but he also was a suspect in her death. Kika, devastated by the revelation of Ramón’s vice and seeing herself as a somewhat unwilling peon of an Oedipal conflict

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far from resolution (it was her maternal gesture, we may recall, that brought Ramón back to life after his heart failure), quietly packs a small bag and leaves the house. Juana follows stealthily, grateful and sympathetic to Kika. Meanwhile Ramón and Nicholas continue their argument, which turns to possession of the maternal estate: the country house, Youkali, which is the last thing that they share and need to divide. Significantly, the many entangled conflicts in need of resolution in Kika are all related to the ‘possession’ of maternal bodies. After Nicholas leaves, Ramón sits in front of the television, watching, tellingly, Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951), which has a murderous plot about a disgruntled policeman’s desire for the married victim of a ‘prowler’ he’s investigating. A memory is triggered in Ramón’s mind, apparently by the movie on TV (or maybe by the bars from Bernard Herrman’s Psycho score, appropriated this time from ‘The Car Lot’ segment). Almodóvar cuts to a black-and-white ‘flashback’ in which Ramón’s mother and Nicholas are apparently having an argument and we see Nicholas shoot his wife and then

Kika reconstructs Juana’s face: Rossy de Palma and Verónica Forqué in Kika

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put the pistol into her dead hand. Afterwards, Nicholas holds up his own and his wife’s hand and shoots himself in the hand. But the ‘flashback’ is revealed not to be one but actually Ramón’s dream of the violent scene. A close-up of Ramón waking up agitated from his dream cuts incongruously to a shot of Nicholas in the garden of Casa Youkali digging a hole in the ground. Somehow Andrea discovers, by watching Nicholas’s videos, that he has recently killed his former lover Susana and we discover then that the shallow grave is meant for her body. Ramón goes looking for Nicholas at Casa Youkali to deliver his mother’s memoirs and objects to him. After reading his mother’s diaries, Ramón discovers (like Norman Bates?) that his mother never loved him. His insane attachment finally explained as a fixation with the object of desire, we discover that his mother’s only thoughts were for her murderous husband, Nicholas. The Oedipal confrontation is made more poignant by our knowledge that the woman’s feelings for Nicholas were not reciprocated. To Nicholas’s protestations of innocence, Ramón replies with a missing page from the mother’s diaries in which it revealed that, after an early suicide attempt, Nicholas had somehow used her suicidal intentions to plot her murder. Later, as had happened three years before, Ramón suffered heart failure after discovering Susana’s nude, dead body in the bathtub. While Nicholas is setting up Ramón’s body in the bed as he had done three years before, Andrea arrives in her full camera-suit and continues to harass Nicholas around the house, to ask about Ramón’s whereabouts and request an interview, although her fixation with these men has never been fully exposed. But Andrea has figured out Nicholas’s murderous activities, not just the killing of Ramón’s mother, but also that of Susana, a murder as yet unexplained to spectators. When Nicholas tries to attack Andrea with a lampstand, she shoots him with a gun. Performing a sort of citizen’s arrest, Andrea only wants an interview in which Nicholas must confirm his serial murders, already confessed to, under the guise of the lesbian killer, in his novel. But, when he attempts once more to attack her and escape, she shoots him again. Moved by a sudden inexplicable surge of sympathy, Andrea promises to take Nicholas to hospital but still tries to make him confess that he has committed all the crimes in his novel. Before admitting

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anything and to Andrea’s sincere heartbreak, Nicholas dies, apparently before confessing. Desperate, she breaks down, now worried about having killed him. But Nicholas, who is not dead, struggles, takes Andrea’s gun and kills her. Kika arrives, summoned by Ramón’s farewell letter, to discover the ghastly scene full of bodies: Andrea, Nicholas, Susana and Ramón. Nicholas has just enough time to confess to Kika and give her the manuscript, which he now calls his ‘autobiography’ before expiring in her arms. When Kika finds Ramón’s body upstairs, she tries the same treatment as before: she tenderly, even motherly, tries to revive his inert body; this time it is to no avail. She then tries to jolt the body back to life, applying electricity with a nearby lamp. Miraculously, ridiculously, he comes back to life, born again out of Kika’s maternal affections. Kika declares her conviction that all her calamities started with the marriage proposal and throws away the ring he gave her which had been his mother’s. The final sequence in Kika is both perfectly simple and incongruously intriguing. After calling the police and an ambulance, Kika follows the ambulance carrying Ramón, apparently on their way back to Madrid. But on the way she finds a stranded driver by the road, his smoking car parked near a bright sunflower field. When the stranded driver flags her down, Kika agrees to take him to the nearest service station. She seems immediately smitten by the handsome young man, who quickly invites her to his sister’s wedding in Montilla, that afternoon. Kika, cleaning the bloodstains from her arms, her chest and her dress, agrees to accompany the stranger. ‘I can use the distraction’, she says. And so the movie ends with Kika on her way to a wedding, shortly after cleaning the blood of everyone’s crimes off her body, a sort of final expiation appropriate to the movie’s Oedipal conflict. And also, although unexpected, the ending is perfectly in tune with Almodóvar’s ‘return to the village’ motif which emerges repetitively in the movies of this period (see my discussion of Tie Me Up! and The Flower of My Secret). Although incongruous and unexplained, the movie’s surprise ending promises a new life for Kika and a ‘rebirth’ for her from all the trauma caused by her past dangerous liaisons. Admittedly the denouement of the

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plot(s) concerning Andrea, Ramón and Nicholas is dissatisfying. And yet, in a film with so little narrative logic, it is a perfectly apt resolution. In fact, in the universe of Kika, the film’s conclusion is one of the few things that is somewhat resolved. After all, Kika’s only option is to escape from Ramón, Nicholas and the others for they have only caused her pain and trauma, exploited her and left her alone. Ramón’s revised Oedipal trauma, for instance, unlike that of Rebeca and Becky in High Heels is never resolved and, at least as far as the law is concerned, Nicholas gets away with the murder of his wife. Andrea’s mysterious past with Nicholas and Ramón is also a loose end that her death, far from bringing to a resolution, makes even more baffling. And the lingering questions about the whereabouts of Pablo ‘Paul Bazzo’ and his sister Juana are nothing short of unimportant. Interestingly then, what we are left with after seeing Kika is relief and perhaps a few questions. What is, then, the purpose of the longest rape scene represented on screen (perhaps until the far more disturbing one in Gaspar Noé’s 2002 Irréversible)? What is the significance or even the importance of Nicholas’s killing spree? What is the meaning of Ramón’s unresolved Oedipal scenario? The answer to those questions is, I believe, what Almodóvar returns to in Bad Education: self-reflexivity and (narrative) excess. In Kika, Almodóvar created probably his most absurd plot since Labyrinth of Passion. Its chronological presence between his two most satisfyingly mature stories to date, High Heels and The Flower of My Secret, seems to underscore its absurdity and its links to Almodóvar’s first decade of feature film-making. The movie, however, treats Almodóvar’s historic topics and narrative strategies (trauma, rape, violence, family tensions, authorial crisis) as forms of excess. These themes are overly mediated by the constant presence of television, handycams and voyeurism on the surface and inwardly by the complications of the plot. Like Labyrinth of Passion, Kika rehearses its own form of reflexivity by being so transparently absurd. Unlike Labyrinth of Passion however, Kika’s improbable finale, involving re-death, re-birth, a violent return to the maternal home and the promise of a new beginning is as frantic and excessive as the Pérez Prado percussion that serves as a theme in the movie and equally exhausting.

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All About My Mother (1999) In his more mature recent films (the ‘blue’ films as Paul Julian Smith calls them), The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh and Todo sobre mi madre, Almodóvar’s exploration of family and the nation has been revised yet again into an equation where women and men constantly rearrange gender and/or familial roles, identity and sexuality. Yet, in these three films there is evidence of a move towards a more definable genre, namely melodrama, a tendency already partly visible in High Heels. Genre ‘definition’ has come with a volatile gender un-definition of key characters whose transitional identities are paradoxically symbolic of their stability and not of crisis. A character like the transgender Agrado in All About My Mother (played by Antonia San Juan) would probably be seen as ‘monstrous’ and symbolic of traumatic identity crises in earlier Almodóvar films like The Law of Desire. But in All About My Mother, Agrado is clearly defined as a rational, ‘authentic’ character who gradually deals with the traumas of her past. Thus, arguably, Agrado’s negotiation of the identity crisis hitherto represented by the transgender or transvestite characters is symbolically neutralised in All About My Mother. In this film, the role of transgender and transitory bodies of fathers, mothers and children becomes a sign of Almodovar’s effort to resolve some issues of national identity raised in his previous films. My analysis of the story, some stylistic motifs, the use of theatrical spaces and performance and the extended body/nation metaphor in All About My Mother, suggests a move towards an understanding of identity as something ambiguous (sexually, culturally) and problematic, yet ultimately functional. Furthermore, I argue that the film’s narrative arc, the choices of locations and mobility and the revised Oedipal trajectory (here a paternal search that leads to stability), propose a resolution to many of the issues surrounding the nation’s issues seen in Almodovar’s and other Spanish films of the previous two decades. Significantly, the main protagonist in All About My Mother, played by Argentine actress Cecilia Roth (Pepi, Luci, Bom, Labyrinth of Passion), is a nurse in charge of transplant co-ordination in a Madrid hospital. From the opening credit sequence, the film concentrates on human bodies and their condition, starting with close-ups of a drip bag, a heart monitor and other

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life-support machines. We are thus introduced to Manuela, as she witnesses a patient’s death and quickly goes to her office to arrange for a transplant of the man’s heart, liver, etc. These early shots concentrate on the sequence of events from death to the arrangement of organ donation without much emotional involvement. For Manuela at this point, this is strictly a professional task. This is further emphasised by Manuela’s agreement to take her son Esteban (Eloy Azorin) to the hospital the next day to watch her conducting a training seminar for hospital employees on notifying relatives of a person’s death and suggesting they consider organ donation. The scene is staged as seen in 1996 in Almodóvar’s The Flower of My Secret. Manuela acts the part of the relative, speaking with the physicians about organ donation. Esteban observes Manuela from a television monitor in the next room. She pretends ignorance about the donation request but ultimately understands that a transplant can save someone’s life, at least. Meanwhile Esteban, an aspiring author, writes in a notebook where he has begun to record ‘all about [his] mother’, inspired by the title of the film All about Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), which he had seen with Manuela the previous night. The ‘staging’ of Esteban’s seemingly capricious desire to see his mother ‘perform’ suggests two things of relevance to an understanding of the film’s position about the body and mise en scène. First, it underscores performance, as Manuela fakes her emotional reaction to the news of death and to the request for organ donation. It also brings up the question of mediation and mise en scène. The film resolves many of its conflicts and crises on or around the stage, either in theatre dressing rooms or in the presence of theatrical and cinematic intertexts, most prominently Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Mankiewicz’s All about Eve. Manuela’s first performance in the film (with her son Esteban as audience) also foretells a type of corporeal intertextuality; the human body itself becomes a site for exchanges and rearrangements in the process of being reconstituted. Nevertheless, Manuela’s journey of reconstruction begins when she has to face reality and not theatricality. When Esteban is hit and killed by a car after attending a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire with her, the story returns to the hospital setting. This time around, however, Manuela hears the request for her son’s organs in reality, and without the mediation of

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acting and television. The scene appears for the fourth time in an Almodóvar film. Yet, unlike its implied performative and theatrical quality in The Flower of My Secret (where the character was also named Manuela), Kika, and the beginning of All About My Mother, the reality of Manuela’s heartbreak here produces a believably moving melodramatic moment. In part, by removing the often present (and usually comic) media intersections seen in his films (television commercials, news broadcasts, magazine clippings, etc.), Almodóvar suggests an immediate and unmediated access to the character’s feelings in All About My Mother. Sitting down in medium close-up with a friend (in contrast to the extreme close-up of her face seen before on the TV screen and reminiscent of television soap-opera mise en scène), Manuela screams and cries even before hearing the news. In the previous version she had waited for the scene to run its course and had reacted as scripted. But here her unmediated reaction delivers a moment of authenticity, suggesting the frivolity of mediating elements. The sequence cuts to a shot of the hospital form which Manuela signs, donating her son’s heart; we learn from their identical last names (Manuela and Esteban Colemán Echevarría) that he is unrecognised by his father. Here the identical names become a restatement of Almodóvar’s previous references to absent (or useless) fatherly figures as seen in Labyrinth of Passion, The Law of Desire, High Heels, Matador and What Have I Done to Deserve This?!. Instead of a rejection of ‘the name of the father’ as in earlier films, Manuela and Esteban’s trajectory in this film points towards reconciliation with the father, something hitherto unseen in Almodóvar’s films since the satirical incestuous relationship ironically explored in Labyrinth of Passion. Before tracing the paternal bloodline, however, the story follows Esteban’s heart in a montage sequence that goes from the ICU to the operating room in Madrid; from the donor’s record (focusing on the word ‘heart’) to the recipient getting ready to leave for his transplant; from the airport to the operating table. The sequence ends with the recipient leaving the provincial hospital in La Coruña, breathing new life as his relatives celebrate his eighteen-year-old heart. In an unusual change for Almodóvar, the ‘heart’ of the story, along with the heart of Esteban, moves away from Madrid, the city so prominently and symbolically featured in all his films.

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The move is especially significant because it underlines an uncharacteristic displacement of the action, here dramatically and violently taken away from the central plains of Madrid. Manuela first goes to the Galician city of La Coruña, on the northwestern coast of the country, only to briefly see the man who now has her son’s heart. She then goes to Barcelona on the northeastern coast, determined to find her former husband, honouring Esteban’s request minutes before dying to be told ‘all about [his] father’. Manuela is prevented by Esteban’s sudden death from fulfilling his desire, expressed in his journal, of completing the ‘missing’ part of his life, from knowing and perhaps reconciling with his father. The significance of Manuela’s travels cannot be underestimated. Galicia, where Esteban’s heart goes, is a largely agricultural region, known to have been historically somewhat isolated from the ‘rest’ of Spain by mountains and Celtic heritage, with less Moorish influence than the rest of the country. In contrast, Barcelona was considered, until recently, Spain’s most modern, culturally dynamic and politically progressive city, with a past of antiFrancoist efforts during the Civil War of 1936–9. By placing Esteban Jr’s heart in Coruña, and Esteban Sr in Barcelona, Almodóvar not only displaces Madrid (called ‘the centre of the universe’ in Labyrinth of Passion) as a synecdoche of all things Spanish, but also acknowledges a sense of inclusion of ‘other things Spanish’ by reconciling this bicoastal dyad. Galicia and Cataluña are steps in Manuela’s healing process, in her search for and effort to ‘reorganise’ the body of Spain. The juxtaposition of these three locales in All About My Mother signals the harmonisation of previously dislocated and seemingly ill-fitting parts of a single body. The film stresses this concept even further with the character of Agrado. She adds a fourth dramatically diverse Spanish region to the equation (the Canary Islands) and also a body literally composed of disparate parts, as we will see shortly. Finally, Manuela’s train journey to Barcelona to look for the father stresses the power of connections instead of separation; the railway lines suggesting the interconnected veins inside a body going from ‘heart’ to ‘brain’ to every organ and member. Furthermore, Almodóvar subverts the classic train imagery seen in films from John Ford (The Iron Horse, 1924) and Buster Keaton (The General, 1926) to Alfred Hitchcock (North by Northwest, 1959)

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and Luis Buñuel (That Obscure Object of Desire). While still emphasising bodily metaphors, Almodóvar denies the customary phallic symbolism associated with this mode of transport in films and directly opposes the ‘monstrous’ characterisation of the approaching train seen in Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973).5 In All About My Mother, the train is seen horizontally bisecting the screen rather than in the aggressive, slightly diagonal, ‘erect’ fashion of other films. Before the anticipated arrival in Barcelona, the camera is placed on the front of the train as it drives through a tunnel. The camera tracks through the darkness of the tunnel, revealing the light of the exit slowly stretching ahead as we approach it. The shot is suggestive of the birth canal seen from the inside rather than the customary action of penetration witnessed from outside and suggestive of the ‘primal scene’ celebrated in films like Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.6 Thus, instead of the classically traumatic vision of penetration much exploited in Freudian analysis and criticism, in All About My Mother, the search for the father is anticipated by an allusion to maternity and birth. The unsuspecting father waits at the other end of this birth canal. Barcelona is introduced as we exit the birth canal in an aerial establishing shot of the city (incongruous in light of Manuela’s arrival by train) in the early evening, cinema’s magical hour. The city emerges from behind the hills looking at once welcoming and harmless. The most prominent city landmark that we are shown on Manuela’s cab journey is significantly the city’s best known: the towers and façade of the Temple of the Holy Family (Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia). Manuela looks out the cab window; as the car briefly comes to a stop we see the temple’s façade in a slow tracking shot. The reverse shot shows the façade reflected on the car window through which we see Manuela. As she rolls down the window, her face replaces the image of the building. One of the most celebrated creations of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí (1852–1926), the Holy Family is an important choice for Almodóvar in this film. Its title as a temple of ‘expiation’ suggests the action of reconciliation (as the Catholic sacrament of ‘penance’ has been known after the Vatican II Council of the 1960s). Moreover, to the Christian doctrine, Jesus offered his own body as a sacrifice for mankind’s

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sins. The allusion to the sacred family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus underscores Manuela’s search for Esteban Sr as a similar act of reconcilement for her fragmented family. Gaudí’s modernist creations, this temple itself, and other city landmarks like the Casa Vicens and the Parc and Palau Güell, also metaphorically emphasise the topic of reconciliation. In Gaudí’s dramatic combinations, dissimilar shapes, spaces and mismatching materials are often laboured into harmony in an effort to give the buildings a natural, organic feeling. The sequence of Manuela’s arrival in Barcelona, from ‘birth’ to ‘family’ to reconciliation, arguably announces the narrative’s direction towards a more harmonious, unaffected view of the family and the nation. Manuela’s transgender friend, Agrado, first appears immediately following the Holy Family stop, which happens to be on the way to Barcelona’s prostitute market, ‘el campo’. The scene is reminiscent of the opening of Almodóvar’s Labyrinth of Passion, in which the main characters, Sexi (also Cecilia Roth) and Riza (Imanol Arias) roam Madrid’s largest flea market, ‘el Rastro’, in search of men. The memorable sequence is composed of shots of Sexi’s and Riza’s faces in close-up, their gazes inconspicuously directed towards men’s crotches and behinds. In All About My Mother, Manuela is driven around in a carousel of johns window-shopping, while prostitutes and transvestites (everyone’s ‘real’ gender and identity a mystery) aggressively offer themselves, emphasising their surgically altered bodies. Manuela’s search for Esteban Sr (or ‘Lola’, as he is henceforth known in the film) among the half-naked, counterfeit bodies, and not among the johns, suggests that the father is one of these ‘transitional’ characters. Manuela does not locate Esteban’s father, but finds instead her old friend Agrado, a transgender prostitute herself. Agrado’s speech pattern and accent clearly place her origin in the Canary Islands. Manuela saves Agrado from a violent john who’s attacking her, her face badly bruised and bloody. From this chance encounter on, Agrado’s body, also surgically altered as she gleefully celebrates later on in the film, becomes the locus of reconstruction and restoration, of the search for stability. Their first sequence together reintroduces the theme of healing when they go first to an all-night

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pharmacy (where Agrado in a marked accent greets the attendant in Catalan) to purchase ‘gauze, rubbing alcohol, iodine, suturing tape’, and then to Agrado’s apartment where Manuela tends her friend’s wounds. In this scene, Agrado sits in a chair while Manuela stands in front of her and applies the medications. While Manuela works on Agrado’s bruised face, her friend finally offers some leads as to the whereabouts of Lola/Esteban. It emerges that some months ago, Agrado had picked up Lola whom she found in terrible shape due to a drug overdose. Agrado relates to Manuela her last meeting with the elusive ‘father’, Lola: ‘one morning after returning from “el campo”, she had robbed my house: watches, jewellery, ’70s magazines where I draw inspiration, three hundred thousand pesetas’. The symbolic action of healing is here associated with the pillages of ‘the father’. Furthermore, Agrado’s reference to the 1970s ‘for inspiration’ (also suggested by her apartment’s vivid décor, wallpaper, lamps and furniture) emphasises the camp value and re-appropriation of recent Spanish history so important for film-makers since the cultural transition.7 With the dialogue and mise en scène, Almodóvar revisits the theme of the absent and harmful father figure, temporally displaced back to the last decade of Franco’s regime and in doing so resumes the task of restoring the nation’s body. The body has been initially fragmented and traumatised with Esteban Jr’s death and later put in motion with his organ donations and the geographical displacements of Manuela (from Madrid, to La Coruña, to Barcelona). The addition of Agrado reinforces these themes. She adds yet a fourth region of Spain to the equation (the Canary Islands), this one further distanced by not ‘belonging’ to the peninsula. The choice may also suggest the inclusion of Spain’s transnational and diasporic elements, since the Islands are not only among the few remaining national territories outside Europe, but were also a common stopping place for Spanish ships during the conquest and settling of its American colonies. Agrado thus suggests a more inclusive picture of the ‘body of Spain’. Agrado’s discourse about her body may also be representative of the process of reconciliation and of the settling of identity issues; other critics have argued that transvestism and transsexuality have been seen as a sign of the nation’s ‘anxiety’ in Almodóvar’s films.8

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The problems of identity presented in All About My Mother are not suggestive of actual ‘settled’ identity, but of the understanding and coming to terms with one’s own ‘authenticity’ even if that which is authentic is paradoxically marked by reinvention. As Agrado remarks in response to Manuela’s compliments of her knock-off Chanel suit, ‘the only things I have that are real is my feelings and the litres of silicone’. When Manuela and Agrado decide to find legitimate work, they go to Sister Rosa, a young, beautiful Catholic novice (Penélope Cruz, cast effectively against type) who works as a counsellor in a support centre for drug addicts, prostitutes and other ‘marginal’ characters. As always, Agrado speaks her mind, this time about the competition in ‘el campo’. She points out the differences between whores (women), ‘drags’ (men in women’s garb) and herself, a ‘pre-op’ transgender. Tellingly, Agrado’s problem with the ‘drags’ is not cross-dressing, but the deceptive nature of their identity. She calls them ‘mamarrachas’ (grotesque, ridiculous): ‘the drags’, she says, ‘have mistaken transvestism with the circus; no, not the circus, but with mime . . . I can’t stand them . . .’. The transvestite character in Almodóvar’s films, as suggested earlier, has often been seen as ‘monstrous’, as indicative of the traumatic identity of both the character and the film’s own genre category. But as Agrado’s words suggest, the transvestite’s problem lies not in the violation of classic systems of gender identification but in the fact that it is based on deception. By contrast, Agrado offers her transsexual character as ‘authentic’ because her ‘feelings’ are real, disparaging the ‘transvestite’ action of deception. Different from the transsexual character of Tina in The Law of Desire, who Paul Julian Smith declares is nostalgic ‘for a singular and unfissured identity’, Agrado does not show signs of insecurity, does not hold onto her previous sexuality as a part of her current self. She is firmly certain of her own authenticity. In The Law of Desire, Tina serves as an agent of ‘the acknowledgement of history as a communal project’, mediating her brother Pablo’s process of coming to terms with his own self and personal history after an amnesiac episode.9 For Pablo and Tina, this involves a final, definitive rupture with the memory of their abusive, incestuous father.10 In All About My Mother, in contrast, Agrado helps in the process of restoring relationships with the father since she is a link in Manuela’s effort to find Lola and reconcile him/her with their son Esteban.

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The process of paternal reconciliation in All About My Mother is seen through Sister Rosa’s family (or families) as well. We learn that Rosa’s relationship with her immediate family is not very cordial. Rosa visits her mother with Manuela, and the brief scene is reminiscent of the treatment of family scenarios in earlier Almodóvar’s films, such as Matador. Rosa’s mother (referred to as Doña Rosa and played by Rosa María Sardá) is a cold woman, estranged from her daughter by the latter’s choice of profession, and by Rosa’s desire to leave for a mission to El Salvador. Rosa’s mother calls the daughter’s desire to leave ‘patricide’, suggesting that the pain of separation will cause her father harm. She begs Rosa to return home to help take care of her father, whose memory is impaired by senility or some unnamed mental disease. Doña Rosa’s concerns, however, are not only with the daughter’s estrangement, but with the threat of being exposed as a fraud. In another enquiry into the question of identity and authenticity, it turns out that Doña Rosa is an art forger, specialising in faking paintings by Chagal. The choice suggests Doña Rosa is someone who customarily passes something false for authentic but who must herself be anonymous, undetected. Here, the question of ‘troubled’ identity is projected onto otherwise traditionally ‘adjusted’ characters, the senile father and the deceptive mother. Sister Rosa’s estrangement from her parents stems from both disease and deception, and from the mother’s own ‘identity crisis’ as an art forger. In this case, the father (played by Fernando Fernán Gómez) does not recognise his daughter and forfeits paternal responsibility. Yet, he is at once harmless in his oblivion (in sharp contrast with fathers, present or not, in What Have I Done to Deserve This!? and The Law of Desire), and immune from any feeling of pain or loss provoked by the daughter’s absence. His abandonment is involuntary, unlike the aforementioned paternal figures in Almodóvar’s films. This familial division is governed not by the trauma of previous relations but by more ‘natural’ causes. Rosa loves her father, as we quickly learn, but is incapable of relating to him. But while Rosa is unable to reconnect with her father and unwilling to negotiate with her estranged mother, she does not want the same thing to happen to her unborn child. Impregnated by Lola/Esteban during one of his drug crises, Rosa has problems with her pregnancy. Instead of going to her mother, she seeks

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Manuela’s protection. Coincidentally, Rosa’s plea to Manuela and her revelation that her child belongs to the same ‘lost father’ as Esteban Jr, coincides with Huma Rojo’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire moving to Barcelona. This is the same production Manuela and her son saw the night he died. The narrative here seems to reconnect with itself. It suggests the inevitability of the confrontation (or reconciliation) with the elusive father, Lola, since Manuela left Madrid in search of him after Esteban’s death. Structurally and thematically, it stresses the circularity of the narrative, a common trait of melodrama. Manuela soon revisits the performance, finding in the familiar play some solace for the seat now empty beside her. Symbolically, it suggests the understanding of the theatrical space as authentic since Manuela seems to genuinely relive the pain of her son’s death as she watches the play again. As with other suffering female characters like Tina and Becky in Almodóvar’s The Law of Desire and High Heels respectively, Manuela seems ready to confront her pain and her loss by an evolution into the theatrical space and performance. But unlike the characters in previous films, Manuela is still removed from the stage, a member of the audience, vicariously living her pain through Williams’ fictional characters. It is off the stage, however, where the real drama takes place. After the performance, Manuela sneaks backstage to look for Huma, who is linked to her son’s death. The scene takes place in the star’s dressing room, recalling the earlier citation from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All about Eve. In an interview with Annette Insdorf that accompanies the film’s DVD release, Almodóvar himself states that the dressing room is where ‘reality occurs’ in this film (as in Mankiewicz’s), as opposed to the theatre stage itself. Huma and Manuela become friends, as Huma repeats a famous line from Williams’ play ‘Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ The dialogue, mise en scène and intertextuality in this scene significantly set the background for a revelation (Manuela learns that Nina, Huma’s co-star and lover, is a drug addict and needs help). The dialogue from A Streetcar Named Desire, the dressing-room set alluding to All about Eve, posters of classic films with Elizabeth Taylor and other divas on the walls, photographs of Bette Davis and Huma herself dressed up and made-

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The theatrical stage provokes real emotions . . .

up in various roles, all point towards theatricality, performance and intertextuality. Nonetheless, the moment is one of disclosure, of confession. What is suggested here, as in the scene where Manuela learns of Esteban’s death, is that the theatrical/media intersections in this film do not really ‘mediate’, because, as Agrado would put it, ‘the feelings are real’. There is no real separation between Huma (which coincidentally is not her real name) and her theatrical personas. The same actress, Marisa Paredes, who plays a singer in High Heels, confesses in that film that the only thing she really knows how to do ‘is perform’. It is in her different roles, in her poses and performances that Huma is ‘real’. Meanwhile, when not performing, Huma is arguably still a masquerade; her false name, her orange-red dyed hair, excessive make-up and plagiarised lines of dialogue announce an identity crisis. The use of theatrical situations as the locus of ‘authentic’ disclosures in All About My Mother is reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s discussion in Cinema 2: The Time Image of the theatrical space in films. For Deleuze, film characters in the theatre, especially when not performing (rehearsing, for

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example), touch upon a deeper state of authenticity. In certain para-theatrical situations, writes Deleuze, ‘the characters spring to life again . . . and discover pure attitudes as independent of the theatrical role as they are of a real action, although echoing both of them’.11 In All About My Mother, there is a similar use of the theatre and ‘para-theatrical’ or theatre-related spaces (such as Huma’s dressing room) that leads to moments of revelation and the unmasking of true feelings. The confusion of theatre with the authentic is also brought up in Manuela’s substitution for Nina in the role of Stella (whom Manuela had played in her youth) in the Sunday matinee of A Streetcar Named Desire. Prepared for the part because she ‘can lie very well’, Manuela’s Eve Harrington-style substitution for Nina (who is home, sick) proves a grand success on stage. We see the end of Scene 8, in which Stanley Kowalski gives Blanche a bus ticket home and asks her to leave the house. In the middle of the ensuing argument over her sister, Stella goes into labour. In Tennessee Williams’ description of the scene, Stanley rants about their ‘happiness’

. . . and the dressing room mediates real relationships. Marisa Paredes and Cecilia Roth in All About My Mother

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before Blanche’s arrival, while ‘Stella makes a slight movement. Her look goes suddenly inward, as if some interior voice had called her name.’12 Manuela is on stage in the role of Stella and yet seems not to be acting but reconnecting with the ‘interior voice’ of her shattered maternity. She is indeed having a ‘real’ moment, reliving the pain of Esteban’s death, forever linked to the play, to performance and to Huma. Manuela, although on stage, is not a professional actress and expresses her real feelings. She grants the performance a transcendence that removes it from the inherent artificiality of the theatre and from the burden of performance itself, of being an actor, a professional phony. The setting is artificial, the ‘feelings are real’ and the moment is melodramatic twice over, both in Williams’ text and in Almodóvar’s appropriation of it. Later confronted by Nina and accused of being ‘Eve Harrington’, Manuela confesses to Huma and Nina her link to A Streetcar Named Desire. Of course, as Almodóvar has already established, the ‘real’, confessional moment occurs again in Huma’s dressing room. It is in this scene, as the two actresses listen to the ‘real’ woman’s story that Almodóvar seems to be suggesting a settling of intertextuality and generic crisis. On the one hand, Streetcar has marked Manuela’s life, as she tells Huma and Nina. On the other hand, Esteban Jr’s narrative of Manuela (the notebook ‘All About My Mother’) underscores the reference to Mankiewicz’s films, itself a text about theatricality and usurped identities. One fictional text (Streetcar), and one confessional or ‘testimonial’ (Esteban’s notebook), unleash and determine the structure and narrative of All About My Mother. Almodóvar seems to be attempting to settle these contrasting modes of ‘theatrical’ fiction and testimonial narrative into something undivided, with less of the generic schizophrenia of earlier films like Labyrinth of Passion, Women on the Verge, High Heels and even Live Flesh. Thus, the theatre question also addresses the issue of generic or formal identity, always present in Almodóvar’s films. In his interview with Annette Insdorf, Almodóvar calls this new generic identity ‘screwball melodrama’, combining the battle-of-the-sexes-based comic tradition of Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy and the melodrama of longing, motherhood, hysteria and inner suffering of classical Hollywood. Appropriately, the ‘screwball’ part serves only as the adjective that describes

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the noun proper which is melodrama. The film stresses themes like Oedipal trajectory, sacrifice, motherhood, circular narrative and inner emotions, subjects generally treated in classic film melodrama. In spite of the strong presence of comedy, mainly present in Agrado’s childlike, unbridled honesty, the melodramatic elements that converge either on the stage, in the dressing room, or around Manuela’s life are decisive for the generic definition of the film. For example, it turns out that Sister Rosa, the pregnant nun, has contracted AIDS from the elusive Lola, sick due to his history of intravenous drug use. Paradoxically, the celebrated body of actress Penélope Cruz is reclaimed by Almodóvar in this film and disrobed of its scopophilic and erotic function, as seen in films like Bigas Luna’s Jamón, jamón (1992). In that film, Cruz plays an ‘ideal’ woman, everyone’s object of desire, her sexuality and desirability exploited for the male characters’ and our own voyeuristic pleasure. In All About My Mother, Almodóvar relieves Cruz of that duty by casting her against type as a pregnant nun with AIDS. In classic melodramatic fashion, the woman’s physical illness steps in to represent redemption, punishment or healing (Letter from an Unknown Woman, Max Ophüls, 1948; Camille, George Cukor, 1936). In this case, as Rosa lies pregnant and seriously ill in Manuela’s apartment, her estranged mother pays a visit, at Manuela’s summons, and the mother and daughter reconcile. Manuela’s apartment is itself a celebration of disparate themes; the décor and mise en scène are cluttered with geometric patterns, right angles and straight lines happily coexisting with circular forms, curved lines, oval shapes, contrasting coloured wallpaper and vases and furniture placed around the rooms. Almodóvar is no novice to the use of symptomatic mise en scène, and here, with the help of designer Antxón Gómez, the setting emphasises the action of reconciliation between the two characters. Even in the privacy of the bedroom where they speak, the two Rosas are surrounded by disparate designs, framed in asymmetrical composition; even their blonde/brunette hair colours are a mismatch. And yet, this is the closest they ever come in the film to reconciliation, admitting their faults, effectively reaching an understanding and mending their relationship. It may never be all that happy, since Rosa will eventually die, in keeping with classic melodramatic conventions, but the gesture of reconciliation

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with the mother announces the final reconciliation with the ‘father’, a far more problematic figure in Spanish cinema after Franco. The scene is reminiscent of the ending of High Heels when the dying mother, Becky (Marisa Paredes) and her estranged daughter, Rebeca (Victoria Abril), also make peace. In that film however, the two Rebecas reconcile over the corpses of several real and metaphoric father figures, since Rebeca has murdered both her stepfather and her husband, who was also Becky’s lover. In search of her mother’s love, Rebeca kills two father figures that have been sexually involved with her mother. In Almodóvar films, ‘family’ usually means ‘mothers’ and, as in High Heels, fathers often disrupt narrative coherence and family structures. As Marsha Kinder demonstrates in her discussion of High Heels, ‘mother love lies at the heart of all melodrama . . . Therefore, the rebellious patricidal impulse must be redirected back toward the father, who remains merely a pawn or minor obstacle in the women’s game.’13 The two Rosas’ restatement of the two Rebecas’ meeting invites a revision of the earlier film’s negotiation of the conflict with the father. In All About My Mother, Sister Rosa’s (and Manuela’s) desire is to reconcile with the father and to introduce their sons to him in spite of his previously destructive absence (from Esteban Jr’s life) and presence (in Rosa’s child’s life). There is no ‘rebellious patricidal impulse’ in All About My Mother, but a convincing effort to repair that troubled relationship of the past in favour of some redemption, of some rebuilding, of some reconstitution of the body of the nation through the reparation of the family. It is quite significant, therefore, that Almodóvar juxtaposes Rosa’s melodramatic bedridden reconciliation with her mother with the comic relief of Agrado’s theatrical performance, once again suggesting a correlation between theatricality and the reality of feelings. At the end of the women’s meeting, Manuela tells the story of her dead son to Doña Rosa. She exits the apartment leaving Manuela crying by the door and the scene cuts to the parallel space of the theatre, to a tracking shot along the theatre curtain. On the soundtrack we hear Agrado’s footsteps announcing her arrival on stage. The shot ends with a close-up of Agrado in profile as she steps out from the curtain. The choice is doubly significant; Almodóvar characterises the close-up as ‘an image whose narrative content is highly complex and

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specific . . . an X-ray of the character [that] precludes all duplicity’.14 While the close-up is customarily used to gain access to a character’s subtleties and ‘real’ value, the close-up in profile further emphasises knowledge of his/her personality. As William Rothman states, the profile shot ‘announces that we have arrived at the limit of our access to the camera’s subject’.15 Agrado’s arrival on stage is thus a moment of revelation and unambiguous disclosure of the character’s meaning and, arguably, a formal suggestion of ‘knowledge’ in film language. Equally suggestive is Agrado’s position on stage, in front of the closed curtain, removing herself from the performance space proper and facing the audience directly, which Deleuze argues is a ‘purer and more independent’ state of authenticity.16 Agrado excuses Nina and Huma, who, due to health reasons (they beat each other up in a fight), are unable to perform. Meanwhile the camera tracks down the centre aisle of the theatre towards her, her public visible on both sides of the symmetrical composition. As the camera approaches her, Agrado announces that the performance is suspended. Paradoxically she offers, in substitution, ‘to tell the story of my life’. The mise en scène emphasises the contradiction, negating the theatricality of the performance space and offering ‘reality’ instead. Under the spotlight, but removed from the stage, the ‘performer’ offers authenticity while the curtain remains shut. Significantly, Agrado’s ‘life story’, as she tells it, is one of assumed names, transformations and alterations of the real body. In her own words: They call me Agrado, because all my life I have only wanted to make life agreeable for others. Besides being agreeable, I am very authentic. Look at this body: all custom made. Eyes, eighty thousand (pesetas); nose two hundred . . .; tits, two, because I am no monster, seventy each. Silicone: lips, forehead, cheekbones, hips, ass . . . Laser hair removal (because women, like men, evolved from the monkeys) sixty thousand per session, depending on how hairy you are, because if you are ‘folkloric’, you’ll need more.

Agrado’s speech is occasionally juxtaposed with the audience’s enthusiastic reaction shots and crowned at the end with a satisfied round of applause. The public celebrates, laughs and is mesmerised by Agrado’s confession, which ultimately does not reveal anything about the ‘story of [her] life’. ‘As

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I was saying,’ she concludes, ‘it costs a lot to be authentic, señora, and for these things one shouldn’t be stingy, because one is more authentic, the more you resemble that which you have dreamed of yourself.’ After the speech, the camera shows a close-up of Agrado visibly moved by the public’s acceptance, by its celebration of her authenticity, even though not one of the performance’s promises have been fulfilled. She is not ‘a monster’, like similar characters in Almodóvar’s films; she is whole and legitimate. Her performance offers no actors, no play, no (theatrical) mise en scène; what the public gets is a recognition of an identity based on the instability of transition, of acceptance, of authenticity based on reinvention, on ‘what you have dreamed of yourself’. The sequence ends with a long shot of the theatre audience happily applauding, satisfied with the performance as it is. In contrast to other theatrical scenes in Almodóvar’s films, Agrado’s performance, perhaps because it isn’t, denotes neither crisis nor the making of counterfeit identities. The performance scene of Cocteau’s La Voix humane and Jacques Brel’s song ‘Ne me quitte pas’ in The Law of Desire, in contrast, are symbolic of the loss of the characters’ parents. Tina misses her abusive, incestuous father, while the child in her care has been abandoned by her mother. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pepa (Carmen Maura) collapses while in the recording studio dubbing Spanish dialogue for Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar. The dialogue itself is a reflection of Pepa’s doomed relationship and her fainting is symptomatic of her desperation at being abandoned by her lover while pregnant. And in High Heels, the young Rebeca breaks down and is arrested for confessing to her husband’s murder on television, while her mother later collapses on stage while singing Agustín Lara’s song ‘Think of Me’ to her daughter. Similar examples of moments of ‘crisis’ (physical, emotional) and deceit while performing occur in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, What Have I Done, and twice more in High Heels. However, in All About My Mother, the theatrical space is reappropriated by Manuela and Agrado as the locus of ‘authenticity’ and relief, not of performance or the ‘hysterical’ symptoms of crisis. Agrado, removed from the purely theatrical space, effectively replaces the dysfunctional Kowalski–DuBois family of Williams’ fiction, in favour of the symbolic ‘story of [her] life’.

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From heartbreak a new family is made. Antonia San Juan (as Agrado) and Cecilia Roth

The conclusion of All About My Mother suggests Almodóvar’s evolution into a phase in which history is no longer deconstructed to neutralise trauma and rebellion, but in which a concerted effort at reconciliation with Spain’s past is dramatised. The third act begins with Rosa’s apparent reconciliation with her father while en route to the hospital to give birth to Lola’s son, Esteban III. Rosa asks the taxi driver to stop at the Plaza de Medinaceli, where she encounters her oblivious father. Although he does not recognise her, she tenderly exclaims ‘Adiós Papá’, acknowledging the possibility that this is their last meeting. Rosa’s father is a man with no historic memory, as I mentioned above, a fact that perhaps allows the reconciliation to occur since the trauma of recent history does not interfere with the process. Their history is not revisionist but forgotten, ignored, perhaps overcome. After reconciling with her father, Rosa dies giving birth to Esteban III. She has succumbed to the HIV acquired from her sexual affair with Lola. At Rosa’s funeral, the elusive Lola finally appears, dressed in drag, ‘a monster’, ‘an epidemic’, as Manuela and Agrado refer to him. But in spite of her initial reaction, Manuela allows Lola

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to make peace with his two sons. They meet at a café off the Plaza de Medinaceli, where Rosa symbolically made peace with her own father. There, Lola learns of his first-born’s death, the reason for Manuela’s move to Barcelona. Holding Esteban III in his arms, Lola, with his enormous breasts and his made-up face, apologises to the child for leaving him ‘such a bad inheritance’. But Manuela informs him that the baby is not sick and has no reason to develop the disease. Manuela then shows Lola their son’s photograph and the notebook where he had begun to write ‘All About my mother’. The upper half of the composition is filled with the young Esteban’s eyes framed within the frame, looking directly into the camera, which adopts Lola’s point of view. The extreme close-up is another moment of recognition and revelation, Esteban II at once acknowledging, confronting and symbolically reconciling with his father in spite of the latter’s ‘monstrosity’, absence and sexual identity crisis. Lola reads Esteban’s journal in which the young man (born around 1982, in the cultural transitional period) states his desire to meet his father ‘no matter who he is, nor how he is, or how he behaved’ and to find and complete the ‘missing half’ of his life. It is ultimately Esteban’s manuscript that resolves the paternal crisis, bringing the Oedipal trajectory to a close, emphasising his desire for reconciliation, his longing to know ‘all about his father’, as he had once requested from Manuela. After reading aloud from the notebook, Lola metaphorically reconciles the two generations, suggesting the settlement of the paternal crisis so often symbolic of the national trauma.17 The conclusion is also circular, since the film begins with Esteban’s interest in knowing ‘all about his mother’, but ends in an encounter with the father. For Esteban II, what is important is reconciliation, to know and perhaps understand ‘all about his father’. In What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, Matador and The Law of Desire, fathers are not only absent, abusive or engaged in incestuous relationships with their children but, as seen in Almodóvar’s symptomatic use of mise en scène and the appropriation of symbols of Spain’s past (bullfighting culture, Catholicism, the Opus Dei), they are also symbolic of the nation’s trauma under Franco. The ‘rebellious patricidal impulse’ of Almodovar’s past is here clearly subverted in favour of reconciliation. In the epilogue of All About My Mother, Manuela retraces the steps of her initial journey once again, having fled to Madrid with the baby, now return-

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ing to Barcelona. The image of the train returns, the same shot as in the beginning repeated from inside the tunnel. The second time around the shot suggests a rebirth, a new beginning. In her internal monologue Manuela explains that Esteban III is cured, his body having ‘neutralised the (HIV) virus in record time’. Lola, Rosa and Esteban II are all dead, but their respective offspring and sibling is a medical wonder. In spite of his troubled conception and ‘bad inheritance’, he is a symbol of the dramatic restoration and reconstruction that the extended bodily metaphor of the film suggests. Like Agrado’s body, which is ‘authentic’ and real because it is what she desires, ‘what she has dreamed of’, Almodóvar offers a conclusion in All About My Mother that stabilises the crises in his previous films. The film ultimately suggests that the characters’ ‘transitional’ or ‘artful’ stages are their defining identities. In the very last scene Huma leaves Manuela, Agrado and Esteban III in the dressing room to go on stage, but what we see, reminiscent of Agrado’s speech, is the closed theatre curtain. Thus, both the melodramatic climax (Lola and her sons) and the epilogue (the cured baby and Huma’s negated performance), offer symbolic ‘conclusions’ to the generic, paternal and identity crises that Almodóvar has arguably explored in his films since 1980. In All About My Mother, there is a reconstruction of the national geographical space which begins with Manuela’s journey from Madrid (the city synecdoche of the national reconstruction effort) to Barcelona, the liberal gateway to Europe. But the urban allegory is here extended to include the province (Galicia), the overseas territories (the Canary Islands) and even the transnational dimension of the ‘new’ Spain, seen in the two exiled characters, Lola and Manuela. The film draws a line of inclusion throughout the national territory. Moreover, Almodóvar emphasises the reconstitution of the body in an allegory of settled identities, not only with Esteban III’s miraculous cure from HIV (through his parents’ symbolic sacrifice), but also with Agrado’s recognition and celebration of her surgically altered self as a testimony of ‘authenticity’. Finally, the theme of reconstruction and restoration is accentuated with the previously rejected option of reconciliation with the father. The film certainly celebrates motherly bonds between the assorted characters (Manuela and the two Estebans, Rosa, her

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mother and Manuela, Huma, Manuela and Agrado). But the strengthening of motherly relations is a step on the way to mending the much more problematic relations between children and their fathers (as we see with Rosa and her father, Lola and his sons, and even Manuela’s visit to the Holy Family temple while searching for Lola). In earlier films, Almodóvar stresses the contrasts and divisions between village and city, Spain and Europe, parents and children, men, women and transgender. In this more mature film, however, traumatic identity, performance, geographic displacement, disease and death serve as the vehicles through which the characters (and the nation by extension) find love, stability, identity and, finally, redemption.

Talk to Her (2002) In “Hable con ella”, Almodóvar appropriates Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana scenario of the ‘raped’ sleeping beauty mediated by the cinematic image, and leading to a promise of national reconstruction (as all his films of reconciliation since Women on the Verge have done). The ‘sleeping beauty’ scenario goes back to Perrault’s story of course, in which the sleeping beauty is metaphorically but unequivocally raped. Almodóvar here returns to the recurring narrative motif of the human body as symbolic of the national trauma, and eventually of the possibility of reconstruction that we have seen evolve throughout his career. As I have been arguing, in Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, The Law of Desire,Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels and Kika, central and marginal characters show ‘transitional, transvestite, transsexual and even cyborg’ characteristics which emphasise the human body as one of the locales of negotiation, tension and trauma, suggesting the body itself as a sign of the ‘social contradictions’ of a country involved in a process of profound cultural transition. The conclusion of this motif is the character of ‘Agrado’ in All About My Mother who makes a successful transition into a body that, after much pain and reconstruction, is full of contradictions, but whose personality, ultimately, is fully functional and emotionally well adjusted.18 Like she says, without hesitation or any sign of contradiction: ‘I used to be a truck driver, then I put on these tits and became a whore.’ Talk to Her resumes the body narrative, but this time, like Viridiana’s, and like

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Ramón’s in Kika, the woman’s body is inert, seemingly lifeless and, through a new experience of pain, rape, crime and expiation, concludes with a renewed promise of reconstruction and rebuilding the nation. In the movie the beautiful dancer Alicia (Leonor Watling) lies in a coma after a car accident and is under the care of the male nurse Benigno (whose name means ‘benign’ suggesting his kind, gentle, harmless disposition) who, it is quickly established, is deeply in love with his patient. This is the first time in Almodóvar’s career since The Law of Desire that the narrative centres around men who are deeply in touch with their feelings, a traditionally female characteristic in his films. In the intriguing opening scene the two protagonists are by chance sitting next to each other in a theatre watching a performance by the German interpretive dancer Pina Bausch. In a scenario that prefigures directly the content of the movie, two women dressed in slips, run around with their eyes closed as if they were somnambulists, on a stage that is cluttered with chairs and tables, while a man tries frantically to clear the way for them. As in Buñuel’s Viridiana, the motif of the somnambulist woman is a way of poetically referring to the woman’s ‘mystery’ which in the course of the film the two men, Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Argentine actor Darío Grandinetti), whose lives eventually become connected, will try to decipher and understand. In a pattern that Almodóvar has perfected over the years, going back to The Law of Desire and Women on the Verge, the opening of Talk to Her establishes a number of motifs that are cemented into patterns over the course of the movie. In Talk to Her, Almodóvar creates a kind of diptych structure beginning and ending at dance recitals in the theatre, flashing back and forward, interconnecting the stories of the two couples composed of Benigno and Alicia, and Marco and the woman toreador Lydia (Rosario Flores), and ultimately reaching a surprising and deceptive open end. The opening images of two sleeping women in slips or nighdresses are of course central to the film’s plot when both Benigno and Marco get involved, to different degrees, with respective sleeping beauties. In Talk to Her in fact, Marco and Benigno are a pair of ‘men on the verge’, who, through their relationships to women, become better, bigger and wiser men. Although Almodóvar was criticised for the restrictive presence of two comatose women in the movie, this narrative

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device is consistent with Almodóvar’s metaphorisation of the human body (especially the woman’s, yes) throughout his career. Although it is Marco who, moved by Pina Bausch’s performance breaks into tears in the theatre, the nurse Benigno shows a gentle, even feminised disposition in his daily care for the beautiful comatose patient, Alicia. As he carefully treats her cuticles and moisturises her hands, he recounts the recital experience and we can see that Benigno’s relationship to his patient is one of devotion, more than any ordinary nurse–patient relationship, but it is one-sided. He talks to her, telling her all about the recital, and bringing her a picture of Pina Bausch he has had autographed. Although there are two other women nurses who take care of Alicia, it is clear that Benigno is the one who takes the greater burden, even volunteering to stay extra nights, and he is in every measure engaged with Alicia’s care. Almodóvar juxtaposes the relationship of Benigno Martín and Alicia Roncero with that of Marco Zuloaga, a reporter and feature writer for El país, and Lydia González, the defiant toreadora who is opposing the all-male world of Spain’s most distinctive sport. On seeing Lydia in a television interview walking off the set and refusing to answer questions about her relationship with the famous bullfighter ‘el Niño de Valencia’ (Adolfo Fernández), Marco becomes interested in the woman and asks his editor if he can interview her. The next Sunday in the traditional plaza at Brihuega (Guadalajara), Marco discovers Lydia the bullfighter.19 In a beautifully staged sequence, Almodóvar paradoxically shows us the feminine side of the all-male world of Spanish bullfighting. Lydia’s grace and style are perfectly choreographed and the accompanying song ‘Por toda a minha vida’ stresses the romantic angle of a sport that Almodóvar himself has before exploited for its gore. In Matador, as we discussed in Chapter 2, the director equates seduction, impotence and the nation’s bloody past, with the science of the kill. There is something eerie and beautifully ironic about the soft heartbroken Portuguese singing voice of Brazilian singer Elis Regina (eu te amo . . . o meu amor), the deliberate slow-motion camera that emphasises the faena or ‘labour’ as a dance of seduction and the bloody violence of the bull’s body crisscrossed with streaks of blood from the banderilleros’ stabs. As Lydia walks off after the kill, triumphant in this ‘labour’ if not love’s (we know she

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is heartbroken over ‘el Niño de Valencia’), Almodóvar cuts to a black-andwhite photograph of a badly gored bullfighter (at the plaza’s bar), that foretells Lydia’s future. At the bar, to get back at ‘el Niño’, Lydia agrees to return to Madrid with Marco and their relationship begins. Thus begins the first of three titled sections of the film, ‘Lydia y Marco’ which Almodóvar later intersects with ‘Benigno y Alicia’. Lydia and Marco’s relationship comes to a seemingly rocky start when she discovers, in the course of their conversation, that Marco doesn’t follow or write about, or even understand, the sport of bullfighting, but is more interested in Lydia’s romantic dealings with ‘el Niño’. But she softens when, in a revealing moment, terrified, she has to ask Marco to kill a snake inside her villa. This beautiful woman who has just killed six bulls ten times her weight, is profoundly disturbed, paralysed even, by the sight of the snake. Marco humbly does not ask for an explanation of the apparent paradox: ‘If there’s something I respect’, he says, ‘it’s other people’s phobias.’ Inexplicably, on killing the snake, Marco weeps with sympathy, maybe even real understanding. The seemingly gallant gesture is really the first evidence of an emotional connection between these two characters. While Marco claims to ‘know something about desperate women’, it’s evident that there is something he needs to know about his own emotions: this is the second time we have seen Marco cry at the sight of a distressed woman; the first time was at the Pina Bausch recital. Almodóvar again juxtaposes the two ‘couples’ by cutting to Benigno’s new day with Alicia: he washes and cuts her hair, leaving it the way it was when she came in four years before, so that if she wakes up, she’ll recognise herself. And Marco and Lydia that day begin a romantic relationship. The plot turns with the next section: again as in All About My Mother where several intertitles divide the temporal sections of the film, in Talk to Her, we are re-introduced to Marco and Lydia ‘several months later’ as they drive into the country together for another bullfighting engagement. The scene is caught in medias res, when Lydia turns to Marco and says ‘We have to talk after the fight.’ Intriguingly Marco replies, ‘We’ve been talking for an hour.’ ‘You,’ she says, ‘not me.’ In a structural practice that is new to Almodóvar, we will return to this same moment later in the film, when the content of the conversation we have missed will finally be revealed. Unlike All About My

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Marco (Dario Gandinetti) ‘talks’ to Lydia (Rosario Flores), yet fails to ‘listen’ to her

Mother where the narrative retains its linearity in spite of the narrative segments (‘two weeks later’, or ‘several months later’) that compose the story time, in Talk to Her, the structure is more circular and various temporal segments are intersected and returned to in the course of the film. Equally, the motif of ‘talking’ to this woman and yet not ‘listening’ to her or allowing her to talk, gives us a glimpse of Marco’s need to connect with Lydia’s feelings, an opportunity he later regrets having missed. This points to a contrast between Marco and Benigno, who are soon to be friends: while Benigno constantly talks to a woman who is incapable of hearing or replying to him, Marco talks to Lydia but seemingly fails to listen to her. The fatal bullfight in Toledo begins with Lydia’s preparations. The scene re-emphasises the feminisation of the bullfighter’s body that Almodóvar had already parodied in Matador, by focusing on Lydia’s delicate figure and feminine demeanour, while a male assistant helps her to get into the elaborate bullfighting garb. The pink stockings, the tight, gold-embroidered pants designed to be practically sewn on and the beautiful design are emphasised in

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the sequence, and clearly suggestive of what male matadors go through as well, in a way that creates an homage that is also a parody of the national sport. At the ring, the 500-kilogramme bull is ready in the pen and the music score, heavy on strings, nervously announces the outcome. At the last moment Lydia pulls her medals from inside her shirt and kisses them devoutly. But as soon as the pen is opened, Lydia surprisingly and deliberately waves away her flag and, to the horror of Marco among the hundreds of spectators, the bull charges decisively onto her, dragging her violently through the arena. An overhead shot shows Lydia’s inert, bloody body being carried away by attendants after the apparent, inexplicable suicide attempt. Unlike the scene of Diego’s goring that we saw in Matador, its pornographic value enhanced by the cheap videotape recording, Lydia’s goring in Talk to Her is romanticised as the act of desperation of a misunderstood woman. The quiet slow-motion photography and subdued palette (by cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe) unlike the flashy colours in Matador (by Almodóvar’s first cinematographer Ángel Luis Fernández) suggest a more understated sense of drama, as opposed to the overly ‘dramatic’ satire of Matador. Unlike Diego who is a monster and a lunatic in Matador, Lydia is treated reverently. And yet both their bodies are presented as metaphors of trauma. The story then inevitably moves to the hospital setting, where eventually Marco and Benigno will be reunited. Hospital scenes are repetitive in melodrama and recurrent in Almodóvar’s dramatic movies like The Law of Desire, High Heels, The Flower of My Secret and All About My Mother as well as in his early melodrama parody, Pepi, Luci, Bom. The most direct reference is to Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954) where Rock Hudson plays a spoiled playboy-turned-doctor, who has to operate on his beloved Jane Wyman in order to save her sight and redeem himself for his past peccadilloes. But as in High Heels and All About My Mother, his most melodramatic movies to date, in Talk to Her Almodóvar treats melodrama and adopts the form and conventions very seriously, including the hospital setting. As Marco and Benigno’s relationships illustrate, for Almodóvar the hospital setting allows for a combination of his recurring body-healingredemption motif (that we saw in All About My Mother, High Heels and The Law of Desire) with the added significance of caretaking as a narrative theme.

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‘Matadora’: Lydia subverts the bullfighters image in Talk to Her

Another flashback reveals the only information we have about Lydia and Marco’s relationship before the day of the gore. In a beautiful summer resort, Lydia and Marco enjoy a brief romantic getaway. As the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso performs on screen another famous heartbreak song ‘Cucurrucucú paloma’ (by Mexican songwriter Tomás Méndez), a tracking shot of the small gathering of guests shows us several actors from previous Almodóvar films, ending with a two-shot of Marisa Paredes and Cecilia Roth, listening attentively and self-reflexively reminding us of All About My Mother (and between the two, of four other Almodóvar movies). The shot cuts to a medium close-up of Marco, visibly affected, again weeping by himself, listening to the song and leaning on a column. Marco leaves the performance and walks towards a nearby garden. He is followed by Lydia, who had spotted him crying from the crowd. When Lydia interrogates him, it is not about his reason for crying now but why he cried the night they met, after killing the snake. So, in another brief flashback within the flashback, Marco tells how years ago in Africa, he had to kill a snake that had terrorised

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his girlfriend, Angela. The shots that illustrate the flashback show only the very young Angela, completely nude, running out of the tent, shivering with fear. Thus Marco’s respect for phobias is explained as are the reasons for his own heartbreak around the time he and Lydia met. Marco and Lydia then, even in the quiet, intimate moment by the pool, seem to be really distanced, still full of mysteries for each other. The scene then cuts to Marco suddenly waking up on the sofa, as if from a dream, after keeping vigil for Lydia. The tender moment with Lydia, the crisis with Angela and the flashback within the dream of memory all abruptly end. In fact, Marco’s memory/dream really addresses the central conflict of his relationship with Lydia, a hermetic protection that actually keeps them apart. Yes, Marco does not ‘talk to her’, nor does he listen to her. Marco’s attempt to put Lydia’s religious medals back around her neck, which the nurses quickly put a stop to, is reminiscent of other Almodóvar male protagonists, especially Ricky in Tie Me Up!, who seem to take on the responsibility of ‘redeeming’ the women in their lives. As we have discussed, this leads to the equating of Ricky’s body with Jesus’s sacrifice for ‘our’ sins, similar to Marco’s attempt to save Lydia’s condemned soul, since she is believed to have attempted suicide.20 Interestingly, Almodóvar mixes up a faith matter with the scientific perspective when Dr Vega explains to him that, as far as he knows, Lydia’s persistent vegetative state is irrevocable. And yet Dr Vega shyly offers a glimmer of hope by telling Marco of the story of another woman who was known to have awakened from a years-long coma, while insisting that from the medical perspective there is no hope. ‘If you want to believe I can’t take that away’, says Dr Vega, ‘but she can’t see you, she can’t hear you, she has no thoughts or emotions; her brain has stopped.’ It is upon meeting Benigno (and Alicia) at the hospital that Marco begins to open up, perhaps even to understand or communicate with Lydia. He observes with curiosity how Benigno relates to his sleeping beauty, how he talks to her in whispers as if telling her a precious secret, how she is clean and made-up, and pampered so that she looks exactly as she did in her healthy years, as Benigno knew her. Marco also observes the visit from Alicia’s former dance instructor, Katerina Bilova, played beautifully by the EnglishAmerican actress Geraldine Chaplin. The casting is an exact reference to the

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resistant, allegorical Spanish cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and its premier figure, director Carlos Saura, with whom Chaplin worked on his best movies of the late Francoist period, Cría cuervos (1975) and Peppermint frappé (1967). In another instance of Almodóvar’s circular design in Talk to Her, Katerina explains the new ballet she will be choreographing in Geneva, based on a World War I text, but in a language that also poetically describes the content of Talk to Her. Because the war is full of men, Katerina will have the soldiers who die in action reborn as ballerinas. From the bodies of the soldiers Ballerinas in white bloodied long tutus will appear. ‘It’s beautiful’, she says, ‘because from death emerges life; from the masculine emerges the feminine; from the earthly emerges the . . . ethereal.’ The death metaphor also offered by the presence of Lydia and Alicia will eventually give way to new life, to intimacy between the feminine and masculine and indeed, to a sort of revival from death. Katerina’s narrated ballet, like Pina Bausch’s ‘Café Müller’, and like The Shrinking Lover later all reflect in poetic ways various segments of the movie itself. This is a new type of practice for Almodóvar, more sophisticated but just as self-reflexive as the techniques seen in almost all his movies from Pepi, Luci, Bom to All About My Mother. This introduction segues into the second titled section of the movie ‘Alicia y Benigno’. Clearly there’s an identifiable motif here in the characters names as the L–M and A–B patterns present consecutive letters of the Latin alphabet suggesting indeed that these pairs go together. It is interesting that Almodóvar introduces an apparent division where there really is none, since there is no narrative resolution yet to the first section, ‘Lydia y Marco’. And the new segment soon leads to a new sequence of flashbacks, when Benigno tells Marco the story of Alicia, her father, Katerina and himself. Introduced by the inevitable intertitle ‘Four years earlier’ in the flashback we see Alicia ‘alive’ so to speak, for the first time practising at Katerina’s dance studio. Opposite the street is Benigno’s flat and, a little like L. B. Jefferies, Benigno spies eagerly on his object of desire through the flat’s windows. In a common Almodóvar motif, the act of seeing, the practice of voyeurism and its representation of desire are equated and presented as a cinematic metaphor, as the scene cuts from Benigno’s face full of pleasure looking off screen to Alicia’s image, performing we may add, and seen

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‘From death emerges life; from the masculine emerges the feminine . . .’: Geraldine Chaplin as Katerina in Talk to Her

through the framed window. Significantly, the image is reminiscent of a silent movie, since we see Alicia dance and Katerina direct her and give her instructions, but we cannot hear the diegetic music nor the dialogue between the two characters. Once again, Almodóvar offers a minute representation of an action that will be seen later in the film (specifically when Benigno goes to see the silent movie The Shrinking Lover, which leads to his rape of Alicia). He has desired her first from the position of a spectator watching a silent movie. It is only the voice of Benigno’s repressive mother in the background scolding him for being at the window for thirty minutes that takes him away from his object of desire and his voyeuristic pleasure. As we have seen in Almodóvar’s earlier films, in Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, The Law of Desire and Women on the Verge, the mother’s repression of the son’s desire is, of course, the major reason for his psychological troubles. But unlike his earlier films, where the mother’s presence is often overwhelming and transparently repressive, in Talk to Her, she doesn’t even have to be there, just utter an order from off screen. Like Norman Bates’s

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mother, Benigno’s is immobile and in the background, yet no less repressive, no less damaging. In fact, after the death of his mother (which again, is only referred to marginally), Benigno is liberated enough to venture outside the apartment and follow Alicia home from the dance studio, after rescuing a wallet (a sign of her identity?) that she has accidentally dropped. He manages to make conversation, return the wallet and find out where she lives. In their brief acquaintance, Benigno learns everything he ever knew about Alicia: that she is a dancer, that she loves to travel, that she adores silent cinema and that her father, Dr Roncero, is a psychiatrist. The boldness of Benigno’s approach to Alicia is a sincere show of the end of his mother’s repressive presence in his life, since, as he tells Alicia, until she died he never went out because he was taking care of his mother. He takes the opportunity to make an appointment to see Alicia’s father.21 Benigno’s strange relationship with his patient is explained through the flashback by the presence of Dr Roncero (Helio Pedregal). Although he later watches suspiciously while Benigno massages Alicia’s thighs, Dr Roncero believes that Benigno is a homosexual. At their single doctor–patient meeting Benigno reveals, unwittingly, that he has had an ‘extraordinary’ life, with a strict, severe, castrating mother and absent father (both recurring Almodóvar motifs), whose repression of the son’s social and sexual development has led to his ambiguous sexuality, hermetic personality and his sort of insane devotion to his immobile patient. ‘I just wanted to see Alicia,’ Benigno tells Marco in voice-over, ‘but since I was there, I decided to meet with the father and tell him that I missed my mother.’ Benigno, it turns out, had taken care of his sick, bedridden mother for fifteen years, and learned to do everything for her: that’s why he became a nurse and beautician. He used to make her up, wash her, cut and do her hair. ‘She wasn’t sick, or crazy,’ he explains, ‘but she was a little lazy’ (just like Eduardo Domínguez’s/Femme Letal’s mother in High Heels, which also led to a son’s colourful lifestyle and identity crisis, described in Chapter 3). Dr Roncero is sincerely interested in Benigno’s case and asks about Benigno’s sexual past: ‘Have you had relations with a woman? . . . Or with a man?’ Benigno’s two negative answers lead Dr Roncero to declare that he has had a ‘rather extraordinary’ adolescence and that he would like to see Benigno regularly as a

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patient. It is interesting to see Almodóvar again treating Spain’s past as passively traumatic and to see the return of the common motif of mistaking homosexuality for a symptom of trouble (which we have seen in Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, High Heels, and All About My Mother and which we will see again in Bad Education). Chance is on Benigno’s side when he comes out of the office portion of Dr Roncero’s flat and finds an open door into the living quarters. He quickly finds Alicia’s room and inspects it carefully, playing with her toys, nostalgically looking at her bedding, memorising the photographs on the walls which he will later position identically in her hospital room. He finds a hair clip and steals it, the innocent object now a fetish. He makes it clasp and for a moment it is like a vagina dentata perhaps announcing Benigno’s eventual involvement with Alicia, through the fantasy of The Shrinking Lover. As he is leaving the room, a bare-breasted, towel-wrapped Alicia on her way from the shower surprises him. She is alarmed but does not scream. He apologises, confesses that he only wanted to see her and walks away quickly and quietly. Alicia instinctively covers her body, not knowing that this strange man would soon be more familiar with her naked body than enyone else. After the two brief encounters, Benigno first notices Alicia’s absence at Katerina’s studio across the street and later learns of the terrible accident that landed her ultimately under his care. The flashback ends back at Alicia’s bedside in the hospital, where Marco still listens attentively, now himself acquainted with the well-cared-for sleeping beauty. It is also apparent that Marco has softened somehow; he is more amiable, and shows a great degree of care and respect for Benigno. The nurse relates how he has taken over Alicia’s hobbies: dance recitals (such as the one where he first met Marco) and going to the silent movies. ‘These last four years,’ he says tenderly, ‘have been the fullest of my life.’ Marco sadly confesses that, to the contrary, he can’t even touch Lydia. He says, heartbroken,’ I don’t recognise her body.’ Benigno’s caretaking of Alicia includes ‘maternal’, feminised activities such as bathing her, dressing her, fixing her hair and checking her vagina for menstrual activity (which is also suggestive of her fertility). Benigno even sews her a bedsheet with their initials embroidered on it (‘A and B’). While Lydia’s gored body has become ‘untouchable’ for Marco, Benigno’s

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involvement with Alicia’s body is total and yet remains chaste for four years of maternal caretaking. Benigno’s solitude partly accounts for his infatuation and while she is immobile he takes on some of her customary activities, like going to the theatre and attending silent films at the Cinémathèque. The two men discuss their ‘relationships’, one that was real and has come to an abrupt, violent stop, the other one imagined, platonic. It is Benigno, in giving Marco advice about his ‘relationship’ with the comatose Lydia, who suggests ‘Talk to her, tell her about it . . . Women have to be cared for, talked to, have a gesture to them, caress them.’ In response, Marco protests that ‘her brain is turned off, she can’t hear me’, and Benigno replies: ‘the woman’s brain is a mystery.’ Finally Marco asks, ‘What experience do you have with women?’ to which Benigno replies, with astonishing logic: ‘Me, all of it. I lived twenty years day and night with one, and four years with this one.’ But the mystery of the woman’s brain is ultimately balanced by the ‘readability’ and accessibility, in a manner of speaking, of her body. Significantly that scene between Benigno and Marco is contrasted with the women nurses who suggest there is no mystery about a man that a woman doesn’t understand: ‘I like the bullfighter’s boyfriend,’ says one of the women, nonchalantly, ‘I think he’s well hung: that shows in a man’s face.’ Benigno’s rape of Alicia in Talk to Her is disturbing, yes, but interesting in a number of ways. It is, among other things, a re-articulation of Don Jaime’s ‘imagined’ rape of the title character in the 1961 Luis Buñuel film Viridiana, which has been called the best film of Spanish cinema.22 It is also a recreation of Buñuel’s erotic fantasy of the sleeping Queen Victoria Eugenia narrated in his autobiography.23 Alicia in Talk to Her, like Viridiana, presents the somewhat ‘traumatic’ past of her accident and her immobility, as well as the recurring motif of an absent parental figure (her mother has been dead for years), unconsciousness and rape, but ultimately this woman’s body is also essential as a vehicle in Spain’s healing process. After attending a screening of the silent film, The Shrinking Lover, at Madrid’s historic Cine Dore, Benigno talks to Alicia while tending to her appearance and physical wellbeing: ‘I’m going to give you a massage, and some rubdowns with rosemary alcohol.’ The camera quietly observes while Benigno tenderly unknots Alicia’s gown, exposing her naked breasts. Like Don Jaime in Viridiana,

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Benigno hesitates momentarily, while explaining that the memory of the movie, The Shrinking Lover, has left him ‘upset’ or ‘disturbed’. He proceeds to recount the plot of the film, and Almodóvar cuts to the film-within-the-film, imitating (with much poetic licence, I should add) the formal and aesthetic conventions of a silent film c. 1926. The plot involves a woman scientist named Amparo (Paz Vega) who develops a weight-loss formula that eventually makes her lover, Alfredo (Fele Martínez), shrink in size to about eight inches in height. Determined to stay together, the couple eventually elope, after she rescues him from his tyrannical mother. Later in their room in the Hotel Youkali, while Amparo sleeps, unable to consummate their sexual desire, Alfredo, ‘the shrinking lover’ climbs into the sleeping woman’s vagina, never to come out again. Almodóvar juxtaposes Benigno’s narration (as he massages and rubs down Alicia’s body), intercutting the silent film images with the shots of Benigno and Alicia during the ablutions ritual. The cleansing or preparation of the body, as that of Don Jaime on Viridiana before, and as we know Benigno had done with his mother, becomes increasingly charged with sexual tension, while Benigno massages/caresses his sleeping beauty. At one point, the intercut sequences from The Shrinking Lover and Talk to Her take on similar formal characteristics. Twin overhead shots show the sleeping women from above revealing their suggestively similar gown/sheet/shroud. Like Benigno, the shrinking lover pulls off the sheet, exposing his lover’s naked body. The woman’s eyes turn and begin the stage of rapid-eye-movement, suggestive of deep sleep and dream activity. The shrinking lover’s fascination with the woman’s body is evident in his reconnaissance trip from her breasts, which he kisses and rolls over, to her pubic area; he has a mesmerised expression on his face. Even in her sleep (remember, she’s dreaming), the woman has spread her legs slightly in a sort of receptive position. Alfredo first introduces his arm into her vagina and sniffs it, seemingly intoxicated, and then takes off his underwear and disappears into the woman’s body. The final shot of The Shrinking Lover that we see is a close-up of Amparo’s face, gasping for air, and biting her lips in an orgasmic shiver. Significantly, Benigno’s narration has stopped at this point so that the hotel sequence is shown independent of Benigno’s voice and retained as an entire narrative sequence. The next shot cuts back to Alicia’s

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face, impassive in contrast to Amparo’s visible evidence of sexual pleasure. The following shot shows Benigno, massaging/caressing the inside of Alicia’s thighs, her legs now positioned in a similar ‘receptive’ attitude to Amparo’s. As he resumes the narration (‘Alfredo stays inside her forever . . .’), Benigno clearly looks at Alicia’s genitals, mesmerised, his hands dangerously close to the pubic area, his voice trembling with anxiety and desire. The next shot shows again Alicia’s made-up but expressionless face and hair in close-up, and then cuts incongruously to an extreme close-up of the inside of the lavalamp on Alicia’s nightstand (brought from her bedroom at home). As Mark Allinson has also concluded, the shot poetically suggests the moment of conception, with the viscous substance inside the lava-lamp (shot horizontally for dramatic effect) standing in for the splitting cells inside Alicia’s body. Interestingly, like so many Hitchcock protagonists, from Notorious to Psycho, Benigno confuses his first, repressive and elusive object of desire, his mother, for Alicia. The two relationships are similar in the women’s dependency on Benigno’s care, in the ways that he at first chastely takes care of their bodies. Benigno seems to confuse Alfredo’s trajectory with his own: upon finding himself diminished, Alfredo returns to the repressive mother from whom he had escaped earlier in his life, presumably as he discovered sexuality. The infantilised Alfredo then, arguably, regresses to the repressed recognition of the mother as the first object of desire when he climbs into Amparo’s vagina, trying to return to the womb. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, the name of the hotel where Amparo and Alfredo’s consummation occurs (Youkali), is also the name of the much-desired maternal estate in Kika. The name, taken from a piece by German composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950), is supposedly that of a utopian island paradise, but in both Kika and Talk to Her, it signifies the incestuous anxiety of a disturbed young man. (‘Amparo’ by the way, is also a Spanish word for ‘shelter’.) Benigno equally confuses his desire to return to the mother’s shelter. His rape of Alicia is not so much an act of violence, which rape usually is, nor even an act of love, which is what Benigno believes, but ultimately an act of submission. A new intertitle announces that the action again moves, now one month later. Marco has been transformed, it seems, by Benigno’s care of Alicia, and now Lydia too is talked to and treated not as a cadaver but as a

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convalescent. She is taken out for air with Alicia on the terrace and Benigno wonders what they, Alicia and Lydia, may be talking about. The question triggers a new flashback in the narration, as Marco, moved by the question, remembers, again, the day of the gore (two months later). The flashback introduces the incongruous site of a beautiful small church (in the town of Lucena) where Marco attended Angela’s wedding. In the back of the chapel, in the middle of the vows, Lydia weeps quietly. Marco mistakenly believes that Lydia suspects that he is still in love with Angela. When the two leave the chapel together, we discover that this scene took place right before the car conversation that, in a previous but disjointed flashback sequence, we had seen before in the film. In fact, three times in the course of the conversation Lydia tries to tell Marco something apparently urgent and he continually refers to the imagined jealousy. While the setting is the same, the scene is longer now and gives us more information on the history of Angela and Marco, and of his difficulty in getting over that relationship. ‘It’s very difficult to be separated from someone you still love’, Marco says, addings ‘as the Jobim song says, love is the saddest thing when it ends.’24 Continuing the circular pattern of the movie the Tom Jobim song Marco refers to is of course, ‘Por toda a minha vida’, heard earlier in the goring sequence, sung by Elis Regina. In this way, even though the three sequences are separated in the film narrative, they are actually interconnected at this point. It is here when the structure takes up the previous part of the sequence from the earlier flashback as Lydia then tells Marco ‘we have to talk after the run’ and he says, ‘but we’ve been talking for an hour’. The repetition of the song, the mysterious conversation in the car and Marco’s continuous failure to ‘listen to her’ comes as a revealing realisation when Marco arrives in the hospital (our cue that the flashback has now ended), and finds el Niño de Valencia holding Lydia’s hand and softly, in a whisper, talking to her. El Niño explains that in fact they had got back together a month before and that she had been trying to tell Marco this. Marco retreats in a gentlemanly gesture, as if not wanting to disturb the visible intimacy between el Niño and Lydia, clearly realising his failure to understand through not really paying attention to Lydia. Thus at the hospital, as in so many other extreme situations in melodrama, the truth about Lydia finally surfaces. As Benigno had said,

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‘Women have to be cared for . . .’. And instinctively it would seem, Marco then goes directly to Alicia’s room, gently sits by her bedside and speaks to her: ‘Hello, Alicia. I’m alone again . . .’. The third act begins with Marco planning to go abroad to write a travel guide, and with the imminent revelation of Alicia’s pregnancy. When one of the nurses realises that Alicia is two weeks late, Benigno tries to ignore the situation but then announces to Marco that he wants to marry Alicia. Benigno’s logic is equally infantile and largely true, he is in love with her and they get along better than most married couples. Marco, naturally, tries to reason with Benigno and they have a heated argument. Marco, before going away on his business trip, makes Benigno promise that he’ll forget the idea. Paradoxically Marco is now the one who understands better, the one who can tell Benigno how to do things. Inevitably, at the clinic it takes little investigation for the truth to surface about the identity of the rapist. When the nursing director confronts Benigno, a witness surfaces who had heard his conversation with Marco about marrying Alicia. Then a new intertitle flashes across the screen to introduce a new temporal ellipsis. The action moves to ‘Eight months later’ when, away in Jordan, Marco reads the news of Lydia’s death in a newspaper. Upon calling the hospital for information, he is told of Benigno and Alicia’s sad situation and of Benigno’s imprisonment. Marco, a good friend (in a quickly edited sequence), returns to Spain immediately to Benigno’s aid and rushes to the Segovia jail where he is held. In the first jail scene Almodóvar seems to linger an unusually long time to make the point that Marco cannot visit Benigno until later in the week. A female officer brokers the situation and the exchange through a thick security glass and a malfunctioning intercom system comically represents the bureaucratic process and the euphemistic terminology used of prisoners, kindly referred to as ‘interns’. Later Benigno also has problems reaching Marco by telephone from jail so the sequence of events suggests the difficulties of communication in a way that briefly reminds us of Women on the Verge. Here the two men seem to be in a situation similar to Pepa in that movie, when eager to give Iván the news of her pregnancy, she is prevented from doing so by all sorts of technical and logistical complications. In fact, Marco and Benigno will never be physically together again in the

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film, touch each other or even talk normally, face-to-face. On the telephone for the first time, Marco and Benigno assess the situation and Marco offers to let Benigno know whatever he finds out, since neither they nor we, the audience, know anything of Alicia’s whereabouts or situation. Benigno obsessively wants to know if Alicia is alive, if she has had the baby, where she may be. Perhaps the most dramatic scene in the film is Marco’s jail visit with Benigno. A slow tracking shot over the jail’s glass booths introduces first Benigno, speaking on a telephone through the thick glass enclosure, and then Marco, sitting on the other side, holding the other telephone. Almodóvar returns to a familiar set-up in which one character’s face is reflected on glass merging or even becoming the face of another character. Here, as with a similar set-up between Leo and Ángel in The Flower of My Secret, and between the detective and Ángel the clairvoyant in Matador, Benigno and Marco’s faces merge and seemingly come in and out of each other’s shapes in the first shot of the scene. In a later shot, the balance is shifted and it is Benigno’s face that is superimposed on Marco’s face. Almodóvar had used the technique before of course, and it is always indicative of a deep, real connection, current or future, between two characters. This is made more evident in their strangely (mis)matched sweaters, one red, one blue, suddenly loud within the movie’s subdued palette. Benigno’s desperation is evident, and he bitterly announces that his psychiatrist has declared him ‘a psychopath’. But what is most evident to us is his terrible solitude. His pleasure in describing Marco’s books, his only companions, and the way he relishes the idea of Marco becoming his tenant. For someone who, willingly or not, happily or not, had spent his life taking care of people and yet with no friends, Benigno’s solitude is his greatest cry for sympathy, even pity. At Benigno’s house, which he has decided to rent, Marco discovers that this whole space is a large shrine to Alicia, with her pictures on all the walls, awake and in a coma, a new bedroom set he had ordered for them, and with the ‘A and B’ pillow Benigno had embroidered himself. Across the street Marco observes, from Benigno’s perspective for the first time, Katerina’s dance studio and, like Benigno before him, discovers Alicia, alive and well

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Benigno (Javier Cámara) is overwhelmed in prison by his solitude: ‘I’ve hugged very few people in my life’

inside, watching the other dancers longingly as yet unable to join in. Unlike Benigno’s rapturous, cinematic fascination with Alicia, Marco is terrified by the unexpected sight and retreats in horror. The contrast is especially interesting because Marco has already had a sort of spectatorial/voyeuristic relationship with her at the hospital, having seen her nude, opening her eyes in her sleep. Back inside, he is confronted by a large photograph of Alicia in her sleep, which seems to appease him momentarily. He later observes Katerina and Alicia through the window, doing some rehabilitation exercises, and seems to then begin to desire Alicia, this Alicia, alive and removed again by the distance of spectatorship. The next time at the jail, Marco is anxious about having to keep the truth from Benigno, about Alicia’s life, as per his lawyer’s request. We learn that Alicia gave birth to a stillborn boy. Fearing for Benigno’s mental state, Marco reluctantly agrees not to disclose the truth. His lawyer has told him that the baby was stillborn and that Alicia is the same as before. This is the

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last time they will see each other and Benigno is again maternal with Marco, and heartbreakingly alone. Through the cold glass of the visiting room, Benigno looks up, his eyes full of tears, and confesses, sincerely, that he would like to give Marco a hug. ‘I’ve hugged very few people in my life’, he explains apologetically, suggesting that he’d have to say that Marco is his boyfriend to get a vis-à-vis, unmediated. While still awaiting trial in jail for Alicia’s rape, Benigno commits suicide (like Don Jaime in Viridiana), both as a form of expiation and as a way of ‘joining’ her in a state of unconsciousness. Marco does not realise this until the next morning, back in Madrid, when he receives a message on his mobile phone. It is Benigno’s confession that he cannot live in a world without Alicia. Although Benigno says that his intention is to put himself into a coma, he is a nurse and would clearly know that the dose of Valium and other tranquillisers (stolen from the jail infirmary, where he works) would be lethal. By the time Marco arrives at the jail Benigno is long dead. He has left his house to Marco (in a final maternal gesture) and another confession. In another flashback, Almodóvar shows us a montage of Benigno (now dead) writing the confession for Marco. In the montage, we see what seem to be Benigno’s thoughts the moments before dying: drops of rain on his window (a melodramatic convention since 1930s’ Hollywood), the cover of one of Marco’s travel guides that had inspired him in jail (and another symbol of desire), his last memories of the house he had prepared for Alicia and himself, on his jail cell wall, the wedding picture of his mother, with the other half torn off (like Esteban’s in All About My Mother but here there is no possibility of reconciliation). He ends by saying, ‘Wherever they take me come see me . . . and talk to me.’ In fact in the next scene, after a moving breakdown when Marco seems to mourn Benigno more than he did Lydia, Marco is at the cemetery talking to Benigno in his grave. He tells him all about Alicia’s incredible, improbable recovery, about the child’s death, about his own last-minute effort to save his friend. Benigno’s fetishes, appropriately, have been buried with him: the pictures of Alicia and his mother and even the hair clip he so treasured and that constituted his first direct possession of the object of desire. This is the lesson that Marco does learn from Benigno, Alicia, Lydia and even el Niño de Valencia: to get in touch with his emotional self in ways

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that are prejudicially thought to be feminine. Intriguingly, the end of the film has Marco again at the theatre for another recital by Pina Bausch’s company. Reinforcing the repetitive, circular structure of the film, this time Marco encounters Alicia (who does not know him) and Katerina. Chance and Benigno have brought them together. On stage, one woman is balanced and carried around by several men while she breathes loudly into a microphone, in a suggestive metaphor, perhaps, of the overwhelming power of the woman’s presence among them. During the recess, Marco casually introduces himself to Alicia, and the two seem to like each other. Marco is again very emotionally affected by the choreography, the bodies, and Alicia asks him, with a very friendly demeanour if everything is OK. He says: ‘Now it is.’ In the last moments of the film, we see Marco and Alicia in the theatre. She is sitting two rows behind him and he does not try to be inconspicuous when he turns around to look at her. She returns the gaze with a lovely smile and a now familiar type of intertitle, for the last time, swells up on screen, this time saying: ‘Marco y Alicia’. On stage, several couples dance the mazurka, the men and women’s rhythmic movements in each other’s arms suggestive, as dancing often is, of coupling, of sexual activity. Interestingly then, this ending that isn’t, is presented as a beginning. First it appears as if it were a new narrative section of the film, but then, as the multiple couples on stage suggest, it is an indication of the love to come between Marco and Alicia. This is Almodóvar’s loveliest, most romantic ending ever and, unlike the false, hasty coupling at the end of Kika, when she rides off towards the horizon with a stranger, there is no irony at the end of Talk to Her, but hope. Marco and Alicia, after going through pain, death and much self-growth, we believe, will live happily ever after. Melodramatic conventions allow for a conclusion that is incredible, yet scientifically plausible, like the babies born of HIV-positive parents who neutralise the virus at the end of All About My Mother. Alicia has awakened from her coma, recovers and eventually finds love. This ending is potentially upsetting since it seems to suggest that something ‘good’ came out of the rape of an innocent, helpless, unconscious woman. However, as is typical in Almodóvar, in Talk to Her rape is a narrative tool that represents multiple different forms of social, psychological and even cultural damage (as suggested

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Life from death: Alicia (Leonor Watling) recovers from her coma after being raped

by the re-appropriation of bullfighting). As in his previous movies that feature rapes, beatings or bodies in transition analysed in the course of this book, in this beautiful film Almodóvar presents us with a familiar scenario that literalises the nation–body metaphor, like All About My Mother and Kika. But provocatively, the metaphor first employed five minutes into his first film to refer to the difficulties of his generation’s transition out of the past, is complicated into a metaphor of a metaphor. Talk to Her presents a ‘projection’ of rape into the fantasy of the cinematic image itself. The rape of the unconscious victim, unlike the parody of Pepi, Luci, Bom or the brutality of Kika, is not seen on screen but substituted for or projected, in a Freudian sense, into the fantasy of the silent movie The Shrinking Lover that the rapist goes to see. Arguably, the rape is diffused by Almodóvar’s cinematic eye, made into something magical, mesmerising or ‘fantastic’, like the movies themselves. The rapist’s desires are visualised and realised as a dream sequence in the style of a 1920s’ silent film. It is a specifically cinematic analogy achieved through the re-creation of silent-movie aesthetics, identi-

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fication and the displacement of the desires of the ‘real’ character of Talk to Her onto the ‘fictional’ character of the film-within-the-film. The cinema, according to Christian Metz and his pupils, is better structured than any other art to recreate unconscious states, dream-works and their projected articulation of our fears and desires. According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, following Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘fantasy is the mise en scène of desire . . . and the cinema the industry of desire itself’.25 In psychoanalytic film theory, the analogy of the cinema with dreams and desires (of which Buñuel was one of the first exponents) allows for the ‘viewer to be positioned as the desiring producer of the cinematic fiction’.26 Almodóvar’s use of a specific cinematic fantasy in Talk to Her to substitute for Alicia’s rape, serves a double purpose. On the one hand, the silent film The Shrinking Lover is at once a projection and the expression, the ‘mise en scène’ of Benigno’s desires. But on the other hand, because of the cinema’s fantastic function it is also the mise en scène of the spectator’s desires (and fears), making us equally complicit since, in viewing a film, the spectator ‘enunciates [his or her] own economy of desire’.27 As I have argued elsewhere in this work, in Almodóvar’s imaginary the human body becomes the site of both unbearable pain and inevitable healing, but in Talk to Her it also becomes a self-reflexive look at the cinematic fantasy, around the desire to reconstitute the family, and the fear caused by Benigno’s sexual repression. Thus it is very provocative that Benigno’s fantasy is both one of sexual fulfilment, and of the desire for a ‘return’ to the maternal womb. As Gaylyn Studlar has argued, the cinematic fantasy is not always sadistic; it can also be ‘masochistic’. Following Gilles Deleuze’s study of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Studlar argues that while the sadistic fantasy ‘is one in which the subject takes the position of the controlling parent’, the masochistic fantasy, which she argues is akin to some forms of cinematic spectatorial pleasure is ‘one in which the subject . . . assumes the position of the child who desires to be controlled within the dynamics of the fantasy’.28 In Talk to Her Benigno’s fantasy can be seen as ‘masochistic’ in that sense: he is not aiming for a controlling relationship with Alicia, but a submissive one in which she is, at least physically, not hurt, and in which his ‘submission’, projected as a specific cinematic fantasy, is invested of a childish/maternal instinct even more than sexual desire.

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Equally humorous and troublesome, Alicia’s rape, like the sacrifices of so many other physical bodies in Almodóvar’s imaginary, leads ultimately to something good. The body can heal, Almodóvar reminds us constantly in his films since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. There will be pain and trauma, and more, but once a body is reconstituted it becomes symbolic of healing at an allegorical level and the generation of ‘Almodóvar babies’ (in High Heels, where at the end Rebeca and Letal, her cross-dressing lover, are expecting a baby; in Live Flesh where the protagonist is born literally in the transitional phase but eventually re-builds himself and has a baby of his own; in All About My Mother and in Talk to Her) promises (or at least suggests) that the nation, like the body, can be made whole again.

Bad Education (2004) At once a summa and a reassessment of Almodóvar’s own excesses, La mala educación made a loud splash in the UK and the US with its honest treatment of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. In the year before the film’s release, there was a sexual abuse controversy in the US Catholic Church with priests accused of abusing children, who were defrocked, tried and put in prison. But that context, which never quite reached the level of a crisis, was perhaps given undue attention making some critics and audiences ignore the film’s involute self-reflexivity. Bad Education is certainly Almodóvar’s most self-reflexive movie ever, possibly his most ambitious technical achievement and a sort of amalgam of topics handled better in The Law of Desire, Kika and All About My Mother. Maybe more sensationalist than interesting, it is also Almodóvar’s most centripetal structure, to the point of (almost) collapsing unto its own triptych, circular plot. Not only is Bad Education a movie about a Spanish movie director making controversial movies who was ‘hot’ in the 1980s and who grew up in Catholic schools, but its structure also involves an intricate, or maybe just convoluted, mise en abîme of flashbacks within flashbacks, false leads and a kind of ‘smokeand-mirrors’ resolution that is more baffling than original, since all its tricks had appeared in Almodóvar’s earlier, better films. What is most interesting about Bad Education is its attention to, or even obsession with understanding context and the weight of the past in contem-

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porary Spain: Almodóvar’s topics since Pepi, Luci, Bom. Appropriately, the movie centres on the intersection of several lives spanning the critical decades of the 1960s, when Franco and his consort, the Catholic Church, ruled Spain’s body and spirit, and the 1980s, when the confusion at the end of the dictatorship and the start of the democratic process was the cause of much tension. Coming at the tail end of his two biggest successes abroad, Talk to Her and All About My Mother, Bad Education seems to want to outdo these two films and the presence of the Mexican international heart-throb Gael García Bernal (Y tu mamá también [2001], Amores perros [2000] and The Motorcycle Diaries [2005]) suggests Almodóvar’s attention to the international market. The opening credit sequence is a mix of Saul Bass’s Psycho and Vertigo designs (both heavy presences in the movie plot) and of the magazine cut-out collage typical of Almodóvar openings in films such as Women on the Verge and High Heels. The greatest difference here is that the bodies in costume and the mannequins in pieces we see represent men and men in drag. Suggesting already one of its narrative motifs, the credit sequence shows each line of text being peeled or ripped off, as if skin or layers were being exposed. These are combined with another Alberto Iglesias score heavy on strings (and, as always, reminiscent of Bernard Herrman’s Psycho and Vertigo themes). The end credit ‘written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar’ cleverly and transparently dissolves into a framed movie poster with the legend ‘written and directed by Enrique Goded’ in the first of many self-reflexive turns in the film. Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) is an uninspired movie director, going through a creative crisis, looking for some sort of inspiration in sensationalist news items (a practice Almodóvar has described in interviews and which pops up often in his movies). He is sitting at a desk, reading a ridiculous story about a dead motorcycle rider when an intertitle assembles on the screen reading ‘Madrid 1980’. Enrique’s apartment is full of the posters from his past films, apparently exploitative fare reminiscent of Pablo Quintero’s titles in The Law of Desire and of Almodóvar’s early films.29 Enrique’s research is interrupted by the visit of ‘Ignacio Rodríguez’ (Gael García Bernal) a former schoolfriend and unemployed actor in search of work who presents him with a treatment to read. Ignacio, who has not seen Enrique in sixteen years,

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seems chummy and intimate, while Enrique’s demeanour is more cautious, as if he suspects that Ignacio wants something from him. He does not seem surprised when Ignacio presents him with his tale, ‘The Visit’. The story, he announces, is inspired in part by their school years together and the rest, he says, ‘is fiction’. Ignacio’s nervous demeanour is made more suspicious by his insistence on being called ‘Ángel Andrade’, his new stage name which he insists everyone, even his mother, calls him by. This early sign announces a character that, as we will see in the next few pages, suffers from a crippling identity crisis for which there is no solution and which eventually typifies him as a sort of monster the likes of which Almodóvar has rarely attempted, except in Kika and Matador. This visit leads to Ignacio/Ángel’s request that Enrique read ‘The Visit’. Enrique and Ignacio, we soon learn, were not only schoolmates in their pre-teen years, but Enrique says that Ignacio was also his first love. ‘But he has changed so much,’ says Enrique, ‘I would not have recognised him.’ In fact, the expository sequence in Enrique’s office is essential in putting forward the movie’s principal concern: the crippling effects of the past in the making of social and sexual identity. This topic, Almodóvar will equate to the creative process and to an almost narcissistic level, to the intricacies, the problems and even the crises of film-making itself. That evening, as Enrique sits down to read the treatment left by his friend, Almodóvar presents the first of the seemingly elaborate narratives within the film. The result is a type of ‘mindscreen’ of the character in which Enrique the film-maker is visualising the story as he reads it, as a film narrative.30 That is what we, the spectators, see. Enrique’s description, from the manuscript, soon takes the form of a voice-over narration, describing the context of the current story: but ‘La visita’ begins itself with a ‘flashback’ to 1977 of the transvestite Zahara (Ignacio already in Enrique’s mind) at the Cine Olympo performing with the tour of a travelling burlesque transvestite show called ‘The Bomb’. Within the narrative of ‘The Visit’ there are two temporal spaces: one is the context of ‘The Bomb’ with the grown-up Ignacio now turned into the homosexual drag queen Zahara. The other is presented as a second ‘mindscreen’ of the character Father Manolo when he reads the early parts of ‘The Visit’, describing Ignacio and Enrique’s experiences as young boys in a Catholic school.

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‘Quizás ... quizás.’ Gael García Bernal as Zahara in ‘The Visit’, the movie-within-the-movie in Bad Education

In ‘The Bomb’ sequence, Zahara/Ignacio shows up on stage in an anachronistic Jean Paul Gaultier design, reminiscent of the costumes designed for Kika that simulated Andrea Caracortada’s breasts ripping through her ‘leather’ suit. Zahara’s gown, similarly, incorporates a simulated pubic hair area and nipples over the sequin design of the tight dress. At once interesting and déjà vu, Zahara’s gown suggests Almodóvar’s focus on excess here as in Kika. On stage, Zahara sings (of course) a torrid love song (‘Quizás, quizás, quizás’ in a 1960s’ breathy Sara Montiel-type rendition), noticing a young man in the audience. Later, after the show, Zahara easily seduces the man and goes to a hotel with him where, in the course of performing fellatio, she discovers that he is ‘Enrique’, his childhood love. While Enrique sleeps, Zahara penetrates herself with the young man’s still erect penis, and in voice-over, reads a letter that she writes to him. Signing the letter ‘Ignacio’, Zahara wants to lure Enrique to get back together, to meet him in a nearby bakery the next evening and promises to help him out financially, suggesting that she has a really good business deal. When Zahara places the letter by Enrique’s sleeping face, Almodóvar cuts from a close-up of ‘Enrique’s’ face with the letter right by his side, to the same page in the manuscript where this action is described. This is per-

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haps the most original of Almodóvar’s self-reflexive games in Bad Education (repeated shortly thereafter). An extreme close-up of the written page suddenly reminds us that what we see is really what the movie director Enrique (Goded) sees while reading ‘The Visit’. Still on the extreme close-up of the page, the tip of a red pen circles some words, showing, however partially, the written description. Words, phrases and sentence fragments such as ‘Enrique’s nude . . .’ and ‘. . . the letter. Finally he decides to place it . . . so that when he opens his eyes it will be . . .’ are clearly readable on the page. We recognise a description of the last scene we have seen of Enrique Goded’s visualisation of ‘The Visit’. A close-up of Enrique Goded in profile, looking intently at the page, reveals him to be engaged and even affected by the reading. Almodóvar soon returns to another shot of the manuscript pages, this time describing the next scene in a slightly longer, but still close shot that allows us even more access to the page: the story is now less fragmented, literally, clearer to our eyes. The page describes Zahara’s return to the Olympo theatre, her memories of seeing Sara Montiel movies as a child and the words of dialogue ‘my knees tremble with emotion’. The shot of the manuscript page dissolves slowly into the action described on the page when Zahara brings her friend Paquita (Javier Cámara who played ‘Benigno’ in Talk to Her) to the newly ruined Cine Olympo and nostalgically recalls seeing there ‘Sara’s first movies’ as well as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961). Both references are significant, for they embody two fundamental formative experiences in Almodóvar’s own life and career. Sara Montiel was, perhaps, Almodóvar’s generation’s first object of cinematic desire. The star of many Franco-era musical melodramas about the perils and solitude that awaited women of loose morals, her movies were often titillating and exploitative while pretending to issue a moral warning. Typical of the Francoist morality of the 1950s and 1960s, Montiel’s greatest success, the 1957 melodrama El ultimo cuplé (‘The Last Song’ directed by Juan de Orduña) allowed her character an unprecedented access to the expression of her own sexual desire, something denied to women, celluloid or otherwise, in Franco’s Spain. Sara’s cinematic romantic adventures, almost always out of wedlock, inevitably led to much suffering and a disastrous end for her character. Montiel’s characters were what they call ‘fallen

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women’, but according to Marsha Kinder, Montiel was portrayed ‘as erotic spectacle for the male gaze . . . [and] as a sexual object that actively pursued her own desire’.31 The mention of Breakfast at Tiffany’s as the other formative text in Ignacio’s life brings back Almodóvar’s interest in the classic Hollywood romances of the 1960s as well as in Truman Capote (an inspirational figure in All About My Mother) who wrote the novel on which the movie is based. It also allows for the introduction of the song ‘Moon River’ (composed by Henry Mancini for the Edwards movie) which eventually becomes the most prominently recognisable media intersection in the film. Of course, as a character ‘Holly Golightly’ is now the subject of a certain camp appropriation by gay men, so Ignacio’s interest in Breakfast at Tiffany’s marks his sexual orientation from an early age. When Zahara/Ignacio speaks the line ‘my knees tremble with emotion’, seen in the previous shot, it is now complete in meaning because of the associations she makes with the Cine Olympo: about Sara Montiel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and about having first known sexual pleasure with Enrique in this theatre. Zahara/Ignacio is full of expectations as she awaits the evening meeting with her first love. It is here that Zahara/Ignacio first mentions ‘Father Manolo’ who she resents for separating him from Enrique in childhood. Zahara/Ignacio intends to confront Father Manolo at their childhood school, which he then

A collapsing identity and narrative: Ignacio/Juan/Ángel in ‘The Visit’

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visits with Paquita. It is bizarre to see Ignacio as Zahara, in full drag, makeup and wig, arriving at the school chapel where, as chance would have it, Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho in ‘The Visit’) is in the middle of celebrating the morning Mass. Father Manolo is reciting the ‘act of contrition’, a prayer of reconciliation in the Catholic liturgy. As he exclaims, beating his chest, the words ‘I confess to God Almighty, and to you my brethren, that I sinned through thought, word, deed and omission. Through my fault, through my fault, through my great fault . . .’, Zahara observes in the back of the chapel. To each of the priest’s admissions of guilt, Zahara replies ‘through your fault . . . through your fault . . .’. After the Mass, compressed in Almodóvar’s narrative time, Paquita goes to steal valuables from the chapel while Zahara confronts Father Manolo. Pretending to be Ignacio’s sister, Zahara insists in speaking with the baffled and evasive priest. When she finally reaches him in the school prefectory (since he is the principal), it is evident that Father Manolo remembers Ignacio very well: in his desk drawer he still keeps a photograph of the young boy in his altar server’s garb. Interestingly when Father Manolo asks what Zahara wants, she responds ‘a better life, and a better body’. The analogy of the body and identity is here made explicit; as in Kika, there is little metaphor and almost a direct interpretation of the body/identity/past problem that, first through the impostor Ignacio and later through the ‘real’ Ignacio, Almodóvar states twice in the course of Bad Education. Zahara’s attempt to blackmail Father Manolo is, of course, based on the priest’s sense of guilt for abusing the child Ignacio sexually. What Zahara has to offer is a story written by Ignacio detailing the history of sexual abuse at the hands of Father Manolo. Zahara’s introduction of this new manuscript-within-the-manuscript leads to Father Manolo’s own ‘mindscreen’ to the character’s mental picture of the events told. ‘You are one of the protagonists of this story’, says Zahara, and then, pointing to the page she says ‘read here’. Once again, in his most self-reflexive strategy in Bad Education, the page we see, more than telling just the story of Father Manolo and the young Ignacio is actually a description of the scene with Zahara leading to the mindscreen. The three visible paragraphs on the close shot of the page describe, respectively, Zahara’s blackmail attempt (threatening to sell the

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manuscript to the sensationalist Madrid paper Diario 16), Father Manolo’s own action, ‘Father Manolo slowly lowers his sight onto the pages the hands of Zahara have put on the table . . .’ (which is the shot we now see) and then continues with the child Ignacio’s memories in voice-over, directly from the page: ‘Each month those of us in the honour roll were taken out for a day in the country with our literature professor, Father Manolo . . .’. Almodóvar cuts to the twin close-up profile shot of Enrique Goded but with Father Manolo’s face, as his eyes move over the typewritten pages. Father Manolo’s visualisation, still within Enrique Goded’s visualisation of ‘The Visit’, begins. The shot dissolves to a dozen or so boys between the ages of eleven and twelve running wildly and happily towards a pleasant-looking river. The slow tracking shot continues to reveal, separate from the group, Father Manolo playing the guitar and the young Ignacio (Ignacio Pérez) sitting behind a green bamboo thicket singing a Spanish version of ‘Moon River’. Seemingly hypnotised by the romantic lyrics in the boy’s soprano voice, Father Manolo plays the guitar almost absentmindedly and stares at the fresh, diaphanous river in front of them. A painful, longing look in his face, Father Manolo looks sincerely disturbed by his own conspicuous desire for the young boy. Almodóvar cuts to a beautiful, slow-motion shot of another boy diving from a boulder gracefully into the river, and to several successive slow-motion shots of the boys happily playing in the water, edited to the rhythmic, seductive beat of the song. There is something strangely erotic about this series of shots, as if Almodóvar was purposely challenging us with his eroticisation of these unlikely objects of desire. The next shot shows the bamboo thicket again in medium long shot and then, suddenly and abruptly, the music stops, then the singing. The camera reframes slowly and we hear the young Ignacio firmly say ‘No!’ and see him run away from behind the bush, while Father Manolo’s voice calls him back. Ignacio trips and falls on the floor, and we see Father Manolo come out from behind the bamboo, seemingly closing up the buttons on his frock. The next shot perhaps encapsulates everything Bad Education is about. It is a close-up of Ignacio’s face as he raises it from the ground, and we see a rock on the floor, where he has hit his forehead. A single trickle of blood runs down the centre of Ignacio’s forehead and he looks directly into the camera with a baffled, accusatory

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look. And then the face is split open down the middle, into a split-screen that reveals the profound darkness inside, and that marks explicitly and melodramatically, the turning point of Ignacio’s life. Father Manolo’s face, with a look of real fear in his eyes, then slowly dissolves from the dark spot centre screen, and Ignacio’s voice-over narration returns, to describe the same moment: ‘a trickle of blood divided my forehead in two, and I had the feeling that the same thing would happen with my life.’ Thus we return, first to Father Manolo’s face in a reminder of the source of this mindscreen and then, suddenly, the shot cuts to Enrique Goded in close-up momentarily, with the young Ignacio’s voice still on the soundtrack. We return to Zahara and Father Manolo in the prefectory when another priest arrives to announce the chapel burglary, perpetrated by Paquita. Of course, the robbery of the sacramental objects, the chalice, the paten, the cruets, at this particular moment is eloquent and consistent with Almodóvar’s practice of equating the sacred and the secular, the holy and the sinful. Thus Zahara and Paquita’s desecration of the chapel is juxtaposed with and compared to Father Manolo’s violation of Ignacio. The other priest, Father José (Francisco Maestre), was known for beating the students, a common practice in 1960s’ Catholic schools. Zahara names her price, one million pesetas, or else Diario 16 will publish Ignacio’s tale. The ensuing argument between the priest and his victim reveals Almodóvar’s interest and awareness of this ‘new’ Spain that he had not so directly treated since Pepi, Luci, Bom, Labyrinth of Passion and Dark Habits (see Chapter 1). To Father Manolo’s insistence that the story is ‘garbage’ and that people will believe him and not the word of a drug-addicted drag queen, Zahara replies: ‘People have changed. This is 1977. This society values my freedom more than your hypocrisy.’ Of course, she is only partially right, and the priests seem to know that. The statement itself is a good indication of Almodóvar’s assessment of the Spanish political process since democratisation. In his early films, but particularly in Pepi, Luci Bom and Other Girls on the Heap and Dark Habits, Almodóvar seems to want to remind us of the fragility of Spain’s vertiginous transformation, from the death of Franco in 1975, to the new constitution of 1978, to the settlement of the democratic process with the election of the Socialist Worker’s Party in 1982. At the time

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of those early films there was no indication that Spain’s transformation would be so solid and profound, and thus, the rapist-policeman in Pepi, for instance, continuously lashes out against democracy (and women). And in Dark Habits the order of the Humiliated Redeemers is seen as an anachronistic, weakening pillar of the past. But in Bad Education Almodóvar’s declaration of the ‘end of the past’ is not sarcastic, as in Pepi, and it is not a parody, as in Dark Habits, but it is historically accurate. For the same reason perhaps, it is also less dramatic, less risky as a political statement, than say, the ‘general erections’ sequence in Pepi. The elaborate structure of this extended sequence continues when Father Manolo goes on reading and we return to the character’s visualisation of what happened in Ignacio’s second year at the school. Briefly bridged by little Ignacio’s voice-over narration again, this segment tells how Ignacio met and fell in love with his classmate, Enrique Serrano (Raúl García Forneiro in ‘The Visit’), in around 1964. When they first meet at the soccer field, the two boys seem transfixed, frozen at the goal line in a confrontation that isn’t. Later, during Mass, while Ignacio sings in the choir (like Almodóvar did himself as a child), Enrique deliberately turns his head back and away from the altar to observe his new object of desire. The courtship of the boys in church and during Mass is especially interesting since we have seen before, in Dark Habits and in The Law of Desire, how Almodóvar converts the church itself into a sanctuary of erotic contemplation and the manifestation of desire. The profane conversion of sacred space into one of sexual awakening is consistent with Almodóvar’s common mix of these two forms of ecstasy. Ignacio finds excitement with this new discovery, seems even happy. Meanwhile Father Manolo’s tortured look declares his state of distress, both at Mass and when Ignacio sings to him in the refectory. Interestingly, there is something sympathetic built into the character because of his evident sense of guilt for the crime and sin he commits. But it is also revealing that, in a moment of true heresy, Almodóvar discloses that during Mass, in the middle of the prayer for mercy, the sung Kyrie eleison (‘Lord, have mercy, Christ have Mercy, Lord have mercy’) Father Manolo is in real emotional and spiritual pain. Even the young Ignacio can see Father Manolo’s distress and comments in his

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voice-over narration that it looks like he wants to cry. But the discovery of love and desire keeps Ignacio going strong. The sequence continues with what looks very much like Ignacio and Enrique’s first date. The two go to the Cine Olympo, of Zahara’s memories, to see the film Esa mujer (‘That Woman’) the story of a former nun turned woman-of-the-world, starring Sara Montiel, of course.32 Almodóvar intersects a scene from the movie with the two boys sitting side by side in the movie theatre. Momentarily distracted, they slowly turn towards each other and Ignacio exclaims, ‘How lovely is Sara!’ As they resume watching, in the same two-shot, protected by the darkness of the movie theatre, we realise that Enrique has reached out with his hand to touch Ignacio’s penis. At first, Ignacio is trembling with the agony of desire while Enrique takes the sexual initiative. The next shot, from behind their theatre seats, cleverly shows the boys in the foreground, rhythmically moving their hands in the middle of mutual masturbation while Sara Montiel is seen in the background larger than life on the screen, mediating or triggering this first sexual encounter. Interestingly, as in Talk to Her, the confusion of cinematic spectatorship with sexual desire is put in the foreground, just like in Matador (when María and Diego go to see Duel in the Sun) and in High Heels (with Rebeca’s desiring gaze of Femme Letal on stage) some form of performance is shown as mediating a character’s recognition of or confrontation with desire. It is also noticeable that the boys, at least in principle, desire Sara Montiel while gratifying each other sexually. That night in the dorms, Ignacio is tortured by guilt. ‘What we did in the movies was not right,’ he says. But Enrique replies, ‘I liked it.’ And while Ignacio fears punishment from God, Enrique confesses that he is a hedonist, he does not believe in God. The boys are terrified upon being discovered by Father Manolo, who is looking for Ignacio. The sequence of the confrontation, in which Father Manolo separates the boys after finding them together in a toilet stall, is particularly dramatic. For the first time Almodóvar shows us Father Manolo in a truly threatening representation, aided especially by high-contrast, expressionistic lighting (by cinematographer José Luis Alcaine) that emphasises Father Manolo’s features, portraying him as a monster, aided by horror film conventions. The long shadows,

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the empty setting of the large lavatory, the pursuit, from stall to stall, the large looming figure of the priest exaggerated over the small size of the boys with high/low angle juxtaposition and even the music, reminiscent, anachronistically, of Wojciech Kilar’s score for Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), are strangely excessive, too cinematic. We are reminded that this vision, this image, is actually Enrique Goded’s visualisation and thus, in his movie director’s mind, we must guess, the pursuit takes the form and adopts the conventions of a horror film. And yet a look into Ignacio’s frightened face seems to disarm Father Manolo’s resolve. Ignacio’s following voice-over is revealing: he tells that he has lost his faith and with it also his fear. Repression is paradoxically, the end of fear, sexually and perhaps politically. ‘I am capable of anything’, says Ignacio. Also at this point, Ignacio resorts to prostitution when, in order to keep Enrique from being expelled he agrees to be Father Manolo’s lover. So, the previous image of Ignacio’s face splitting down the middle, its suggestion of a broken life, is from this moment on, practically realised. When Father Manolo expels Enrique in spite of his promise, Ignacio is finally broken. The long, extended sequence of ‘The Visit’, Enrique’s mindscreen within the film, ends with twin dissolves in close-up of the morphing faces of Ignacio as a child to ‘Ignacio’ adult, and from the young Enrique to Enrique ‘now’. Separating the two in their youth, the hard, iron gate around the schoolyard is an explicit representation of the forces between these two lives. The shot of the morphing faces leads to our return to the 1980 setting and the re-encounter between Ignacio and Enrique. ‘I think there’s a movie here,’ says Enrique, ‘and I’d like to direct it.’ Thus begins the second defined segment of Bad Education, purportedly telling of the production of ‘The Visit’ and of the evolving relationship between Ignacio and Enrique, first loves, reunited. From here on, the film becomes increasingly self-reflexive to the point of narcissism. While there are some autobiographical elements in many of Almodóvar’s films and many in Bad Education, the story told in ‘The Visit’ is not, except in the incidentals, autobiographical. While Almodóvar went to Catholic schools and was a soloist in the choir (like Tina in The Law of Desire), and he admits knowing that boys were sexually abused by priests in his school, he himself

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has never claimed to have been a victim. And he offers some parallels to his own history as a film-maker, his formation and his early interest in classic American and Spanish melodrama. But the story told in the second half of Bad Education is more about self-reflexivity itself than it is about Almodóvar. It contains several parallels to its closest relative, The Law of Desire, for instance, the centrality of a gay film-maker character involved in a strange relationship with a troubled man; the tendency of the filmmaker’s fiction to become increasingly confused with his ‘reality’; and eventually, like the story of ‘Laura P.’ in the earlier film, in Bad Education the fiction seems to take over, to spin out of control. The trouble begins when Ignacio, now ‘Ángel’, insists on playing Zahara, not what Enrique Serrano as Enrique Goded wants. It’s a clever trick by Almodóvar who has already shown us Goded’s visualisation of ‘The Visit’ with ‘Ángel’ playing Zahara. But after Ignacio/Ángel, author of the original story, refuses to co-operate on the screenplay and continues to insist on being called ‘Ángel’, Enrique seems genuinely suspicious. When the two go out to celebrate, in what looks like a bad imitation of the early 1980s’ Madrid so genuinely celebrated in Pepi, Luci, Bom and Labyrinth of Passion, Enrique’s suspicions are fuelled by Ángel/Ignacio’s failure to recognise ‘their song’ on the radio. It seems evident that Enrique’s intentions are to seduce Ángel: at his villa, Enrique seems surprised at Ángel’s modesty, when he seems to shy away from Enrique’s advances. Like Almodóvar’s earlier ‘Ángel’, in Matador and ‘Antonio’ in The Law of Desire, both played coincidentally (or not?) by Antonio Banderas, this Ángel may either be repressing his homosexuality or unsure of his true orientation. Enrique is forthright, after they return to the argument about playing ‘Zahara’ in the movie: he simply does not believe that this man is his Ignacio. Enrique’s final test is to demand that Ángel have sex with him, if he wants to play ‘Zahara’. Ángel walks away, taking the prospect of ‘The Visit’ with him, and muttering to himself ‘Why did I have to see you again, you fucking faggot?’ With no resources, Enrique returns to his search for stories in the sensationalist tabloids, in a scene that repeats in form and mood the opening of the film. Incongruously, Almodóvar cuts to a drag show in which a Sara Montiel impersonator performs one of her dreadful signature songs of the 1960s,

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‘Maniquí Parisien’. In a setting very similar to that seen in High Heels with Femme Letal, and Agrado’s soliloquy in All About My Mother, in the audience sits Ángel, studying the performer, practising her every move and gesture, preparing, evidently, to play Zahara. The theatrical setting serves a familiar function here when, in between sets, Ángel visits ‘Sara’ in her dressing room. When he explains his situation among the wigs, mirrors and performer’s paraphernalia, saying that he is preparing to play the part of a drag queen who imitates Sara Montiel, the performer asks, logically, why don’t they hire her to play the part. In the dressing room Almodóvar’s characters are often unarmed, more honest than they are in other situations, paradoxically unmasked, as I have previously discussed. Appropriately Ángel shows his true colours when he explains to ‘Sara’ that she can’t play Zahara because ‘I’m an actor, and you’re just a fag.’ Ángel’s apparently inexplicable homophobia is, for us, perhaps the last clue that Enrique hasn’t found Ignacio inside Ángel. Appropriately, in the next scene Enrique arrives in Ignacio’s hometown of Ortigueira, Galicia, looking for him, having clearly decided that Ángel is not the person he claims to be. The depth and complexity of this character’s identity crisis is made clearer when Enrique tracks down Ignacio’s mother. In a local bar in Ortigueira, Enrique soon finds out where ‘Ángel Andrade’s’ family is, that Ignacio died three years ago (in 1977) and that the man he knows as Ignacio/Ángel is actually Ignacio’s younger brother, Juan. Even his mother, it surfaces, must call him Ángel. In Ignacio’s old decrepit house where only his mother and a deaf aunt are left, Juan seems to have begun his transformation into Ignacio by burning all Ignacio’s belongings when he died. Almodóvar lingers on a shot of a large tin bowl used for the burning, no trace left of life or memories, except for a letter he left for Enrique Goded and the manuscript of ‘The Visit’. Clearly, Juan’s mysterious transformation into his dead brother Ignacio is a sign of a deep disturbance, of an identity crisis that Almodóvar places in the transition to democracy, from 1977 to 1980. Almodóvar, in Enrique Goded’s mindscreen, in fact showed us Ignacio’s face morphing into Juan’s, and that image helps to explain the context of Ignacio’s trauma in the terrifying childhood experience, but not Juan’s. His mother explains that Juan was gravely affected by Ignacio’s death, that he

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found him and seems to offer that as an excuse for Juan’s bizarre behaviour. Finally, in voice-over, Ignacio tells his story to Enrique. It is interesting that Almodóvar grants Ignacio the opportunity to speak for himself, after the character has been imagined, visualised and had his identity consumed by others, particularly Juan, Father Manolo and even Enrique. In the letter, which Ignacio had prepared to send to Enrique with his story ‘La Visita’, Ignacio explains how by chance, he ran into the former Father Manolo, who now calls himself Manuel Berenguer, lives in Valencia with a wife and kid, works as a literary editor and is, he says, ‘ripe for blackmail’. He writes, ‘this son of a bitch owes me a big debt’. Bitter, angry, Ignacio ends his letter by saying he can only share this story with Enrique and that he still loves him. Enrique receives a new visit from Juan/Ángel who wants to apologise and continues to prepare for the part of ‘Zahara’ by studying ‘to be a fag’ with the Sara Montiel impersonator. Already aware that this Ignacio/Ángel is neither, but the younger brother Juan, Enrique decides to give him the part of ‘Zahara’ after the two finally have sex. Interestingly, the love-making scene between Enrique and Ángel is uncharacteristically rough for Almodóvar. Unlike the tender candour of Antonio (Banderas) in The Law of Desire, who is also presumably a first-timer in the love-making scene with Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela), Enrique’s aggressive manner and angry face when penetrating Ángel, make this an act of punishment not love or even desire. In the ‘passive’ position, Ángel is overpowered and his pain shows on his face. Pablo Quintero shows sympathy for the troubled Antonio, even after his irrational, violent side surfaces, but Enrique’s anger at Ángel’s deception (which we still do not entirely understand) seems deeper. The two decide to embark on the production of ‘The Visit’, when Enrique announces that the movie, unlike the written version, cannot have a happy ending. Almodóvar cuts to a familiar shot of the inside of the movie camera, similar to the shot of the projector in Women on the Verge, revealing the entrails of the most basic instrument of the cinematic apparatus, while in voice-over Enrique speaks of the production of ‘The Visit’. He made the movie, he says, as an homage to Ignacio and to decipher the mystery of Juan. He has continued to penetrate Ángel, he says, but only physically. As in Tie Me Up!, when production of the film-within-the-film, ‘The Midnight

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Phantom’, allowed Almodóvar to make a commentary about national cinema and to embark on one of his self-reflexive games, the production of ‘The Visit’ affords us a similar glance at the apparatus, but for different purposes. In the studio, the sequence begins with the apparent filming of the last scene of ‘The Visit’, The shot reveals at first the clapperboard itself, perfectly legible (like the opening of Robert Altman’s The Player) with the usual technical information, such as title, director, cinematographer, scene, shot, take, etc. The shot widens slightly to show Ángel as Zahara, in costume and make-up exactly as we had seen in Enrique’s first visualisation of the scene, arguing with Father Manolo who is calmly sitting at his desk, as in the previous representation of the scene. The next shot is, cleverly, a reverse shot of Enrique and the crew, including the camera operator and the sound man, intently watching the action. But there is another man on the set, presumably Manuel Berenguer (Lluís Homar), whose ‘visit’ Enrique had announced in the voice-over. We can see that the camera is slightly tilted to a Dutch angle, just like the reverse shot of Zahara and Father Manolo, implying that the reverse shot (to which we soon cut back) is in fact, this take. In the scene however, Zahara is much more agitated than in the previous version. She is nervous, edgy, in need of a fix, while Father Manolo is calm, apparently in control of the situation. It is the scene of the blackmail, when Zahara threatens that Father Manolo will always owe her, even if he pays. The next shot is a close-up of Zahara, followed by a reverse frontal shot in medium close-up of Father Manolo still at the desk. These are clearly taken from different angles, suggesting now not the camera set-up previously revealed, but different ones. Once again, Almodóvar takes great liberties in creating his illusion that what we see is occurring simultaneously, by showing us what is not really a take, but a finished, edited scene. In other words, the scene is now independent from the diegesis, from the context of the studio that Almodóvar had set up. But the illusion is maintained that what we see is, in fact, the scene being filmed. The interesting thing is that, as with the story of ‘Laura P’ in The Law of Desire, ultimately the reality of the characters becomes entangled, indistinct, from the fiction of ‘The Visit’. In this new ending Zahara is trapped in the office by Father José, desperate and

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out of control, a visible contrast from the cool and seemingly composed Zahara of the first (written) version, who never loses control of herself or of the situation. In this ending, Father Manolo and Father José struggle physically with Zahara, overpower her, tie her and bind her, before Father Manolo finally acknowledges that this is the Ignacio he once ‘loved’. There is a look of real horror in Father Manolo’s eyes as he struggles to recognise the youth and beauty of ‘his’ Ignacio lost somewhere inside this strange figure. Finally, the burly Father José, in one swift movement, as if he had done this before, breaks Zahara’s neck, killing her instantly. Father Manolo then, in a final paradoxical gesture, absolves her sins. Even in this version of the scene, Enrique Goded makes Father Manolo somewhat sympathetic. He is the one who shows some mercy towards the dead Zahara and reveals his sense of guilt. ‘I’ll find a way to get rid of the body’, says Father José, ‘and we have no witnesses.’ But Father Manolo reminds him, ‘God is our witness.’ ‘Yes’, says Father José, ‘but God is on our side.’ As in the earlier version, Father Manolo is portrayed as a man who struggles with his feelings and who feels guilty, even repentant, for his sins. The final shot of the sequence shows in a lateral long shot the actors, the set and the crew all together at the moment Enrique yells ‘Cut’. Again, Almodóvar insists in keeping the illusion of one single take, which the set-up, the complexity of the scene and the juxtaposition of shots that we see in the ‘edited’ version do not support. But the effect is successful in drawing the audience into a very intimate moment; it is as if in this cinematic version we have all killed Zahara, we are all complicit. When the crew and the actors disperse, congratulating each other for a job well done, Enrique finds that Ángel is deeply affected, crying, even traumatised by the scene they have just filmed. He remains in his place on the set, weeping and shaking his head. While an aide helps him out of his costume, it seems Ángel is not quite out of character: once again, the character’s life is invaded by its own ‘fiction’ and in the process of performance, paradoxically, as in The Law of Desire, Women on the Verge, High Heels and All About My Mother, real feelings are exposed. Enrique returns to his office to find Manuel Berenguer there. Enrique is openly hostile to this uninvited guest, but Berenguer, the former Father Manolo, insists on telling the ‘real’

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story of what happened to Ignacio and how he died. For the third time in the movie, there is an outsider revealing ‘the truth’ about Ignacio, this time, uncharacteristically, from the perspective of the victimiser. Ignacio’s story becomes as much a MacGuffin as Juan’s identity and it seems provocative of Almodóvar, even risky, to grant the last word to Berenguer. The set-up allows for the last flashback in the movie, in fact the only conventional flashback, as the scene moves to three years earlier (again, 1977) and to Berenguer’s version of these events. Inevitably, in Berenguer’s recollection, he presents himself as a victim of the money-hungry, erratic, drug-addicted Ignacio Rodríguez (now played by Francisco Boira). Ignacio has become a pre-op transsexual with a needle stuck in his arm, a monster, unrecognisable as the lovely boy of the past with the angelic voice and the sad eyes. When Manuel Berenguer meets with Ignacio, as per his request, he is not ‘the Ignacio we loved’ he tells Enrique. Ignacio wants one million pesetas for drug rehab and for plastic surgery. Her logic is strangely reminiscent of Agrado’s monologue in All About My Mother when she says ‘It costs a lot to be authentic. Look at this body, all made to order . . .’. In turn Ignacio says, ‘Yes my tits are great, but the rest . . . To be pretty costs a lot of money, Father Manolo . . . I think one million would be enough.’ Yet, this character is pathetic, not joyful like Agrado, and unlike his predecessor, Ignacio does not want to work to earn the price of his transformation, he wants to blackmail it from the past, he wants what seems like an easy way out. (We might recall Agrado’s story: ‘I used to be a truck driver, then I put on these tits and became a whore.’) Ignacio is, it seems, clueless about the complexity of blackmail. Even Berenguer tells him that he is in no position to blackmail anyone, because he is so ‘defenceless’. It is then that Manuel Berenguer is introduced to Ángel, or Juan, who is living with Ignacio, supposedly to help him through rehab. Berenguer’s lust for the young, beautiful and healthy Juan makes his disdain for Ignacio even more evident. In the course of the extended flashback, which Almodóvar occasionally intercuts with Berenguer and Enrique in the office, we learn of his involvement with the Rodríguez brothers, of how he kept Ignacio happy with small quantities of money, while his desire for Juan kept intensifying. Childishly, it seems, Ignacio tries to sell to Manuel some

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of his childhood watercolours, including, bizarrely, one in reference to a pseudo-Fascist organisation ‘Hijos de España’, adapted by Almodóvar from other similar organisations. When Ignacio goes away to Ortigueira to visit his mother (which is when he wrote the letter to Enrique, previously introduced, as well as ‘The Visit’), Berenguer takes advantage of the context to seduce (or to buy) Juan. Although initially unwelcoming to his advances, it does not take long for Juan to start hustling Berenguer, and the two soon initiate a sexual relationship. In another self-reflexive moment, Juan and Manuel play with a Super-8 camera during foreplay and Almodóvar intercuts the shots of the couple with the point-of-view shots seen through the Super-8 frame, emphasising again the mediation of the apparatus, as well as reminding us of Almodóvar’s own film-making beginnings in Super-8. When Ignacio surprises the two together, also seen through the Super-8 frame, Almodóvar seems to be foretelling the end of Ignacio as told in ‘The Visit’, through the intervention of Manuel, Juan and the cinema itself. Both exasperated with Ignacio’s increasingly erratic behaviour, Juan and Manuel decide to kill him. Berenguer tells Enrique that it was more or less like what he has just filmed, but ‘not so violent’, and he conveniently blames Juan for the planning and the execution of the crime. When the two meet to conclude the details at Valencia’s museum of giant heads, another reflexive situation reveals more about the character than the plot does. Surrounded

The ‘real’ Fr Manolo (Lluis Homar) and Ignacio (Francisco Boira) get confused in the reflexive fiction of Bad Education

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The reflexive, repetitive image of the typewriter follows Almodóvar’s characters from Pepi to Bad Education

Juan and Manuel’s murderous plot seems taken directly from the films noir they watch together

by the monstrous representations of men, women, animals, magicians and costumed figures, Juan ironically claims he is not a monster while asking Manuel to give the lethal dose of heroin to his brother. ‘I can’t do it, I’m his brother; I’m not a monster.’ But he is, of course, and the setting, the bizarre faces and distorted features of the museum pieces and the mise en scène that places Juan vis-à-vis one of the figures in a shot, confirms it. Juan is cool and distant and does not seem to catch the irony of the situation when, looking at a row of giant laughing heads he says, ‘What are these big heads laughing at?’. But Manuel understands: ‘They’re laughing at us. Or at least at me.’

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The sad end of Ignacio comes after he had declared his real intention this time of getting into rehab and quitting drugs, but it’s too late: his last dose is the last one indeed. After taking the heroin, of lethal purity, he sits at the typewriter to write another letter to Enrique. He collapses dead over the last line he ever wrote: ‘Dear Enrique: I think I’ve made it.’ Juan and Manuel spend the afternoon at the movies, where a film noir retrospective seems to mimic their own murderous plot. As they walk out of the theatre, together for the last time, the classic posters of Double Indemnity (1944) and other films noir make for a moment of symptomatic mise en scène, creating the parallel of the classic plots of sex and murder with that of Bad Education. The last of the numerous cinematic references in the movie, the film noir ending also seems to suggest the film’s own generic schizophrenia. Like High Heels or even Women on the Verge, in Bad Education the combination of melodrama, horror and film noir makes for a familiar, purely Almodóvarian type of reflexive practice. Juan is clearly the femme fatale of this plot, conniving, lying and pursuing his own interest. In the final goodbye, dramatically shot in the rain at night, Berenguer is heartbroken, Juan, evasive. After the flashback, Manuel and Enrique seem sympathetic to each other, at least in their perception of both having been abused by Juan. Aware that his story, his identity and his cover have been blown, Juan goes directly to Enrique’s villa to seemingly try to make up for what has happened. He apologises but gets an unequivocal cold shoulder from Enrique. It is too late to reveal yet another truth. Exposed, defeated, Juan’s apology is baffling and simply his own justification for his crimes: ‘You don’t know what it’s like to live in a small village and have a brother like Ignacio.’ Seemingly then, Juan’s logic is that his pride and the embarrassment of having a homosexual brother somehow explain what he has done. Enrique is steadfast in his resolve to break off all contact with the impostor, accepting only, before Juan leaves for good, the last letter Ignacio wrote: ‘Dear Enrique: I think I’ve made it.’ Shutting the gate behind him, Enrique remains, in the last shot of the film, pensive with Ignacio’s unfinished letter in his hand, when a series of text boxes appear on screen to announce the fate of the characters. Paradoxically, the unfinished letter is the evidence of the finished life of Ignacio Rodríguez. In the text boxes, used for the first time by Almodóvar, we learn that after

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‘The Visit’ Ángel Andrade became a professional actor, married a woman and later killed Manuel Berenguer in an apparent hit-and-run; we learn that Berenguer never recovered and blackmailed Andrade until he died; and that ‘Enrique Goded continues to make films with the same passion.’ The last image of the film is the word ‘passion’ spread over the entire screen. This final, self-congratulatory gesture on Almodóvar’s part suggests in fact, as I said earlier in this section, how the director seems more interested in the self-reflexivity of this film than he is in the fate of the characters. It is also misleading, since Enrique Goded, far from showing any ‘passion’ about his work, confesses from the beginning that he has lost his inspiration, that he is in search of a story to tell, that he has reached a creative slump. So, clearly, the ‘passion’ described can only be taken to be Almodóvar’s, not Enrique’s. Furthermore, the sad end of Ignacio and the irredeemable crimes of Manuel Berenguer and Juan Rodríguez make them perhaps Almodóvar’s most troubled characters to date and suggest that, unlike most of his previous characters, the director himself has no sympathy with or compassion for them. Ignacio’s miserable fate in particular is a very provocative development, for Almodóvar is contradicting his own declared view (cited in the All About My Mother section) of the possibility of creating a new, better life in fiction than reality affords us. For Ignacio, it was the written word that gave him the opportunity of a ‘better life and a better body’. But Enrique Goded, his brother Juan Rodríguez, Father Manolo and later Manuel Berenguer, even Pedro Almodóvar and the cinema itself gave him a very sad ending instead. This is the story of Agrado from All About My Mother, or Tina from The Law of Desire, but gone terribly wrong. Like Kika the ending of Bad Education, with its inconclusive resolution and its boring text boxes is unsatisfactory. It’s as if, like with ‘Laura P.’ and Pablo Quintero, Almodóvar had lost control of his own creation. But, unlike the ending of his other movies, from Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap to Talk to Her, Bad Education does not conclude for the characters, it concludes for the film-maker.

CONCLUSION: Bad Bodies, Good Hearts In Bad Education, Almodóvar revisits his own career, retracing steps and remaking stories. This new trajectory takes him from the anachronistic but real threat of the past in Pepi, Luci, Bom, to the parody of the Church in Dark Habits, and from the trauma of sexual abuse by parental figures in The Law of Desire, Kika and Labyrinth of Passion, to the transformations of the body also featured in Labyrinth of Passion, Kika and All About My Mother. In Bad Education, Almodóvar also restates his interest in self-reflexive style and content, which we can trace back to Pepi, Luci, Bom and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and which is most successful in The Law of Desire. But something has happened to Almodóvar’s current characters in Bad Education that makes them different: they are bitter and unhappy. Unlike Agrado in All About My Mother, Tina in The Law of Desire or even Quety in Labyrinth of Passion, Ignacio is transformed in Bad Education into a monster because, unlike the other characters who seek reconciliation and healing through love, Ignacio is consumed, and destroyed, by hate. We may recall how Ricky in Tie Me Up! offers his body in a sort of Christ-like fashion to redeem Marina’s past sins, which is comparable to Ignacio’s fate vis-à-vis Father Manolo and his brother Juan. But neither Juan nor Ignacio are redeemable. Paradoxically while both ‘Father Manolo’ in ‘The Visit’ and Manuel Berenguer are presented in a somewhat sympathetic light, or at least show some repentance, Ignacio is doomed apparently from the beginning. But the real Ignacio is ultimately a marginal character, showing up three quarters of the way into the movie for a narrative turn that is neither surprising nor satisfying (since there is so much narrative information in the movie that prefigures Ignacio’s fate). As a principal character, Ignacio’s brother Juan/Ángel is the one that is truly unique in Almodóvar’s career in one particular area: he is, without a doubt, the only central character in the director’s universe, the only character around whom the narrative is structured, who is fatally, irredeemably loveless. Juan neither gives nor receives

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love and thus he cannot be redeemed either. As a criminal, an impostor and a fraud he is hardly unique, for such characters often appear with much narrative significance in Almodóvar’s movies, for instance Nicholas in Kika and Ángel in The Law of Desire. And as a character in a transitional identity phase he is in the company of some of Almodóvar’s best, notably Tina and Agrado. It is his ‘lovelessness’ that really sets Juan Rodríguez apart from all his brethren in Almodóvar’s imaginary. Ángel Andrade/Juan Rodríguez inspires no sympathy because his usurpation of his brother’s identity comes without the real pain and trauma that Ignacio suffered: as far as we know Ángel was not the victim of sexual abuse; he pretended to be a victim in order to gain sympathy, to advance his career and to treat his own prejudices as if they were comparable to his brother’s past. To wit, Ángel has no real ‘history’, no real past and so no real trauma. He seems to be a character who has emerged from a historical vacuum and unlike most other Almodóvar characters, all of whom are either literally or metaphorically profoundly aware of Spain’s history and their cultural context, Juan is a character who is historically indecipherable. He is an actor in the entire, most extreme sense of the word: there is no ‘real’ Juan, only his own representation of himself; there’s only performance. What Juan does is abduct history without having to live it. There are three temporal segments intersected in Bad Education and by extension in ‘The Visit’: 1980, 1977 and 1964. These present an interesting choice of historical moments in Spain’s evolution for the characters’ peripeteia. The mid1960s were Franco’s Spain’s most stable years after the country’s incorporation into the UN in 1952 and after the 1953 defence agreement with the USA gave the nation financial and military aid. So, the 1964 flashback written into ‘The Visit’ places the worst horrors of Ignacio’s life at the height and apogee of Franco’s regime. The 1977 context or contemporary segment of ‘The Visit’, however, differs greatly by suggesting that ‘Ignacio/Zahara’s’ naive trust in the democratic process is still to be proven. (‘People have changed. This is 1977. This society values my freedom more than your hypocrisy.’) Zahara in ‘The Visit’ truly believes that Spain’s new democracy can protect him, that he has gained rights previously denied to someone like him under Franco. In fact in 1977, Spain saw its first real steps

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towards democracy with the legalisation of opposition parties, the first free congressional elections since 1936 and the subsequent ratification of the new constitution in 1978. The ending of ‘The Visit’ as revised by Enrique Goded, however, reminds us that Spain’s young democracy, while real, is still under threat, as in fact it was with the coup attempts of 1981. Zahara’s sad ending in the ‘The Visit’, however, still offers some sense of hope to Enrique Goded, who, as the final text box indicates, flourishes after the storm. Thus in Bad Education Almodóvar seems to re-evaluate his career and exorcise some grudge with the past. In the process he offers us an admittedly complicated mise en abîme of self-reflexive techniques, a triptych structure reminiscent of Vertigo, a tragic antihero and a loveless protagonist. Almodóvar’s insistence on context (1964, 1977, 1980), however, proves the inevitability of history around his characters, as also suggested by the references to ‘Hijos de España’ and Sara Montiel, both icons of Spain’s Fascist past. Even in spite of their own efforts (as Juan’s story suggests), even if they are not fully conscious of it (like the tragic Ignacio), the weight of Spain’s historical process, during and after Franco, continues to fatally enclose Almodóvar’s characters. All Almodóvar’s characters are, it seems, bound by history, children of the unholy matrimony of Franco and the Catholic Church. They oscillate between repression and unrestraint; they are often insane, unstable, insecure or continuously inventing and re-inventing themselves. Out of that national ‘family’ eventually emerges a new generation of ‘troubled’ children in Almodóvar movies who evolve visibly and logically from the maladjusted, psychologically disturbed, even criminal (like Antonio Banderas in both The Law of Desire and Matador), into the ‘healed’, colourful, but at least functional families which (with a lot of physical and psychological pain) emerge from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! and Volver. In Tie Me Up! for instance, the junky porn star Marina (Víctoria Abril) is beaten up and tied up by her would-be lover, Ricky (Antonio Banderas). Later, while she sleeps, he draws her image (itself an ancient ritual representing ‘possession’) and narrates his own life in a drawing as a train line beginning with death, despair and abandonment, but leading to the happy ending of ‘coupling’ with Marina (there is the beautiful scene of

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the two of them healing each other’s wounds in front of the bathroom mirror and the tiny figure of Spain in the shower curtain in the background). In High Heels, the neglectful and narcissistic mother, Becky (Marisa Paredes), redeems herself by practically dying in her daughter’s arms in a gesture that allows the daughter a second chance at happiness (‘In life I gave her nothing,’ says Becky, ‘let my death be of some use to her’). And in All About My Mother, the body of the novice Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz) is ultimately sacrificed for the good of the family, while the miraculous neutralisation of the AIDS virus by Rosa’s son, Esteban III, suggests the possibility of healing the wounds of the past and fully reconstituting a new, ‘healthy’ national family (even if it’s somewhat ‘queer’, even if it hurts, even if someone has to die). Throughout his career, Almodóvar’s revisionist historical approach has changed from the construction of a new past in the films of the 1980s, to the acceptance of the present, to reconciling generational differences, as suggested in Live Flesh, All About My Mother and Talk to Her. In Live Flesh, the protagonist observes the streets full of people on Christmas night while in a taxi with his girlfriend en route to the maternity ward. He warmly tells his unborn child to be patient and not fear anything because, unlike twenty-six years before when he was born, ‘Luckily, in Spain it’s been a long time since we’ve been afraid.’1 In Talk to Her, he revisits Buñuel’s scenario of the ‘sleeping beauty’ and the adoption of rape as a narrative tool to suggest, like Buñuel and many others before him, the analogy of the nation and the body. In Almodóvar’s version, however, while the past is equally traumatic, the future looks much more promising than Buñuel’s. Through the juxtaposed motifs of the body and the nation, Almodóvar suggests several conclusions that unequivocally point to a happy ending. In his most recent films, Almodóvar’s twenty-six-year search for an understanding of the nation’s identity crisis settles into the suggestion of ambiguity as Spain’s strongest sign of current stability. As the director himself prophesied in 1994, ‘When one makes a film, writes a book or paints a picture, one can correct reality, improve on it.’2 In the last twenty-six years, Spain has steadily moved towards more open politics, higher tolerance of regional differences and cultural identities, an effective democratic political structure and an impor-

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tant place in the economic community of the European Union. At once synopses and re-evaluations of his past career, in All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education and Volver, Almodóvar makes the outrageous believable while reaching that point where art imitates, corrects and indeed improves on reality.

NOTES Introduction 1. Some sources list Almodóvar’s date of birth as 25 September 1951. 2. Gwynne Edwards says the critical reception in Spain to many Almodóvar films was ‘usually divided’ citing reviews of Matador, but suggests this was common. Almodóvar: Labyrinths of Passion (London: Peter Owen, 2001), pp. 56–7. 3. See Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 101–2. 4. Marvin D’Lugo, ‘Almodóvar’s City of Desire’, in Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 13 no. 4 (1991), p. 48. 5. Alejandro Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 1999). 6. Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid, pp. 117–22. 7. Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 429–33. 8. Ibid., p. 433. 9. Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid, p. 174. All translations to English from Yarza’s book are my own. 10. D’Lugo, ‘Almodóvar’s City of Desire’, p. 50. 11. Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid, p. 90. 12. See Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 432; Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid, pp. 117–22. See

13.

14.

15. 16.

also Rob Stone, Spanish Cinema (Harlow: Pearson, 2002), pp.110–32. See the works by Acevedo-Muñoz, D’Lugo, Kinder, Smith and Yarza cited here. See also José M. Del Pino, ‘La tradición permanente: apuntes sobre casticismo y europeísmo en los fines de siglo’, in John P. Gabriele (ed.), Nuevas perspectives sobre el 98 (Madrid: Iberoamericana, Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1999), pp. 161–70. See Pedro Almodóvar, Patty Diphusa and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). See also Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews, edited by Paula WilloquetMaricondi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), pp. xvii–xx. In her excellent study La poética de Pedro Almodóvar (Barcelona: Littera, 2001), Sasa Markus analyses Almodóvar’s debt to the style, context and mode of production of Andy Warhol’s work, particularly his films with Paul Morrissey, pp. 40–3. In L’Amour (1973) for instance, two American women search for love and marriage in Paris, an inspirational plot for Almodóvar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 437. See my article ‘The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 21 no. 1, pp. 25–38.

NOTES

1 – The Aesthetics of Bad Taste 1. Mark Allinson, ‘The Construction of Youth in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s’, in Barry Jordan and Rikky MorganTamosunas (eds), Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 268–9. 2. Ibid. 3. See Alejandro Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 1999). 4. Spain’s first democratic elections of the post-Franco era were held in 1977 and a new democratic constitution approved by the cortes in 1978, under the leadership of King Juan Carlos. 5. Mark Allinson points out that the contest/game-show parody was the original idea behind the scripting of Pepi, Luci, Bom as a parody of the political process. See Allinson’s A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 10, 16, 36. 6. Fear of a coup attempt from right-wing military elements was real through the transition bringing fears of a return to dictatorship. In fact, military coups d’état were attempted and stopped twice in 1981. 7. Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth, p. 85. See also Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso, 2000), p.12. 8. Juan Francia and Julio Pérez-Perucha, ‘First Film: Pedro Almodóvar’, in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (ed.), Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), p. 4.

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9. On Almodóvar’s visual style in Pepi, Luci, Bom, see Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 160–4. 10. See Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid, ‘Introduction’ and Chapter 1. 11. Paul Julian Smith describes this character as ‘a caricature fascist, as brutal as he is corrupt’. Smith, Desire Unlimited, p. 10. 12. On this point see also Gwynne Edwards, Almodóvar: Labyrinths of Passion (London: Peter Owen, 2001), pp. 29–30. 13. Smith, Desire Unlimited, pp. 23–4. 14. Common in Spain and other European and Latin American countries, the ‘photonovella’ is a cheap publication that tells lurid sexual or criminal stories through a series of still photographs with dialogue balloons and other comic-book characteristics. They are usually explicit and exploit sexual and violent situations. 15. The column and some other materials from La luna and other sources were published in English as Patty Diphusa and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 16. The island of Contadora, off the Pacific Coast of Panama, was considered in the 1980s to be both a tropical paradise and a diplomatic heaven, where peace talks began in January 1983 and a (failed) treaty was signed among Central American nations in 1984. 17. See Marvin D’Lugo ‘Almodóvar’s City of Desire’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 13 no. 4 (1991), pp. 47–65. 18. The PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) was elected to power in Spain’s third general election after Franco, in 1982.

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19. Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 125–7. 20. See D’Lugo, ‘Almodóvar’s City of Desire’, pp. 53–4. 21. Edwards, Labyrinths of Passion, pp. 34–9 and Smith, Desire Unlimited, pp. 37–40. 22. See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 58–69. 23. For a more formal analysis of the scene and the music’s significance, see Smith, Desire Unlimited, pp. 42–3. 24. The presence of Hitchcock in Almodóvar’s movies is insistent and significant, from the few bars from Bernard Herrman’s Psycho score in Pepi, Luci, Bom to the direct references in Matador, Women on the Verge, High Heels, Kika and Talk to Her, all of which are discussed later. 25. Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), Spain’s most distinguished poet and playwright, wrote the play in 1936. The play was first produced and published in Buenos Aires in 1945, and not produced in Spain until 1964. It tells the story of the twice widowed title character, Bernarda Alba, and her cripplingly repressive control over her five daughters, who live ‘cloistered’ in a sort of eternal mourning (for Bernarda’s two dead husbands). The influence of the play in Almodóvar’s movie is evident, especially since in García Lorca’s play the house and the women’s internment there is referred to as both ‘prison’ and ‘convent’. 26. Among Chávarri’s best-known films are Las bicicletas son para el verano (1984)

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adapted from the famous play by Fernando Fernán Gómez about a Madrid family’s survival during the Civil War, and El desencanto, a documentary produced by Elías Querejeta. 27. Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 8. 28. Smith, Desire Unlimited, p. 57.

2 – Memory, Identity and Style 1. In Spain, the art and sport of bullfighting is called tauromaquia and is considered, culturally and socially, a major event. The matador’s craft, in which he deals (the verb in Spanish is ‘lidiar’) with the bull, very much seducing the animal into death, is also called faena which translates best as ‘labour’. 2. Founded in Madrid in 1928 by Father Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer (1902–1975), and recognised by Pope Pius XII in 1950, the Opus Dei is a devout organisation of priests, nuns and lay members of the Church, dedicated to prayer, conversion and the confession of sins. While its focus is to drive its members to live a saintly life through professional, familial and social devotion, the Opus Dei is considered by critics a reactionary organisation, deeply anchored in traditional patriarchal family values. Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992 and canonised into sainthood in 2002. 3. On this point, and the significance of symmetrical compositions, mirrors and reflections in other Almodóvar films see Allinson, pp. 189–93.

NOTES

4. Prelatura del Opus Dei (San Juan, Puerto Rico) ‘Hoja Informativa’, no. 14, June 2000, p. 4. 5. See also Gwynne Edwards, Almodóvar: Labyrinths of Passion, (London: Peter Owen, 2001), pp. 59–61, Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 67–70 and Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 81–3. 6. For a persuasive and terrific analysis of the relationships between bullfighting and gender, see Leora Lev’s article, ‘Tauromachy as Spectacle of Gender Revision in Matador’, in Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris (eds), PostFranco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 73–86. 7. In Spanish films and television many actors who are hired for their physique are often dubbed by other actors. In coproductions with other European countries foreign actors’ voices are dubbed to minimise accents and mispronunciations. The post-dubbing industry is a major employer in the Spanish film industry, providing work for many technicians, directors, translators, screenwriters and actors even in times of local production lulls. 8. See Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (ed.), Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), pp. xvii–xx. 9. The story of ‘Laura P.’, at least superficially, already presents some of the themes of Almodóvar’s next actual feature film project, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Instead of

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10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

revenge of course, Women on the Verge is another story about reconciliation and the reconstitution of the family. See Smith, Desire Unlimited, pp. 85–8. The conservative Popular Party was in fact elected to government in the March 1996 elections, and José María Aznar named Prime Minister shortly thereafter. See Pedro Almodóvar and Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, trans. Yves Baiquères (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 147. See Smith, Desire Unlimited, p. 112. See also Alejandro Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 1999), pp. 35–8. See Peter W. Evans, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (London: BFI, 1996), pp. 15–18. For more on this topic see Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 91. See for example, Raymond Bellour, “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion”, in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 311–31. Also Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 58–69. See also Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Doane, The Desire to Desire.

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17. Almodóvar and Strauss, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, p. 147. 18. William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 22. 19. Ibid., p. 271. 20. Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 198–200. 21. See Marvin D’Lugo ‘Almodóvar’s City of Desire’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 13 no. 4 ( 1991), pp. 47–65 (49). 22. Lesley Brill, The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 200–1. 23. See Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson, ‘Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism’, in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 193–206. 24. Stam and Pearson, ‘Hitchcock’s Rear Window’, p. 196. 25. François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 291–2. 26. See Margaret Horwitz, ‘The Birds: A Mother’s Love’, in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 279–87 (279). 27. Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema, pp. 198–200. 28. Truffaut and Hitchcock, Hitchcock/ Truffaut, p. 179. 29. Brill, The Hitchcock Romance, p. 227. 30. Ibid., p. 200.

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31. Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 13–18; Edwards, Almodóvar, pp. 18–21; Evans, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, pp. 12–13; Kinder, Blood Cinema, pp. 247–62; Smith, Desire Unlimited, pp. 1–4, 9–12; Vernon and Morris, Post-Franco, Postmodern, pp. 5–8. 32. See José M. Del Pino, ‘La tradición permanente: apuntes sobre casticismo y europeísmo en los fines de siglo’, in John P. Gabriele (ed.), Nuevas perspectives sobre el 98 (Madrid: Iberoamericana, Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1999), pp. 161–70 (170). See also Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, ‘The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 21 no. 1, pp. 25–38. 33. Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid. See especially Yarza’s excellent ‘Introduction’ and ‘Chapter 1’. 34. See my article ‘The Body and Spain’, cited above, and adapted into part of Chapter 4 of this book. 35. The Catholic icons of the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary show the two figures commonly side by side, each with one hand extended in a wave and the other one holding the exposed heart in flames at chest height. 36. In fact, the reference can be considered specific, since Victoria Abril herself made her first screen leading appearances in Vicente Aranda’s Cambio de sexo (Sex Change, 1976) and La muchacha de las bragas de oro (The girl with the golden panties, 1979) both instrumental films in the early post-Franco period in their treatment of sexual and physical

NOTES

transformations as allegories of the nation’s own transition. Of course these themes are essential in Almodóvar’s oeuvre, and certainly not unique to Aranda. But in the late 1980s, Aranda’s treatment of sexuality seemed to have lost its sensationalist impact. In ¡Átame!, Almodóvar suggests that Spanish cinema is transitioning from sexuality as allegory to relationships as allegory. See Rob Stone, Spanish Cinema (Harlow: Pearson, 2002), in particular, pp. 114–20.

3 – Figures of Desire 1. For more on the significance of the performance and songs, see Mark Allinson, A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 204–5. 2. The song’s lyrics, slightly altered for the movie, go like this: If you are in deep sorrow, think of me. If you feel like crying, think of me. You see, I revere your divine image. Your childish mouth, which being so youthful taught me how to sin . . . Think of me, when you suffer. When you cry, think of me too. When you want to, take my life away, I don’t want it, it’s no good to me without you . . . This translation is my own. 3. See Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 272–327. 4. By Ryuichi Sakamoto, actor and composer in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987). 5. Allinson’s analysis of the motifs of glass and mirrors in Almodóvar is very

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helpful here. See A Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 186–93. 6. As seen also in Almodóvar’s most evident influences from Hollywood melodrama, Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli. See Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); see also Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 512–35. 7. See Pedro Almodóvar and Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, trans. Yves Baiquères (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 160–1. 8. See note 5. 9. While the origin of the poem is unknown, Almodóvar told Frédéric Strauss that his mother used to recite the poem from memory (Almodóvar and Strauss, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, p.160). The translation is my own. 10. Pedro Almodóvar interview with Paul Julian Smith in Sight & Sound, reprinted in Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 171–9. 11. Ibid., p. 175. 12. As an intertextual presence, Rich and Famous is a typical Almodóvar allusion: the film of course, by the long-time closeted Hollywood gay director George Cukor, also tells the story of two girlfriends, one a writer of ‘prestige’ literature and the other of ‘trashy’ romance novels, who maintain a solid friendship over various years, relationships and life changes. In some

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13.

14.

15.

16.

ways, Leo and Ángel present a somewhat abridged version of that relationship, which Ángel very self-reflexively acknowledges. Ruth Rendell, Live Flesh (London: Kingsmarkham Books, 1986). Almodóvar drops, among other things, the literal and symbolic meaning of Rendell’s title. ‘Live flesh’ in the novel refers to Victor’s awareness of an involuntary cheek muscle movement (‘chorea’), which occurs in moments of anxiety and tension and which is linked to ailments of the central nervous system. There’s no such reference in Almodóvar’s film, where the title acquires the symbolism of open wounds or sexual activity. For more on Archibaldo de la Cruz, see my book Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Chapter 6. See also Víctor Fuentes, ‘Pulsiones y perversiones en el cine de Buñuel y en el de Almodóvar’, in Turia-Revista Cultural, no. 76 (2005), pp. 192–209. This special issue of Turia contains various essays on Buñuel’s influence on Almodóvar. Sasa Markus analyses the ghost of Buñuel in Almodóvar through surrealist themes and motifs, but makes only passing reference to Buñuel’s Archibaldo de la Cruz. See Sasa Markus, La poética de Pedro Almodóvar, (Barcelona: Littera, 2001), pp. 103–12. See also Gwynne Edwards’s excellent analysis in Almodóvar: Labyrinths of Passion (London: Peter Owen, 2001), pp. 165–6. In the Buñuel film, Archibaldo fancies himself a great murderer but is

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constantly unable to commit his crimes due to a number of often-ridiculous external circumstances. His ‘impotence’ to kill, of course, has been likened to sexual inadequacy by most critics, including myself. See note 14. 17. See Almodóvar’s official site and web diary at: . Quote retrieved 24 November, 2006. 18. Paul Julian Smith, Volver review, Sight & Sound vol. 16 no. 6, June 2006, p. 16. 19. There is a shot that turns 360° in All About My Mother when Manuela first approaches and holds her dead son’s body, effectively conveying the character’s psychological reaction to the most traumatic event in her life. But, the Dutch-angle in Volver is a different formal feature and serves a new function here as well. 20. ‘Volver’ by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera. The translation is my own: ‘Volver . . . con la frente marchita, las nieves del tiempo platearon mi sien. Sentir, ques es un soplo la vida, que veinte años no es nada, que febril la Mirada, que errante en las sombras te busca y te nombra. Vivir con el alma aferrada a un dulce recuerdo que lloro otra vez . . .’ 21. Smith, Volver review, p. 16.

4 – The Body and the Nation 1. Part of this chapter was previously published under the title, ‘The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother’, in Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 21 no. 1, Winter 2004. It is reproduced here, with some alterations,

NOTES

by permission of Taylor & Francis, . 2. See Paul Julian Smith’s excellent analysis of Kika in his book Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature and Sexuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983–1993 (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 37–55. 3. The name ‘Paul Bazzo’ is, of course, a pun. In Spanish the word ‘polvazo’ means ‘big fuck’. 4. Andrea’s choices are movies with sadistic plots involving the mutilation of women. The Sadist is an early film version of the December 1957–January 1958 killing spree perpetrated by Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate made famous later in ‘A’ films like Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). Circus of Horrors is the strange and moody story of a mad plastic surgeon whose patients end up monstrously mutilated and exploited, possibly how Andrea sees herself. 5. See Marsha Kinder’s perceptive discussion of Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive in her Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 126–33. 6. See Linda Williams’ analysis of train imagery and phallic symbolism (in Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire) in her book, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 190–1. See also Lesley Brill’s discussion of North by Northwest in The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films (Princeton, NJ:

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Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 3–21. 7. Recall the cited discussions in previous chapters by D’Lugo, Kinder, Smith, Yarza. 8. Alejandro Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 1999), p. 90; Smith, Desire Unlimited, pp. 87–8. 9. Smith, pp. 87–8. 10. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 247. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 194. 12. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Signet, 1972), p. 112. In italics in the original. 13. Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 253. 14. Pedro Almodóvar and Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar on Almodóvar trans. Yves Baignères (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 34. 15. William Rothman, Hitchcock, The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 33. 16. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 194. 17. As cited earlier, see Kinder, Blood Cinema, pp. 197–8, Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid, pp. 111–13 and Smith, pp. 33–4. 18. See my article, ‘The Body and Spain’. See also Gwynne Edwards, Almodóvar: Labyrinths of Passion (London: Peter Owen, 2001), pp. 180–200. 19. The character of Lydia González is based on a real woman bullfighter in Spain, Cristina Sánchez, who had a good career beginning in 1992, but retired in 1999 because of male prejudice. Like Lydia González in Talk to Her, Cristina Sánchez was also the daughter of a ‘banderillero’.

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20. We should note that after the Vatican II council begun by Pope John XXIII in 1960 suicide is no longer an irredeemably damning offence. The Church now acknowledges the possibility of repentance even in the last fractions of a second, when the attempt cannot be prevented. 21. It is not uncommon in Madrid’s expensive real estate and rental business for professionals like dentists, attorneys and physicians to have their offices and living quarters in divided sections of a single flat or house. That explains why, in his efforts to see Alicia, Benigno calls Dr Roncero’s practice for an appointment. 22. Víctor Fuentes, Buñuel en México: Iluminaciones sobre una pantalla pobre (Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses,1993), p. 137. 23. In his autobiography, Buñuel describes his surrealist, dream-like fantasy of drugging the Queen, who he describes as ‘a beautiful blonde’, to rape her in her sleep. It was, he says, one of the recurring sexual fantasies of his adolescence. Almodóvar revisits the scenario as Buñuel adapted it in his most celebrated Spanish film, Viridiana (Spain and Mexico, 1961). See My Last Sigh (New York: Vintage, 1984), p. 97. 24. Susan Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 94. 25. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, ‘Psychoanalytic Film Theory’, in Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in

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Film Semiotics (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 141. 26. Lapsley and Westlake, quoted in Flitterman-Lewis, ‘Psycholoanalytic Film Theory’, p. 142. 27. Ibid. 28. Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 778. 29. In 1980, the year when Pepi, Luci, Bom was released, Almodóvar had already made and released in alternative venues and private screenings many Super-8 and one 16mm short, with titles such as ‘Two Whores or Love Story that Ends in a Wedding’, ‘The Fall of Sodom’, ‘The Three Advantages of Ponte’, later used as the basis of the television commercials in Pepi, Luci, Bom, and even one entitled ‘Death on the Road’, suggestive of the news item read by Enrique Goded at the beginning of Bad Education. 30. The term ‘mindscreen’ was coined by Bruce Kawin in his 1978 book with that title. In essence it describes a type of first-person narration created and visualised by the movie character themselves. Much more complex than a subjective sequence or a flashback, the mindscreen is not only subjective, but also exists only in the character’s mind. See Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 31. See Kinder, Blood Cinema, pp. 68–70. According to Román Gubern, quoted by Kinder (p. 460, n. 19), El ultimo cuplé

NOTES

was ‘the most important commercial success in Spanish cinema since 1939 . . .’. Sara Montiel also had a Hollywood career in various films such as Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954). She was married to the American director Anthony Mann, and appeared in his film Serenade (1956). 32. This particular intersection in the movie is another anachronistic licence on Almodóvar’s part. Esa mujer, by the now distinguished director Mario Camus, was a 1969 release and could not have been seen by the young Ignacio and Enrique together in 1964, of course. Perhaps the shock value of seeing the two boys masturbating each other with the image of a nun on screen was important in Almodóvar’s continuous sin/sacred references in the movie.

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Conclusion 1. As José Del Pino has argued, the end of Kika and the province sequence in The Flower of My Secret also suggest Almodóvar’s effort to recover some previously troubling signs of identity and to help the ‘transitory’ present connect with the past. See José del Pino, ‘La tradición permanente: apuntes sobre casticismo y europeísmo en los fines de siglo’, in John P. Gabriele (ed.), Nuevas perspectivas sobre el 98 (Madrid: Iberoamericana, Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1999), pp. 161–70. 2. See Pedro Almodóvar and Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar and Almodóvar, trans. Yves Baignères (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 136.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto. Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto. ‘The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 21 no. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 25–38. Allinson, Mark. ‘The Construction of Youth in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s’, in Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (eds), Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 265–73. Allinson, Mark. A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001). Almodóvar, Pedro. Patty Diphusa and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Almodóvar, Pedro. Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews, Paula WilloquetMaricondi (ed.) (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). Almodóvar, Pedro and Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar on Almodóvar, trans. Yves Baignères (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1987). Altman, Rick. Film/Genre (London: BFI, 1999). Bellour, Raymond. ‘Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion’, in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 311–31. Brill, Lesley. The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh (New York: Vintage, 1984). Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Del Pino, José M. ‘La tradición permanente: apuntes sobre casticismo y europeísmo en los fines de siglo’, in John P. Gabriele (ed.), Nuevas perspectivas sobre el 98 (Madrid: Iberoamericana, Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1999), pp. 161–70. D’Lugo, Marvin. ‘Almodóvar’s City of Desire’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 13 no. 4 (1991), pp. 47–66. D’Lugo, Marvin. ‘Recent Spanish Cinema in National and Global

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Contexts’, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities vol. 21 no. 2 (2002), pp. 3–11. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Edwards, Gwynne. Almodóvar: Labyrinths of Passion (London: Peter Owen, 2001). Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Brandy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 512–35. Evans, Peter W. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (London: BFI, 1996). Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. ‘Psychoanalytic Film Theory’, in Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (London: Routledge, 1992). Fuentes, Víctor. Buñuel en México: Iluminaciones sobre una pantalla pobre (Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, 1993). Fuentes, Víctor. ‘Pulsiones y perversiones en el cine de Buñuel y en el de Almodóvar’, Turia-Revista Cultural no. 76 (2005), pp. 192–209. Hayward, Susan. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies (London: Routledge, 1996).

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Horwitz, Margaret. ‘The Birds: A Mother’s Love’, in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 279–87. Jordan, Barry and Rikki MorganTamosunas (eds), Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies (London: Arnold, 2000). Kawin, Bruce. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Lev, Leora. ‘Tauromachy as Spectacle of Gender Revision in Matador’, in Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris (eds), Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 73–86. Markus, Sasa. La poética de Pedro Almodóvar (Barcelona: Littera, 2001). Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 58–69.

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Prelatura del Opus Dei (San Juan, Puerto Rico) ‘Hoja Informativa’, no. 14, June 2000. Rendell, Ruth. Live Flesh (London: Kingsmarkham Books, 1986). Rothman, William. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Smith, Paul Julian. Vision Machines: Cinema, Literature and Sexuality in Spain and Cuba, 1983–1993 (London: Verso, 1996). Smith, Paul Julian. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London: Verso, 2000). Stam, Robert and Roberta Pearson. ‘Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism’, in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (eds), A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 193–206. Stone, Rob. Spanish Cinema (Harlow: Pearson, 2002).

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Studlar, Gaylyn. ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema’, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 773–90. Truffaut, François and Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). Vernon, Kathleen M. and Barbara Morris (eds), Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Signet, 1972). Yarza, Alejandro. Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 1999).

FILMOGRAPHY Film politico (Political Film, 1974)

Homemade Trailer for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf (1976)

Running time: 4 minutes Super 8mm

Running time: 5 minutes Super 8mm

Dos putas, o historia de amor que termina en boda (Two Whores, or Love Story That Ends in A Wedding, 1974)

Sea caritativo (Be Charitable, 1976)

Running time: 10 minutes Super 8mm

El sueño, o la estrella (The Dream, or the Star, 1975) Running time: 12 minutes Super 8mm

La caída de Sódoma (The Fall of Sodom, 1975) Running time: 10 minutes Super 8mm

Homenaje (Homage, 1975)

Running time: 5 minutes Super 8mm

Muerte en la carratera (Death on the Road, 1976) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Roberto Gómez Editing: Julio Peña Cast: Paloma Hurtado, Juan Lombardero, Pepe Maya, Miguel Ángel Requejo, Iván Villafranca, Carlos Villafranca Running time: 8 minutes Super 8mm

Running time: 10 minutes Super 8mm

Las tres ventajas de Ponte (The Three Advantages of Ponte, 1977)

Blancor (Whiteness, 1975)

Running time: 5 minutes Super 8mm

Running time: 5 minutes Super 8mm

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Sexo va, sexo viene (Sex Comes, Sex Goes, 1977) Running time: 17 minutes Super 8mm

Folle… folle… fólleme Tim (Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me Tim, 1978) Cast: Carmen Maura Running time: 9 minutes Super 8mm

Salomé (Salome, 1978) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Luciano Berriatúa Cast: Isabel Mestres, Fernando Hillbeck, Agustín Almodóvar Running time: 12 minutes 16mm

Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, 1980) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Paco Femenía Editing: José Salcedo Music: Little Nell, Alaska y Los Pegamoides, The Ju-Jus, Maleni Castro, Monna Bell Costume design: Manuela Camacho Cast: Carmen Maura, Olvido Gara

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‘Alaska’, Eva Siva, Félix Rotaeta, Kiti Manver, Julieta Serrano, Cecilia Roth, Cristina Sánchez Pascual, Fanny McNamara, Pedro Almodóvar Production: Félix Rotaeta, Pepón Coromina, Pastora Delgado, Esther Rambal Production company: Fígaro Films Running time: 80 minutes 16mm blown up to 35mm

Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passion, 1982) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández Editing: José Salcedo Music: Bernardo Bonezzi, Pedro Almodóvar, Fanny McNamara Songs: ‘Suck It To Me’ and ‘Gran Ganga’ by Pedro Almodóvar and Fanny McNamara Sound: Martin Müller Production design: Virginia Rubio Costume design: Alfredo Caral, Marina Rodríguez Cast: Cecilia Roth, Imanol Arias, Helga Liné, Antonio Banderas, Marta Fernández-Muro, Fernando Vivanco, Fanny McNamara, Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Pedro Almodóvar Production company: Alphaville S.A.

FILMOGRAPHY

Running time: 100 minutes 35mm

Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits, 1983) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández Editing: José Salcedo Music and songs: Morris Albert, Tite Curet Alonso, ‘Encadenados’: sung by Sol Pilas Sound: Martin Müller, Armin Fausten Production design: Pin Morales, Román Arango Costume design: Francis Montesinos, Teresa Nieto Cast: Julieta Serrano, Cristina SánchezPascual, Mary Carrillo, Marisa Paredes, Carmen Maura, Chus Lampreave, Lina Canalejas, Cecilia Roth, Manuel Zarzo, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Luis Calvo Production company: Tesauro S.A. Running time: 115 minutes 35mm

¿¡Qué he hecho yo para merecer ésto!? (What Have I Done to Deserve This!?, 1984) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández

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Editing: José Salcedo Music: Bernardo Bonezzi Songs: ‘La bien pagá’ by Perelló & Mostazo, sung by Miguel Molina; ‘Nur nicht aus Liebe Weinen’ by Theo Mackeben, sung by Sarah Leander Sound: Bernardo Menz Production design: Pin Morales, Román Arango Costume design: Cecilia Roth Cast: Carmen Maura, Ángel de Andrés López, Chus Lampreave, Juan Martínez, Miguel Ángel Herranz, Verónica Forqué, Kiti Manver, Jaime Chávarri, Katia Loritz, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Hervé Hachuel Production company: Tesauro S.A., Kaktus Producciones Cinematográficas S.A. Running time: 102 minutes 35mm

Matador (1986) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández Editing: José Salcedo Music: Bernardo Bonezzi Songs: ‘Espérame en el cielo’ by P. López Vidal, sung by Mina Sound: Bernard Ortion Production design: Román Arango,

306

José Morales, J. Mordes, Josep Rosell Costume design: Antonio Alvarado, Ángela Arregui, Ángeles Boada, José M. de Cossío, Francis Montesinos Cast: Assumpta Serna, Nacho Martínez, Antonio Banderas, Eusebio Poncela, Eva Cobo, Julieta Serrano, Carmen Maura, Chus Lampreave, Bibi Andersen, Verónica Forqué, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Andrés Vicente Gómez Production company: Cia Iberoamericana de TV, S.A. Running time: 96 minutes 35mm

La ley del deseo (The Law of Desire, 1987) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández Editing: José Salcedo Music: Bernardo Bonezzi, with music by Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri Shostakovich Songs: ‘Ne me quitte pas’ by Jacques Brel, sung by Maysa Mataraso; ‘Lo Dudo’ by C. Navarro, sung by Trio Los Panchos; ‘Déjame recordar’ by J. Sabre Marroquín, sung by Bola de Nieve Sound: James Willis Production design: Javier Fernández Costume design: José M. de Cossío

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Cast: Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Miguel Molina, Bibi Andersen, Fernando Guillén, Helga Liné, Fernando Guillén Cuervo, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Miguel Ángel Pérez Campos, Agustín Almodóvar Production company: El Deseo, S.A. and Lauren Films S.A. Running time: 102 minutes 35mm

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine Editing: José Salcedo Music: Bernardo Bonezzi Songs: ‘Soy infeliz’ by V. Romero, sung by Lola Beltrán; ‘Puro teatro’ by T. Curet Alonso, sung by La Lupe Sound: Gilles Ortion Production design: Félix Murcia Costume design: José M. de Cossío, Peris, Humberto Cornejo Cast: Carmen Maura, Julieta Serrano, Antonio Banderas, Fernando Guillén, María Barranco, Rossy de Palma, Kiti Manver, Loles León, Chus Lampreave, Agustín Almodóvar

FILMOGRAPHY

Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A. Running time: 95 minutes 35mm

¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1989) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine Editing: José Salcedo Music: Ennio Morricone Songs: ‘Resistiré’ by C. Toro Montero and Manuel de la Calva, sung by Dúo Dinámico; ‘Canción del alma’ by Los Coyotes, sung by Loles León Sound: Goldstein & Steinberg, S.A. Production design: Ferrán Sánchez Costume design: José M. de Cossío, Peris Cast: Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, Loles León, Francisco Rabal, Julieta Serrano, Rossy de Palma, María Barranco, Francisca Caballero, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Enrique Posner, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A. Running time: 101 minutes 35mm

Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991) Screenplay and direction: Pedro

307

Almodóvar Cinematography: Alfredo Mayo Editing: José Salcedo Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto, with music by Miles Davis and George Fenton Songs: ‘Un año de amor’ by Mogol, Testa, Ferrer and Pedro Almodóvar, sung by Luz Casal; ‘Piensa en mí’ by Agustín Lara, sung by Luz Casal, Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel Production design: Pierre Louis Thévenet, Studio Gati Costume design: José M. de Cossío Cast: Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes, Miguel Bosé, Féodor Atkine, Nacho Martínez, Pedro Díez del Corral, Bibi Andersen, Cristina Marcos, Rocío Muñoz, Mayrata O’Wisiedo, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., CiBy 2000 Running time: 113 minutes 35mm

Kika (1994) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Alfredo Mayo Editing: José Salcedo Music: E. Granados Campiña, Dámaso Pérez Prado, Bernard Herrman, Kurt Weill

308

Songs: ‘Luz de luna’ by A. Carrillo, sung by Chavela Vargas; ‘Se nos rompió el amor’ (traditional) sung by Fernanda and Bernarda de Utrera Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel Production design: Javier Fernández, Alain Bainée, Cristina Mampaso, Nuria San Juan Costume design: José M. de Cossío, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gianni Versace Cast: Verónica Forqué, Peter Coyote, Victoria Abril, Rossy de Palma, Bibi Andersen, Álex Casanovas, Santiago Lajusticia, Jesús Bonilla, Francisca Caballero, Agustín Almodóvar Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., CiBy 2000 Running time: 112 minutes 35mm

La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret, 1995) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Affonso Beato Editor: José Salcedo Music: Alberto Iglesias Songs: ‘Ay amor’ by J.J. Villa, sung by Bola de Nieve; ‘En el ultimo trago’ by J.A. Jiménez, sung by Chavela Vargas Sound: Bernardo Menz Production design: Wolfgang Burmann

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Costume design: Hugo Mezcua Cast: Marisa Paredes, Juan Echanove, Carmen Elías, Rossy de Palma, Chus Lampreave, Kiti Manver, Imanol Arias, Manuela Vargas, Joaquín Cortés Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., CiBy 2000 Running time: 103 minutes 35mm

Carne trémula (Live Flesh, 1997) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Based on the novel Live Flesh (1986) by Ruth Rendell Cinematography: Affonso Beato Editing: José Salcedo Music: Alberto Iglesias Sound: Bernardo Menz, J.A. Bermúdez Production design: Antxón Gómez Costume design: José M. de Cossío Cast: Liberto Rabal, Javier Bardem, Francesca Neri, Ángela Molina, José Sancho, Penélope Cruz, Pilar Bardem, Álex Angulo Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., CiBy 2000 Running time: 101 minutes 35mm

FILMOGRAPHY

Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Affonso Beato Editing: José Salcedo Music: Alberto Iglesias Sound: Miguel Rejas Production design: Antxón Gómez Costume design: José M. Cossío, Sabine Daigeler Cast: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz, Candela Peña, Antonia San Juan, Rosa María Sardá, Eloy Azorín, Carlos Lozano, Toni Cantó, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Fernando Guillén Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., Renn Productions, France 2 Cinéma Running time: 99 minutes 35mm

“Hable con ella” (Talk to Her, 2002) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe Editing: José Salcedo Music: Alberto Iglesias Songs: ‘Cucurrucucú, paloma’ by T. Méndez Sosa, sung by Caetano Veloso Sound: Miguel Rejas

309

Production design: Antxón Gómez Costume design: Sonia Grande Cast: Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Rosario Flores, Leonor Watling, Geraldine Chaplin, Mariola Fuentes, Paz Vega, Fele Martínez, Elena Anaya, Loles León, Chus Lampreave, Agustín Almodóvar, and Pina Bausch Tantztheatre Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., A3Tv, Vía Digital Running time: 114 minutes 35mm

La mala educación (Bad Education, 2004) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine Editing: José Salcedo Music: Alberto Iglesias Songs: ‘Quizás, quizás, quizás’ by Oswaldo Farres, sung by Sara Montiel; ‘Maniquí Parisien’ by A. Roses Berdiel and M. Aniesa Pelayo, sung by Sara Montiel; ‘Moon River’, by J. Mercer and H. Mancini, sung by Pedro J. Sánchez Martínez; ‘Torna a Surriento’ by G.B. and E. De Curtis, sung by Pedro J. Sánchez Martínez Sound: Miguel Rejas Production design: Antxón Gómez

310

Costume design: Paco Delgado, Jean Paul Gaultier Cast: Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Daniel Giménez-Cacho, Lluís Homar, Francisco Maestre, Francisco Boira, Juan Fernández, Ignacio Pérez, Raúl García Forneiro, Javier Cámara Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., Ica A, Televisión Española, Canal + Running time: 106 minutes 35mm

Volver (2006) Screenplay and direction: Pedro Almodóvar Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine Editing: José Salcedo

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Music: Alberto Iglesias Songs: ‘Volver’ by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera, sung by Estrella Morente Sound: José Antonio Bermúdez, Miguel Rejas Production design: Salvador Parra Costume design: Sabine Daigeler Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lola Dueñas, Carmen Maura, Yohana Cobo, Blanca Portillo, Chus Lampreave, Antonio de la Torre, María Isabel Díaz Production: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García Production company: El Deseo, S.A., Canal + España, Televisión Española Running time: 120 minutes 35mm

List of Illustrations Whilst considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future editions. Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, Figaro Films; Labyrinth of Passion, Alphaville; Dark Habits, Tesauro; What Have I Done This!?, Tesauro/Kaktus Producciones; Matador, Cía. Iberoamericana de TV; The Law of Desire, El Deseo/ Laurenfilm, S.A.; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, El Deseo/Laurenfilm, S.A.; Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, El Deseo; High Heels, El Deseo/CiBy 2000; The Flower of My Secret, El Deseo/CiBy 2000; Live Flesh, El Deseo/CiBy 2000/France 3 Cinéma; Volver, © El Deseo; Kika, El Deseo/CiBy 2000; All About My Mother, ©El Deseo/ © Renn Productions/© France 2 Cinéma; Talk to Her, © El Deseo; Bad Education, © El Deseo; Volver, © El Deseo.

INDEX Page numbers in italics denote illustrations; n = endnote.

Abril, Victoria 3, 118, 121, 130, 135, 147, 207, 210, 234, 287 abuse of children by priests 263, 269, 274–5 as metaphor 24 physical 58 sexual 32–3, 53, 78, 83, 91, 236, 285, 286 see also rape; violence, sexual acting, quality of 26 advertisements see commercials and advertisements Aguirresarobe, Javier 245 Alaska y los Pegamoides 8 Albacete 39 Alcaine, José Luis 164, 192, 273 Aldrich, Robert 299n All About Eve (1950) 221, 229 All About My Mother (1999) 220–40, 231, 289 analogies 10 authenticity 209 and creative process 158 father figures 191 and The Flower of My Secret (1996) 154 homosexuality 251 hospital scenes 245 identity 192 influences on 62, 69, 96, 116, 146

All About My Mother cont. intertextuality 6 lack of sexual content 94 linear narrative 243–4 as melodrama 152, 159, 162, 194, 260 mirror motif 208 mother figures 90, 193, 196, 201–2, 288 profile shot 104 reconciliation 199, 259 success of 12, 203, 264 theatricality 17, 57, 87, 128, 143, 153, 276, 279 title 183 transition 240–1, 261, 263, 285 All That Heaven Allows (1955) 37 Allinson, Mark 8, 37, 115 Almagro 167–8, 202 Almodóvar, Agustín 30, 30, 67, 79 Almodóvar, María Jesús 185 Almodóvar, Pedro as auteur 78 cameo appearances 15–16, 16, 29–31, 53, 69–70 Patty Diphusa 95 ‘Scrotum in the Wind’ 95 short films, Super-8 5, 298n Alonso, Anabel 208 Althusser, Louis 206

Altman, Robert 278 Amores perros (2000) 264 L’Amour (1973) 290n Andersen, Bibi 76, 82, 87, 142, 144, 145, 208, 211 Angélica, Ofelia 26 The Apartment (1960) 160 Aranda, Vicente 6, 119, 294n Arias, Imanol 26, 162, 225 Atkine, Feodor 138 authenticity 209, 211, 220, 222, 227, 230–1, 235–6, 239, 280 authority, masculine 10, 11, 17, 21, 28, 36, 86, 90 authorship 39–40, 60, 79, 80, 156, 159, 204, 205–6, 221 crisis 211–12, 219 autobiography 184 Autumn Sonata (1978) 19, 69, 95, 135, 145–6, 152 Aznar, José María 91, 180, 293n Azorin, Eloy 221 babies 25, 260, 263 Bacall, Lauren 42 Bad Education (2004) 263–89, 281, 282, 285–7 analogies 10 as autobiography 285, 289 ‘The Bomb’ sequence 265–6

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312

Bad Education cont. Catholicism 36, 150 controversiality 204 creative process 158 flashbacks 206 homosexuality 251 influences on 117 murder of father figure 188 relationship to past 132 self-reflexivity 7, 95, 133, 183 sexual repression and abuse 64, 83 success 1 temporal segments 286 theatricality 42, 97 ‘The Visit’ narrative 265, 266, 268, 270, 274, 275, 276–9, 280, 286, 287 and Volver 192, 202 bad taste, aesthetics of 8–61, 135 Badlands (1973) 297n Balaguer, Father Josemaría Escrivá de 292n ballet 241, 242, 243, 248, 260 Banderas, Antonio 21, 29, 30, 63, 65, 77, 80, 86, 90, 97, 118, 130, 159, 277, 287 Barcelona 223, 224–5, 229, 239 Paralympics 173 Temple of the Holy Family 224–5 Bardem, Javier 171 Bardot, Brigitte 42, 144 Barnes, Djuna 156, 157 Barranco, María 97 Basque separatism 4 Bass, Saul 264 battle of the sexes 232

Bausch, Pina 241, 242, 243, 248, 260 Beato, Affonso 164 Belle de jour (1967) 119, 182 Bellour, Raymond 98 Beltrán, Lola 97 Bergen, Candice 169 Bergman, Ingmar 6, 19, 62, 69, 95, 102, 135, 145–6, 152, 196 Bergman, Ingrid 95, 146, 168 Bicycle Thieves (1948) 60 Bigas Luna, Juan José 6, 233 biography 206 The Birds (1963) 96, 98, 99, 109, 112 birth canal metaphor 224 Bisset, Jacqueline 169 Blackmail (1929) 98 body motif 3, 199, 240 body/nation metaphor 42, 154, 203, 204, 220–84 Bogart, Humphrey 168 Boira, Francisco 280, 281 Borau, José Luis 119 Bosé, Miguel 139, 140, 141 Bowles, Jane 156 Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) 267, 268 Brel, Jacques 81, 236 Brihuega 242 Brill, Lesley 107, 114 The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films 115 bullfighting 2, 4, 63–4, 67–72, 73, 74, 78, 238, 241, 242–5, 255, 261 colours of 65, 67–8, 69–70, 75, 76

Buñuel, Luis 1, 6, 60, 104, 119, 146, 171, 173, 182, 205, 212–14, 224, 240, 241, 252, 262, 288 Burroughs, William 206 Caballero, Francisca (Doña Paquita) 55, 123, 126, 185, 202, 205 Cáceres 5, 132 ‘Café Müller’ 248 Calzada de Calatraba 1, 5, 167 Cámara, Javier 241, 258, 267 Cambio de sexo (1976) 294n Camille (1936) 233 Camus, Mario 299n Canary Islands 223, 225, 226, 239 cannibalisation 62 Capote, Truman 268 caretaking theme 245, 250, 251–2, 255–6 Carrero Blanco, Luis 4 Carrillo, Mari 37 Carroll, Leo G. 112 Cartland, Barbara 156 Casablanca 168 Casal, Luz 143 Casanovas, Alex 205 Cassavetes, John 6 Cataluña 223 Catholicism, Catholic Church 2, 3, 4, 29, 36–9, 47, 48, 64, 66, 68, 73, 78, 91, 150, 238, 264, 287 in USA 263 celebrity 204 censorship 12, 14, 44 Chagall, Marc 228 Chaplin, Geraldine 247–8, 249

INDEX

Chapman, Michael 37 Charles III, King 171 Chávarri, Jaime 56 Chekhov, Michael 112 Un chien andalou (1929) 205, 213, 214 Chinchón 76 Ciges, Luis 28 circular narrative 229, 260 Circus of Horrors (1960) 212 civil liberties 73, 181 clairvoyance 72–3, 76 close-ups 235, 266 extreme 238, 267 medium 278 Cobo, Eva 64 Cobo, Yohana 184 Cocteau, Jean, La Voix humaine 81, 84, 87, 236 coincidence, narrative 174 Colbert, Claudette 135 Colmenar de Oreja 162 comedy 37, 116, 233 comic relief 162, 234 screwball 1, 96, 97, 116 comic books and strips 5, 10 commercials and advertisements 1, 18–19, 35, 51, 96, 107, 126–7, 205 ‘Concierto para bongó’ 210 conservatism 89 Contadora 32 Coppola, Francis Ford 274 corruption 46 Cortazár, Julio 153 Cortés, Joaquín 154, 155, 168 coups, military 291n Coyote, Peter 205 Crawford, Joan 101, 102–3, 236

313

creative process 44, 157, 158–9, 265 credit sequences 264 Cría cuervos (1975) 248 The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) 171, 172, 182–3 Cruz, Penélope 170, 184, 227, 232 ‘Cucurrucucú paloma’ 246 Cukor, George 169, 233, 295n cultural anxiety 3, 5 cultural symbols 46, 78, 116 culture, high or low 212 Culture, Ministry of 79 Curtiz, Michael 135 Dahl, John 104 Dark Habits (1983) 2, 10, 36–48, 50, 53, 57, 61, 62, 66, 70, 84, 116, 130, 134, 150, 156, 190, 191, 211, 271, 272, 285 Davis, Bette 229 Davis, Miles 168 De Sica, Vittorio 60 dead, return to life of 192, 206, 213, 218, 219 death images of 69, 71, 205, 206 and love 74–5, 78 as metaphor 248 Deleuze, Gilles 235, 262 Cinema 2: The Time Image 230–1 democracy 2, 14, 15–16, 18, 26, 36, 50–1, 61, 73, 89–90, 179–80, 264, 271–2, 276, 286, 291n El Deseo, S.A. 79

desire 1, 195 aspirational 54–5 forbidden 41–3, 47, 86, 273 objects of 42, 268, 270, 272 sexual 205 Dial ‘M’ for Murder (1954) 96, 101, 102, 105, 106 Diario 16 270, 271 Diaz, María Isabel 190 Dietrich, Marlene 42 Diéz del Corral, Pedro 136 Dinesen, Isak 156 divorce 20 D’Lugo, Marvin 2, 3, 96 Doane, Mary Ann 98 Double Indemnity (1944) 283 Dracula (1992) 274 drag queens 264, 275–7 dream sequence 261–2 drugs 2, 40, 50, 51, 53, 54, 59, 70, 123, 124–5, 128, 171, 172, 226, 227, 233, 283 dubbing 80, 101, 102, 236 Duel in the Sun (1946) 69, 77, 273 Dueñas, Lola 184 Dúo Dinámico 122 Dutch-angle shot 296n Echanove, Juan 156 Edwards, Blake 267 Edwards, Gwynne 115, 172 Elías, Carmen 154 Elliot, Laura 102 Ellroy, James 153 ‘En el ultimo trago’ 162 Erice, Victor 6, 119, 224 Esa mujer (1969) 273 españolada 3 ‘Espérame en el cielo’ 77

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314

ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatsuna) 4 European Union 289 Evans, Peter W. 96, 115 excess, narrative 219 Extremadura 5, 50 families 14, 25–6, 35, 36, 47, 52–4, 60, 62, 75, 84, 87–8, 105, 118, 133, 135, 150, 169, 183, 197, 203, 204, 220, 228 fantasy 261–2 sadistic and masochistic 262 Fascism 2, 4, 12, 28, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 68, 70, 78, 95, 115, 127, 181 fashion 69–70 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 6, 196 father figures 2, 28–9, 105, 188–9, 191, 194, 215, 222–3, 228–9, 238, 240, 285 absent and harmful 2, 191, 226, 227, 238, 250 murder of 188, 234 reconciliation with 237–8 fear metaphor 177, 181, 288 fellatio 17, 31, 211, 266 female characters, treatment of 99–100, 117 Ferguson, Perry 106 Fernán Gómez, Fernando 228 Fernández, Adolfo 242 Fernández, Angel Luis 37, 245 Fernández-Muro, Marta 28 fetishism 72, 74, 79, 211, 259 film noir 282, 283

film-within-the-film 1920, 27, 79–80, 120–2, 249, 253, 265, 266 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 153 flagellation 209, 211 flamenco 2, 3, 4, 46, 120, 153–6, 160, 168, 169, 177, 182, 205 flashbacks 28, 91, 136, 206, 216–17, 246–7, 255, 259, 265, 280 within flashbacks 246–7, 263 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy 262 Flores, Rosario 241, 244, 246 The Flower of My Secret (1996) 153–69, 155, 166 authorship 17, 39–40, 211 camera technique 192, 215, 257 flamenco 177 hospital scenes 221, 245 identity 50 as mature narrative 219, 220 as melodrama 90, 153, 194, 245 mother figures 90, 184, 195, 196, 206 political motif 181, 183 reconciliation 152 return to the village 39, 54, 185, 186, 187, 200, 202, 218 strike scene 170 stylishness 7 suicide attempt 193 theatricality 221, 222 trauma of past 116 visual games 20 fluids, bodily 14, 40–1, 70

folkloric themes 11, 46 Ford, John 223 forgery 50, 52, 60 Forqué, Veronica 53, 59, 70, 205, 216 Fraga, Manuel 171 fragmentation 7, 160, 165, 179, 225, 226 Frame, Janet 156 frame-within-the-frame 194 France, Vichy regime 51 Franco, Francisco, regime Catholicism and nationalism of 3, 29, 36, 64, 91, 264, 287 characters born under 53, 59 Church and state under 65 death 4, 12, 40, 271 decline and end of 2, 4, 5, 6, 28, 61 Fascism of 115 height of 286 and Hitler 127 morality of 267 news item on health of head of state 136–7 recovery from 5, 107 references to 24, 32, 38 repression under 6, 10, 16, 24, 26, 44 Freud, Sigmund 224 Galicia 223, 239 Gara, Olvida ‘Alaska’ 11, 13 García Bernal, Gael 264, 266, 268 García Forneiro, Raúl 272 Gardel, Carlos 184 Gardner, Ava 42, 64 Gatica, Lucho 42 Gaudí, Antonio 224–5

INDEX

Gaultier, Jean Paul 266 Gaynor, Gloria 122 The General (1926) 223 ‘general erections’ contest 16, 17–18, 22, 272 genre crises 239 definition 220 instability of 1, 96, 116 mixed 1, 37, 62, 116, 283 Germany 127 golden shower 13, 40 Gómez, Antxón 233 González, Felipe 54, 163, 181 Granada 55 Grandinetti, Darío 241, 244 Guillén, Fernando 90, 96–7, 100, 101 Hawks, Howard 116 Hayden, Sterling 98, 101 Hayers, Sidney 212 Hayworth, Rita 42 healing process 42, 51, 61, 115–16, 123, 129, 133, 157, 182, 191, 223, 225–6, 233, 245, 263, 287, 288 Hedren, Tippi 109 Hepburn, Katharine 232 Herranz, Miguel Angel 50 Herrmann, Bernard 12–13, 97, 98, 134, 216, 264 High Heels (1991) 135–52, 147 absent fathers 2, 191, 222 authorship/identity 42, 53, 57 body motif 240 camera technique 164 creative process 158 cultural anxiety 3 family relationships 105

315

High Heels cont. healing process 116, 245, 263 homosexuality 251 influences 62, 69 media intersections 19 as melodrama 162, 194 mixed genres 1, 6, 283 mother figures 90, 95, 117, 184, 196, 199, 201, 202, 204, 229, 234, 250, 288 murder theme 188–9, 236 Oedipal conflict 176, 219 opening credits 264 return to the village 167 songs 22 stylishness 7 table scenes 185 theatricality 17, 42, 87, 128, 230, 273, 276, 279 visual games 20 high-angle shot 9, 77 Hitchcock, Alfred 6, 13, 30, 43, 62, 95–117, 134, 146, 164, 189, 197, 210, 213, 223–4, 254 female characters of 99–100 Hitchcock, Patricia 102 Hitler, Adolf 50, 56, 127 Hitler Youth 127 Homar, Lluis 278, 281 homoeroticism 63, 72 homophobia 15, 90, 276 homosexuality 2, 26, 34, 54, 60, 64, 72, 73, 80–1, 85, 86, 209, 211, 250–1, 275, 283 see also lesbianism horror films, conventions 273–4, 283 hospital scenes 221, 245 Hudson, Rock 245

‘I Am Unhappy’ 97, 99 ‘I Will Survive’ 122 iconography, religious 47, 48 identity 1, 2, 50, 53, 57, 80, 92, 137–8, 159, 192, 211, 220, 225 crises 26, 32, 35–6, 44, 46, 49, 60, 81, 83, 136, 145, 150, 152, 220, 226–8, 230, 238, 239–40, 265, 276, 288 formal 232 games 11–12, 20 gender 225 national 1–4, 96, 104–5, 134, 203, 204 personal 104 recognition of 236 reinvention of 192 sexual 33, 49, 96, 204, 238, 265 Iglesias, Alberto 153, 264 imagery, religious 129, 130, 134 Imitation of Life (1959) 135 immigration 128 impotence, sexual 72 incest 28–9, 31–5, 39, 84, 91, 188, 199, 200, 209, 222, 227, 236 Insdorf, Annette 229 instability 4, 5, 7 intertextuality 1, 6–7, 43, 96, 104, 133–4, 146, 221, 229 Interview (magazine) 30 The Iron Horse (1924) 223 Irréversible (2002) 219 Jamón, jamón (1992) 233 Jerez de la Frontera 86 Jobim, Antonio Carlos (Tom) 255

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John Paul II, Pope 43, 292n John XXIII, Pope 298n Johnny Guitar 98, 101, 102, 236 Jones, Jennifer 69 Juan Carlos, King 4, 12 Kazan, Elia 57, 62, 69, 96, 116 Keaton, Buster 223 Kelly, Grace 53, 102, 108 Kika (1993) 1, 3, 14, 20, 21, 42, 76, 77, 98, 104, 117, 146, 153, 188, 192, 199, 200, 202, 204–19, 222, 241, 254, 260, 261, 263, 265, 266, 269, 285, 286 Kilar, Wojciech 274 Kinder, Marsha 2–3, 105, 115, 234, 268 La Coruña 222, 223 La Iglesia, Eloy de 6 La Mancha 1, 5, 50, 169, 187, 202, 206 Labyrinth of Passion (1982) 26–36 absurdity of plot 27, 62, 219 analogies and allegory 10, 18, 21 authorship/identity 1, 2, 57 bodily fluids 14, 40–1 body motif 3, 240 cinematography 26 as early film 7, 12, 61–2, 115, 232 family theme 47 father figures 28–9, 191, 222 finale 76 incest 28, 33, 222

maturity of style 62 and ‘new’ Spain 271 opening 72 parent/child relationships 58, 90, 105, 116, 249 prostitution 225 punk culture in 8 self-reflexivity 39, 42 songs 8, 22 Lacanian analysis 27, 32 lacemaking 167–8 The Lady Vanishes (1938) 96, 98 Lajusticia, Santiago 210 Lampreave, Chus 40, 50, 70, 157, 166, 185, 202 Landis, James 212 Lara, Agustín 22, 143, 148, 236 Latham, Louise 109 The Law of Desire (1987) 79–95, 82, 88 authenticity 209 authorship/identity 53, 57, 192, 211, 220 body theme 3, 199, 240 as breakthrough film 4, 183 creative process 157 dead returning to life 206 families, dysfunctional/ absent fathers 2, 105, 222, 228, 238, 285 healing process 116, 182, 191 homosexuality 275 introduction of characters 119, 241 male characters 241, 274, 286 masturbation 124 as middle period film 30 mirror motif 208

The Law of Desire cont. mother figures 89–90, 196, 249 musical score 22, 153, 236 reconstruction metaphor 118, 133 religious themes 134 as screwball drama 135 self-reflexivity 7, 132, 158, 204 sex scenes 277 theatricality 42, 140, 229, 236, 278 titles 264 transsexuality 227 Lawrence, Amy 98 layered narrative 206 Le Pera, Alfredo 184 lesbianism 13, 21–2, 208–9 Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) 233 Lifeboat (1944) 102, 106 light and dark 62 Liné, Helga 27, 27, 89 lipstick 67, 68–9 Little Nell 9 Live Flesh (1993) 1, 21, 90, 104, 117, 146, 159, 162, 170–83, 220, 232, 263, 288 Lizaran, Marga 138 ‘Lo dudo’ 81, 85, 93–4 López, Angel de Andrés 50 López, Charo 205 López Vidal, Paquito 77 Lorca, Federico García 212 La casa de Bernarda Alba 48 Losey, Joseph 216 lovelessness 286, 287 low-angle shot 20 La luna 5, 19, 30 ‘Luz de luna’ 211 Lynch, David 6

INDEX

‘MacGuffin’ 97, 98, 114, 280 machismo 56, 67, 136 MacLaine, Shirley 160 McNamara, Fanny (Fabio de Miguel) 5, 8, 22, 29–30 madness motif 157, 167 Madrid 167 Asturias 49 Barajas airport 135 Bellas Artes 212 as centre of free expression 50–1, 86 Cine Dore 252 as city in chaos 49 Club Villarosa 139, 148 coming to 60 drug use in 51, 124–5, 128 flea market 29 La Ventilla 178 landmarks 106–7 leaving 54–5, 76 names and addresses in 83 pace of life 167 prominence in films 5, 32, 37, 97, 222–3 provincial roots 126, 157 Puerto de Alcalá 170, 171 skyline 37, 211 symbolism of 3, 107, 239 youth and underground culture 8, 23, 34, 41, 49, 118 Magnificent Obsession (1954) 37, 245 male characters, in touch with feelings 241 Malick, Terrence 297n Mancini, Henry 268 ‘Maniqui Parisien’ 276 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 69, 96, 116, 146, 221, 229, 232

317

Mann, Anthony 299n Manver, Kiti 58, 97, 153, 154 marginality 9, 14–15, 26 marital rights 20, 56–7 Marnie (1964) 99, 109 Martínez, Fele 253, 264 Martínez, Juan 50, 71 Martínez, Nacho 63, 65 masochism 13, 21 masturbation 63, 79–80, 124, 188, 273 Matador (1986) 2, 63–79, 65, 77 and Bad Education 273 body motif 3 camera technique 78, 159 and Catholic Church 150 dysfunctional families 105, 191, 222, 228, 236 ending 133 failed rape 21, 65–7 identity crisis 265 and Live Flesh 172, 181 mirror motif 208 mother figures 90, 117 self-parody 70, 84 self-reflexivity 29, 30 table scenes 185 and Talk to Her 240, 242, 244–5, 249, 251, 257 theatricality 42 and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! 118, 120 trauma of past 84, 116 visual games 20 Mataraso, Maysa 81, 87 Mathieu, Mireille 81 Maura, Carmen 9, 45, 49, 52, 59, 77, 80, 87, 88, 96, 99, 190, 202, 236 Mayo, Alfredo 164 media, obsession with 204

media intersections 1, 18–20, 51, 53, 85, 126–7, 143–4, 161–2, 196, 198–9, 209–10, 222, 230, 268 mediation 221 melodrama 1, 6, 37, 62, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 116, 135–203, 222, 234, 245, 260, 267, 275, 283 screwball 232–3 memory 185, 186, 193 Méndez, Tomás 246 Metz, Christian 262 Mexico, Revolution 183 Mildred Pierce 135, 152 Milland, Ray 102 Millás, Juan José 153 Mindscreen 265 Minnelli, Vincente 6, 95, 295n mirror effect 159, 160–1, 165, 192, 196, 208–9 misogyny 12, 20, 53, 63, 64, 71, 90 modelling 208 Molina, Angela 173, 182 Molina, Miguel 80 ’La bien pagá’ 53 Montiel, Sara 42, 266, 267, 273, 276, 277, 287 Montilla 218 ‘Moon River’ 268, 270 Morente, Estrella 195 morphing faces 159, 274, 276 Morrissey, Paul 290n mother and daughter relationship 161, 176, 188, 190, 192–3, 195–7, 199–202, 233–4, 239–40, 288 maternal instinct 192

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR

318

mother cont. maternal types 89 and son relationship 176, 217, 249–50 see also parent–child relationship mother figures 67, 89–90, 109, 117, 126, 161, 184, 193, 195, 196, 201–2, 206, 249–50, 254, 288 The Motorcycle Diaries (2005) 264 la movida 5, 8, 23–4, 26, 31 movie set as background 97 La muchacha de las bragas de oro (1979) 294n Mulvey, Laura 98 Muñoz, Rocío 136 ‘Murciana’ 21–2 murder 67, 70, 71, 73–6, 188–9, 199, 201, 206, 207, 217, 219, 234, 236, 278, 281–3, 284 musicals, American 1, 145 narcissism 81–2, 87, 95, 135, 136, 140, 152, 213, 265, 274, 288 narrative, written 208 nationalism 64 NATO 54, 161, 163 Natural Born Killers (1994) 297n Navarro, Chucho 81 Nazarín (1958) 119, 182 Nazism 51 ‘Ne me quitte pas’ 81, 85, 87, 236 necrophilia 64, 68, 72, 75 neo-realism 60 Neri, Francesca 171, 174 Noé, Gaspar 219 North by Northwest (1959) 223, 224

nostalgia 127 Notorious (1946) 98–9, 112, 254 Novak, Kim 114 nymphomania 26, 31–2, 34, 58 O’Connor, Flannery 156 Oedipal motif 27, 105, 109, 112, 136, 140–1, 152, 176, 194, 197, 208, 215, 217, 219, 220, 233, 238 ‘One Year of Love’ 139 Ophüls, Max 233 Opus Dei 64, 68, 72, 238 Orduña, Juan de 267 Ortigueira 276, 281 over- and under-exposure 9, 17 O’Wisiedo, Mairata 144 pain 42 El País 156, 242 Palma, Rossy de 97, 108, 124, 157, 166, 208–9, 216 Paredes, Marisa 40, 136, 147, 153, 155, 230, 231, 234, 246 parent–child relationships 28–9, 32, 58, 104, 117 see also father; mother Parker, Dorothy 156 parody 206 Pascual, Cristina S. 37 past disease of 116–17, 265, 285 idealization of 127 obsession with 204 trauma of 84, 116, 152 patriarchality 2, 28, 63, 85, 137, 177 Peck, Gregory 69, 106, 112

Pedregal, Helio 250 Peeping Tom (1960) 207, 212, 213 penance, sacrament of 224 Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) 7–26, 275 authorship 18, 19, 22, 25, 39, 44, 57 début film 2, 202 desire, male and female 188 ending 284 family 47 golden shower 13, 40 hospital scenes 245 identity 36, 57 intertextuality 134 Madrid in 275 media intersections 18–20, 51, 126 and ‘new’ Spain 271–2 parody in 261 past and recovery 104 performance 22–3 policeman 12–13, 20–1, 24, 95, 171, 272 poor quality 9, 17, 23, 37, 61–2 and Psycho score 98, 134 self-reflexivity 18, 23, 29, 42, 79, 158 shock techniques 40 threat of past 264, 285 typewriter, image of 158, 282 ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón’ (comic strip) 5 Peppermint frappé (1967) 248 Pérez Galdós, Benito 212 Pérez Prado, Dámaso 209–10, 219

INDEX

performance 17, 22–3, 23, 195, 221, 232, 236, 273, 278 Perrault, Charles 240 Persona (1966) 102 phallic symbolism 224 photography 208 photonovella 5, 29, 30 ‘Piensa en mí’ 143, 148, 150, 236 pietà 47, 48, 94 ‘pink’ (romance) novels 156, 158 Pius XII, Pope 292n The Player (1992) 278 political themes 32, 50–1, 163 Poncela, Eusebio 67, 80, 86, 159, 277 poor quality of film-making 9, 17–18, 22, 23, 23, 37, 61–2 Popular Party 163, 180 ‘Por toda a minha vida’ 242, 255 pornography 204, 210–11, 213, 245 videos 124 Portillo, Blanca 184 Powell, Michael 207, 213 primal scene 224 profile shot 104, 235, 270 prostitution 51, 53, 55, 60, 225, 227, 274 Proust, Marcel 83 The Prowler (1951) 216 PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) 36, 49, 50, 271 Psycho (1960) 254 characters 99, 100 direct and indirect allusions to 96, 98, 103–5, 107, 189, 212

319

Psycho cont. mother, references to 67, 109, 249–50, 254 musical score 12–13, 97–8, 134, 216, 264 narrative 197 opening credits 264 real time sequence 113 spying shots 43, 65 violence 213 and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 112–13, 117 psychoanalysis 26–7 punk culture 8, 26 ‘queer’ narrative 79, 81 ‘Quizás, quizás, quizás’ 266 Rabal, Francisco 119, 171, 182 Rabal, Liberto 171, 174, 182 racism 154 Radio Futura 8 Raging Bull 37 rape 10, 12–13, 20–1, 69, 71, 206, 207, 212, 214–15, 288 as act of submission 254, 262 as dream sequence 261–2 extended scene 213, 219 failed 21, 65–7, 72, 73 incestuous 28–9, 32, 188, 199, 200, 209 as metaphor 32, 260–1, 263 as narrative tool 10, 25, 288 as reconciliation 24 of sleeping beauty 240 televised 199, 215 Ray, Nicholas 6, 98, 101, 196

‘real-time’ sequences 106, 109, 110, 111 reality and artificiality 23, 25, 42, 87–8, 153, 232 Rear Window (1954) 96, 102, 107, 108, 210, 213 Rebecca (1940) 114 rebirth process 167, 219 reconciliation 24, 133, 151–2, 154, 179, 197, 199, 202, 222, 224–8, 233–4, 237–8, 240, 259 reconstruction 221, 225, 239, 241 redemption 182, 234, 245, 285–6 Reeve, Christopher 9 reflections on glass 257 see also mirror effect Regina, Elis 242, 255 religious imagery 95 Rendell, Ruth, Live Flesh 170, 172–3, 175 representation 208, 209 repression 4, 86–7, 89, 117, 159, 274 religious 38, 42–3, 44, 48, 61, 62, 64, 66, 78, 84, 91 ‘Resistiré’ 122, 132, 133 return to the village 5, 39, 54–5, 76, 157, 165, 167, 185, 186, 187, 200, 202, 218 return to the womb 254, 262 see also The Shrinking Lover Rhys, Jean 156 Rich and Famous (1981) 169 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, ‘Capriccio Español’ 10, 20 Rojas, Fernando de, La celestina 15

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Rope (1948) 96, 102, 104, 105–6, 109–13, 114 Rotaeta, Félix 9, 17 Roth, Cecilia 26, 42, 220, 225, 231, 237, 246 Rothman, William 235 The Murderous Gaze 104 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 262 sacred and profane 272–3 The Sadist (1963) 212 sadomasochism 24, 63 San Francisco 109 San Juan, Antonia 220, 237 Sanchez, Cristina 297–8n Sancho, José 171 Sánz, Nieves 190 Sardá, Rosa Maria 228 Saura, Carlos 119, 248 Scorsese, Martin 37 screaming contest 162 ‘Se nos rompió el amor’ 205 self-reflexivity 1, 7, 18, 23, 29, 39, 42, 49, 56, 62, 68–9, 79, 83–4, 95, 97, 100–1, 102, 120–1, 132, 133, 141, 145, 158, 159, 183, 194, 204, 206, 207, 219, 262, 263, 267, 269, 274–5, 281, 284, 285 Serenade (1956) 299n Serna, Assumpta 63 Serrano, Julieta 37, 65, 97 sex scenes 129–30, 179, 211, 277 sexual inadequacy 174, 176, 182, 208, 296n sexuality 1, 204, 220 shock techniques 40–1, 45 The Shrinking Lover (film within film) 19–20, 248, 251, 252–4, 261, 262

Sight & Sound 190, 192, 202 Silverman, Kaja 98 sinners 42–3 Sirk, Douglas 6, 37, 62, 95, 116, 135, 152, 164, 196, 245, 295n Siva, Eva 12, 13, 40 sleeping beauty scenario 240, 288 Smith, Paul Julian 29, 61, 115, 126, 190, 192, 202, 207–8, 220, 227 snuff videos 63, 72, 124 ‘Soleá’ 168 songs 1, 8, 21–2, 31, 42, 46–7, 53, 77, 81, 85, 87–8, 93–4, 97, 122, 132, 139, 143, 148, 162, 194, 196, 205, 211, 236, 242, 246, 255, 266, 268, 270, 275–6 Spain Civil War 70, 223 constitution (1978) 271 crime rate 73, 128 defence agreement with USA 286 entry into NATO 161, 163 entry into UN 286 free elections 16, 128, 271, 287, 291n history and weight of the past 75, 76, 115, 129, 170, 179, 181, 226, 237, 242, 251, 263–4, 272, 287 immigration rates 154 ‘new’ 271–2 ‘new mentality’ 5, 6, 271 political situation 15, 91, 180, 271

Spain cont. recovery and reconstruction process 177, 203, 204 signs of stability 288–9 state of emergency (1970) 170, 181 tourism 127 transitional period 2, 3, 4, 12, 14, 18, 24–5, 36, 38, 49, 61, 135, 238, 240, 261, 276 transnational and diasporic elements 226, 239 see also Franco, Francisco, regime Spanish Telefónica 5 Spanishness 1–2, 15 spectatorship, and sexual desire 273 Spellbound (1945) 96, 100, 106, 110, 111–12, 114, 115 The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) 224 Splendor in the Grass (1961) 57, 69 Springer, Jerry 198 Stahl, John 135 Stewart, James 111, 113 Stone, Oliver 297n Strangers on a Train (1951) 96, 102–3, 104 A Streetcar Named Desire 116, 221, 229, 231–2, 236 Studlar, Gaylyn 262 style, consistency of 62 submission 254, 262 suicide 205, 217, 259 attempted 161–2, 193, 245, 247

INDEX

Talk to Her (2002) 1, 2, 20, 42, 71, 80, 117, 152, 183, 188, 192, 203, 205, 206, 240–63, 264, 267, 273, 284, 288, 289 see also The Shrinking Lover (film within film) Tandy, Jessica 109 Taylor, Elizabeth 229 telebasura 198 telekinesis 58 television 199, 207, 208, 209–10, 215 intersections 198–9 That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) 173, 224 theatricality, theatrical space 17, 42, 46–7, 57, 87, 97, 128, 140, 141, 143, 153, 229, 230–1, 232, 236, 273, 276, 278, 279 Theresa, Mother 144 thrillers 1, 8, 96, 116 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) 62, 118–34, 130, 172, 197, 204, 207, 287 body motif 3, 199, 240 and Buñuel 183 as melodrama 135 ‘The Midnight Phantom’ (film within film) 277–8 mirror motif 208 redemption 285 relationship with mother 161 return to village 39, 50, 54, 157, 165, 185, 187, 200, 218 self-reflexivity 135, 183 sex scenes 179 theatricality 17, 140, 236 trauma of past 116, 152

321

time and space, manipulation of 11, 15 Torre, Antonio de la 187 Tos (Cough) 8 Tracy, Spencer 232 train imagery 223–4, 239 transsexuality 3, 3–4, 83–4, 85, 87–8, 90, 91, 220, 225–7, 240, 280 transvestism 2, 3–4, 220, 225–7, 240, 265 trauma 7, 219 ‘Las tres ventaja de Ponte’ (1977) 18–19 Trio Los Panchos 81, 85, 93 Truffaut, François 109 typewriter, image of 92–3, 158, 282 Ullmann, Liv 95, 146 El ultimo cuplé 267 Umberto D (1952) 60 Unamuno, Miguel de 212 unconscious states 262 underground culture 14–15, 19, 23–4, 26 United Kingdom 128 United Nations 286 United States of America 128 utopianism 54 Utrera, Fernanda and Bernarda de 205 Valentine, Joseph, and Skall, William V. 106 Vargas, Chavela 162, 179, 211 Vargas, Manuela 155, 168 Vatican II Council 224, 298n Vega, Paz 253 Veloso, Caetano 246 Vera Cruz (1954) 299n

Vernon, Kathleen M. and Morris, Barbara 115 Vertigo (1958) 96, 100, 106, 107, 110, 112, 115, 264, 287 Victoria Eugenia, Queen 252 Vidor, King 69 Villaverde de los Ojos 209 violence 15, 63, 64, 70–3, 113, 179, 180, 204, 210, 219 sexual 10, 13, 21, 25, 74–5, 213 virginity, restoration of 15 Viridiana (1961) 119, 182, 240, 241, 252, 259 Vivanco, Fernando 27, 27 Volver (2006) 1, 9, 17, 21, 183–203, 287, 289 ‘Volver’ (tango) 184, 194 voyeurism 204–5, 207, 209–10, 213–15, 219, 233, 249, 258 Walker, Robert 102 Warhol, Andy 30, 118 Watling, Leonor 241, 261 Weill, Kurt 205, 254 Wharton, Edith 156 What Have I Done to Deserve This!? (1984) 45, 49–62, 52, 60, 76, 115–16, 127, 238 analogies with past 10, 21 authorship 17 creative process 158 dysfunctional family 53 ending 133 father figures 188–9, 191, 222, 228, 238 healing process 115–16

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What Have I Done to Deserve This!? cont. identity crisis 60 identity games 12 influences 69 as melodrama 135 rebellion 2 return to the village 39, 76, 157, 185, 187 theatricality 56 Wilder, Billy 6, 160 Williams, Tennessee 62, 96, 116, 146, 221, 229, 232, 236 windmills, motif of 191 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) 95–117, 100, 101–2, 111, 192, 202, 256 camera techniques 79–80, 277 desire, male and female 188

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown cont. ending 76 father figures 191 healing process 287 Hitchcock references 6, 13, 43, 62, 95–117, 146 intertextuality 6–7, 95–6 Madrid skyline 211 as melodrama 137 mixed genres 116, 232 mother figures 89–90, 109, 126, 249 motifs 241 opening 264 preview of 88 real-time action 109, 111 reconciliation 133, 240 self-reflexivity 100–1, 285 success 2, 4, 6–7, 183 theatricality 17, 42, 87, 140, 236, 279

Woolf, Virginia 156 Written on the Wind (1956) 37 Wyman, Jane 245 Y tu mamá también (2001) 264 Yarza, Alejandro 116 Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almódovar 2, 3, 4 zapateo 153, 154 Zarza de Granadilla 131–2 Zarzo, Manuel 38 zarzuela 11

Olvido Gara (‘Alaska’), Carmen Maura and Eva Siva as the title characters in Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980)

Self-reflexivity in production design: Dark Habits (1983)

Counterfeit masculinity and performance: What Have I Done to Deserve This!? (1984)

‘Spain Divided’: Almodóvar, Eva Cobo, Verónica Forqué and Chus Lampreave in Matador (1986)

Consuming passion: Pepa’s burning bed in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Carmen Maura, Julieta Serrano, Antonio Banderas, Rossy de Palma and María Barranco in a publicity still for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Ricky (Antonio Banderas) and Marina (Victoria Abril) in a moment of apparent intimacy in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)

The incongruous musical-prison number in High Heels (1991). Bibi Andersen (centre)

Death’s point of view?: prophetic mise en scène in Live Flesh (1997). Ángela Molina

Death’s seduction?: Helena (Francesca Neri) gives the gun a desiring look in Live Flesh

‘Are you asking me to be your mother?’: Cecilia Roth and Penélope Cruz in All About My Mother (1999)

‘Bad body, good heart . . .’: a healing moment in All About My Mother

‘Matadora’: Rosario Flores as Lydia the bullfighter in Talk to Her (2002)

‘Look at her’: Benigno (Javier Cámara) spies on his object of desire in Talk to Her

‘Talk to Him’: Marco (Darío Grandinetti) visits Benigno's grave

Art of deception: Gael García Bernal adopts many identities in Bad Education (2004)

‘The Bomb’: Javier Cámara as Paquita in Bad Education

‘What the hell?’: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Dueñas) see dead people in Volver (2006)

‘Love never dies’: Carmen Maura (as Irene) and Yohana Cobo in Volver