Who is Pedro Almodóvar: a counterculture figure in love with cinema itself

Originally from Castile-La Mancha, an arid, landlocked rural region of Spain, Almodóvar was born in 1949 and grew up under the Francoist dictatorship and its deeply conservative rule. He first began to understand the repressive influence of the regime when his parents sent him to a Catholic boarding school in Caceres in western Spain when he was eight years old, in the hope that their son would become a priest.

The principal now views this religious education as “the thing I regret most about my childhood.” Instead of following the path his parents had intended, Almodóvar began to hate the church for covering up abuses and for its close ties to Francoism. As he began to fall in love with cinema, his eyes were also opened to the level of censorship and control that Spain was subject to.

“I was afraid of the gray uniforms, as we call them, the National Guard,” he said last year, recalling his childhood. “We were repressed by the police. I realized that there are films that we can never see in Spain, there are books that never reach us, there are things that we cannot buy. I remember the complete darkness of that time.”

Against his parents’ wishes, Almodóvar moved to Madrid at the age of 18, dreaming of becoming a director. When Franco closed the city’s National Film School, he studied on his own, earning a living in the capital by working for the telecommunications company Telefónica. His first salary was for a Super-8 film camera.

Then, in 1975, Franco’s death brought an end to the dictatorship. And in Madrid, in response to the shift toward democracy, an entire countercultural scene emerged, known as La Movida Madrileña.

“It’s a bit of a creative explosion… and it’s all very subversive and anarchic,” explains Dr Tom Whittaker, lecturer in film studies and Spanish culture at the University of Warwick. “It’s a bit like British punk, but more festive, more camp, less nihilistic. (Almodóvar) is very much part of the counterculture that is emerging in this post-Franco moment.”

Almodóvar quickly became immersed in La Movida Madrileña and a wave of artists exploring all sorts of taboos in post-censorship Spain. His earliest films, sexy shorts shot as silent films because his low-quality tapes could not contain soundtracks, were shown in Madrid nightclubs. Almodóvar sometimes provided the voices and other sound effects himself, using a separate tape. Made on a shoestring budget, his first feature, the flamboyant and outrageous Pepi Lucy Bom, came out in 1980 and is about a lesbian punk singer who sets out to get revenge on the cop who kidnapped her. It’s a messy first effort that focuses on pure shock value.

“I must confess that I sort of forgot my political views and devoted myself to finally enjoying what had been denied me,” he said later; but even at first his portrayal of authority figures seemed to serve a satirical purpose.

Three years later, Almodóvar turned to religion in Dark Habits, which featured a group of wild, cocaine-snorting lesbian nuns. 1984. What did I do to deserve this? sees downtrodden cleaner Gloria, stuck in a loveless marriage, struggling to support her uncaring family. She later kills her abusive husband with a ham – seemingly by accident – and the police are useless when it comes to solving the crime. In fact, almost as useless as the hapless officers who show up to investigate a bomb threat midway through 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

“His films are a product of this kind of Madrid counterculture, but this counterculture itself is a reaction to Francoism,” Whittaker explains. “The Franco regime was deeply Catholic, deeply patriarchal, and in it the army was of great importance. That is why in the 1980s any patriarchal figures, such as policemen and priests, were presented in a completely subversive way.”

Although Almodóvar waited until 2021’s Parallel Mothers, which is partly about the discovery of mass graves containing the bodies of Republicans murdered by the country’s fascist state, to make an overtly political film that directly addresses the painful burden of modern Spanish history, his earlier films were also based on the site of the riot against the era in which he grew up, and all contain key elements that have become Almodóvar staples: melodrama, camp, strong female characters, black comedy and a love of cinema for its own sake.

The director’s big breakthrough was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which often starred Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas and Rossy de Palma. A strange and brilliant tale of poisoned gazpacho and airport shootouts, it draws heavily from the melodramas of American cinema of the forties and fifties, as well as screwball comedies like How to Marry a Millionaire. The 1991 murder mystery High Heels, which follows a famous singer and her reporter daughter as they become embroiled in the aftermath of the crime, also takes inspiration from old Hollywood dramas and film noir.

Intertextuality (the relationship between texts) is a theme in almost all of Almodovar’s films. “They are in love with film history,” Whittaker says. “His films constantly reference other films.” For example, the 1987 film The Law of Desire is about a gay director and an obsessive fan who was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock. The 2006 film Volver, set in La Mancha, where Almodóvar grew up, was inspired by Italian neorealism and Anna Magnani’s explosive acting style. The 2002 Academy Award-winning film Talk to Me is about Lydia Gonzalez, a famous matador who competed in the bullring or rings. Although she lives her life on a stage of sorts, she is equally fascinated by the theater and silent black and white films.

Another important element of Almodovar’s films is fluidity. In his universe, everything is rarely what it seems at first glance. In the 1999 Oscar-winning All About My Mother, a grieving single mother, a pregnant nun and a trans sex worker form a family unit of sorts, caring for each other amid the growing fear, ignorance and paranoia caused by the AIDS crisis. In The Law of Desire, cis actress Carmen Maura plays Tina, the trans sister of the film’s protagonist Pablo, and Bibiana Fernandez, a trans actress, plays the cis mother of Tina’s surrogate daughter. These are just two examples of how Almodovar’s characters subvert expectations associated with gender stereotypes.

“In Franco’s time, gender was the opposite of fluid, right?” Whittaker says. “It’s very binary: men and women. So, very different, discrete roles. This is another way in which he tries to attack the mythology of Francoist gender norms.”

And even today, almost all of these elements are present in Almodóvar’s films, even as he moves away from the more anarchic spirit of his earlier films. For example, Parallel Mothers draws on the legacy of Spanish history and the idea of ​​finding an unconventionally chosen family; his new short film A Strange Way of Life, out Monday in the UK, explores a gay love story between two cowboys (Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke) and sees the director begin filming in English for the first time. time after The Human Voice in 2020, while also taking on one of the most visually distinctive genres of cinema.

“I loved the idea of ​​Pedro revisiting an era of cinema in a place that preserves the physical history of some of our most beloved and subversive Westerns,” Pascal said of his decision to join the project. “This is the first film in which I don’t mix genres, the only one where I follow the rules,” said the director.

And it looks like there may well be more English-language films in Almodovar’s future, although if one thing is certain, it will be on his own terms. The director once turned down the opportunity to direct Brokeback Mountain because “I never believed that I would be given complete freedom and independence to do what I wanted.”

“It’s animalistic,” he said of the now-classic gay western originally told by Annie Proulx, “and for me it was impossible because it was a Hollywood film. We can’t have these two guys fucking all the time.”

Although he was originally slated to direct the English-language adaptation of Lucia Berlin’s short story collection A Cleaner’s Guide (starring and produced by Cate Blanchett), he gracefully bowed out last year. “I was blinded by excitement, but unfortunately I no longer feel able to fully realize this film,” he said.

Instead, the director is now focused on making her first English-language feature film, saying it is “a very intimate film about women” set in New York. Filming is reported to begin there early next year. “These two (short) films (Strange Life and The Human Voice) were experiments to see if I could handle language.”

And this love of experimentation – and willingness to stand firm on his own – is perhaps what has made Pedro Almodóvar one of the most culturally significant Spanish creatives of his generation. To borrow a few choice words from Agrado’s famous monologue in All About My Mother: “It costs a lot to be sincere, ma’am. And you can’t skimp on these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble who you thought you were.”

A Strange Way of Life will be released on September 25th.