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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 15, 2005)
4CJustout aprii 15.2005 out out FILM ...... ▼..... The Almodovar touch Northwest Film Center looks at career of gay Spanish director by We are back! ■' ■_> - Please check out our new menu. 2000 NE 40th (2 blocks north of Sandy) 503/460-2682 Private parties <£ catering available 5:30 to 9 pmTues-Thurs 5:30 to 10 pm Fri-Sat Late-night lounge on weekend night life Ckech out pacfñ 42 tome Itop^ùeuj, Itot Lpoii,............. C hristopher M c Q uain n old Hollywood, the stylistic qualities that seamlessly brought together elegance, politi cal awareness, comedy, romance and drama in the films of director Ernst Lubitsch (The Shop Around the Comer, Heaven Can Wait) were called, simply, “the Lubitsch touch.” The works comprising The Films of Pedro Almodovar, a near-complete retrospective of the gay Spanish director’s career at the Northwest Film Center, amply demonstrate that there is an “Almodovar touch” as indispensable to cqn- temporary cinema as Lubitsch’s was to classical Hollywood. It is this inimitable touch—an excessive yet skillfill devotion to color, artifice, pop culture debris and outrageous emotion and sexuality, all veering recklessly from fiill-on camp to the most glorious heights of comedy its charm; these are, after all, the tackiest, most low-budget sisters imaginable. That film’s delirious, surrealistic satire recurs through much of Almodovar’s subsequent work. Less slight and more polished is 1984’s Wkit Have I Done to Deserve This?, set in a Madrid public housing block, where a No-Doz- addicted housewife (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura) copes with her loutish hus band, friendly prostitute neighbor, mercenary mother-in-law and two wayward sons. Also in this pre dominantly satirical vein are 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown— and melodrama—that made 2004’s Bad Education, a fantastically stylish, homoerotic film noir with blatantly autobiographical elements, the best film of the year and his greatest film to date. Almodovar began his career doing a bit of everything—rock music, comics, 8 mm short films—in Madrid’s underground culture of the early to mid-1970s, during the waning reign of Francisco Franco. The president’s authoritarian, generally censorious administration did much to hinder Spanish artistic expression, and a satirical, flamboyantly gay sensibility like Almodovar’s was not looked upon kindly. Almodovar’s gifts flourished after Franco’s death in 1977, however, and he is now easily the most well-known and highly acclaimed Spanish or gay filmmaker in the world. A true auteur, he has time and again brought a world of his own vibrant invent ion to the silver screen and developed special, ongoing relation ships with actors, many of them unknowns who later developed into huge stars: Penelope Cruz (who is already cast in his next three films), Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem all have him to thank for their fame. The earliest Almodovar film on the pro gram is his fourth feature, 1983’s Dark Habits. Early Almodovar is often likened to the shock value of early John Waters, and Dark Habits— with its order of heroin-shooting, blackmailing lesbian nuns out to save their convent by any means necessary—validates that comparison. The low-budget tackiness of the film is part of Almodóvar’s breakthrough hit featuring Maura, Banderas and most of the regular Almodovar troupe run ning around in a postfeminist screwball about being driven mad by inscrutable men—and the 1990 romantic comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, in which Banderas plays a just- released mental patient who kidnaps and falls in love with an ex-porn star turned B-movie actress (Victoria Abril). This strain of Almodóvar’s work reaches its pinnacle in 1993’s Kika, in which a naive, ditzy Lucille Ball-like cosmetologist (Veronica Porqué) finds herself caught in the middle of a murder mystery involving her husband, her maid, an escaped rapist, an American writer and a sensational TV newswoman. The film’s extremely politically incorrect slapstick center piece (you’ll be shocked, either in the gtxxJ way or in the dismayed way) makes it Almodóvar’s most provocative, and possibly funniest, film. All Almixlóvar has its moments of out landish humor, but his later films evolve toward a kind of florid, less frenetic—even contempla tive and tear-jerking—Douglas Sirk-like “women’s picture.” In 1991 s High Heels— an explicit homage to Bergman’s Autumn Sonata— a famous actress (regal Almixlóvar fixture Marisa Paredes) is forgiven by her daughter (Abril) for a life lived in her shadow after the mother makes a tremendous sacrifice to absolve her daughter of murdering a man they both loved. 1995’s The Flower of My Secret, Alnuxló- I var’s quietest and most restrained film up to that point, gives Paredes a beautiful star turn as an aspiring serious novelist making her living writing pulp romances under a pseudonym as she awaits her negligent husband’s return from a peacekeeping mission in Sarajevo. 1999’s epic, elegiac All About My Mother— the title is a play on All About Eve— is the render story of a woman (Cecilia Roth) who loses her son and, with the help of a great stage actress (Paredes again), a transsexual prostitute and a preg nant nun, tries to rediscover her place in life. One of the director’s best, and winner of an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it’s the perfect introduction for the Almoddvar neophyte; David Thomson called it “one of those films to make you wonder if God didn’t mean the movies to be gay.” On that subject, it’s surprising how very queer all of Almodovar’s films seem considering how few of them are, strictly speaking, “gay movies.” Both 1987’s Law of Desire and Bad Education do unabashedly depict the fully sexualized loves and lusts of gay men, but clearly, to Almoddvar, falling in love is a sensuous, erotic experience no matter one’s gen der or orientation. He has an abiding affection for those who break the gender barrier: Law of Desire fea tures a transsexual (Almodovar regu lar Bibi Ander sen) cast as a straight woman opposite a woman (Maura) cast as a transsexual, while Bad Education is framed by a transsexual’s story. Transvestites, drag queens, hcxikers, sexually assertive women and other marginalized char acters create such a lively, captivating back ground in Almodovar’s films that any charac ters retaining their original gender identity, regardless of their orientation, seem straight forward to the point of conventionality. The odd film out in the retrospective is 1997’s Live Flesh, a Ruth Rendell adaptation done nicely enough as a sexed-up revenge thriller but lacking the other films’ unmistak ably Almixlovarian qualities; 1986’s Matador, missing from the roster, would’ve been a more felicitous selection. Otherwise, the only thing about the program that seems off is the ran dom sequencing of the screenings, which is neither chronological nor with any evident theme or categorization. But that’s not really a problem: This polymorphous filmmaker would undoubtedly appreciate a schedule illustrating that, for his sexy, funny, witty and touching Ixxly of work, one point of entry is as gcxxl as another. The Northwest Film Center screens T he F ilms P edro A lmodovar through May 21. For a complete schedule visit www.nwfilm.org. of C hristopher M o Q uain lives, writes and works in Seattle. He finds that Antonio Banderas’ post-Almodovar career can cause anxiety and depression.
