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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Pedro Almodovar broke
into the art-house mainstream with this wild, manic comedy about
a gaggle of women and their various problems with men, be they
married lovers, cheating husbands, fiancés, or terrorists.
Almodovar's long-time leading lady, Carmen Maura, stars as an
actress (famed for her laundry detergent commercial as the mother
of a sloppy serial killer) who's just been dumped by her married
lover. In the midst of trying to track him down for a
face-to-face confrontation, she crosses paths with her lover's
son (Antonio Banderas), his unbalanced wife (Julieta Serrano),
and his new girlfriend (Kiti Manver). Adding more fuel to the
fire is the hess friend (Maria Barranco) who got involved with
a Shiite terrorist and is now being hunted by the .
Almodovar, a master of farcical screwball comedy, manages to keep
all these balls in the air in dizzy, hilarious style without once
losing his momentum. Chock full of the director's over-the-top
stylization, in terms of both story and sets, the film is a
hilarious yet heartfelt marriage of kitsch and drama, verging on
parody but never going entirely over the top. Maura is absolutely
breathtaking as the unhinged lover, dispensing wise advice to
others while trying to keep a semblance of sanity, and the
supporting cast is quintessential Almodovar, including a brief
but memorable turn by Banderas in what could have been a bland,
go-nowhere role. Nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film
O in 1989. --Mark Englehart
All About My Mother After her son is killed in an accident,
Manuela (Cecilia Roth) leaves Madrid for her old haunts in
Barcelona. She reconnects with an old friend, a pre-op
transsexual prostitute named La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), who
introduces her to Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a young nun who turns out
to be pregnant. Meanwhile, Manuela becomes a personal assistant
for Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), an actress currently playing
Blanche DuBois in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. All
About My Mother traces the delicate web of friendship and loss
that binds these women together. The movie is dedicated to the
actresses of the world, so it's not surprising that all the
performances are superb. Roth in particular anchors All About My
Mother with compassion and generosity. But fans of
writer-director Pedro Almodóvar needn't fret--as always,
Almodóvar's work undermines conventional notions of sexual
identity and embraces all human possibilities with bright colors
and melodramatic plotting. However, All About My Mother
approaches its twists and turns with a broader emotional
than most of Almodóvar's work; even the more extravagant aspects
of the story are presented quietly, to allow the sadness of life
to be as present as the irrepressible vitality of the characters.
Almodóvar embraces pettiness, jealousy, and grief as much as
kindness, courage, and outrageousness, and the movie is the
richer for it. ----Bret Fetzer
Talk to Her
Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar makes another masterpiece with
Talk to Her, his first film since the wonderful All About My
Mother. Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is in love with Lydia (Rosario
Flores), a female bullfighter who is gored by a bull and sent
into a coma. In the hospital, Marco crosses paths with Benigno
(Javier Camara), a male nurse who looks after another coma
patient, a young dancer named Alicia (Leonor Watling). From
Benigno's gentle attentiveness to Alicia, Marco learns to take
care of Lydia... but from there, the story goes in directions
that deftly manage to be sad, hopeful, funny, and creepy,
sometimes at the same time. The rich human empathy of Almodóvar's
recent films is passionate, heartbreaking, intoxicating--there
aren't enough adjectives to praise this remarkable filmmaker, who
is at the height of his powers. Talk to Her is superb, with
outstanding performances from all involved. --Bret Fetzer
The Flower of My Secret
Pedro Alomodóvar made this misfired, rambling comedy about a
romance novelist (Marisa Paredes) whose crumbling marriage has
left her depressed and unable to work. At a low point, she writes
a scathing indictment of her own books (which are penned under
another name), with no one realizing critic and author are one
and the same. Almodóvar ( Law of Desire) has the start of a great
idea here, and for once, he's direct about his sympathy for a
character. But nothing else about The Flower of My Secret is so
clear. Despite its unusual allegiance to the straightforward
"women's films" of the 1950s, this movie blows it by becoming
needlessly complicated over extraneous junk, forcing one to grope
in the dark for Almodóvar's point. -- Tom Keogh
Bad Education
Writer/director Pedro Almodóvar's dark, sexy Hitchcock homage is
his best work since his O-winning All About My Mother, and
deepened by a sun-dappled sadness. Handsome, enigmatic Ángel
(Gael García Bernal) arrives at the Spanish movie offices of
director Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) and happily procls that
he's actually Enrique's long-lost school chum Ignacio--an
announcement that is both less than convincing and more than it
seems. A novice actor, Ángel pitches a semi-autobiographical
screenplay in which he's determined to star, a revenge-laden
reflection of the doomed love he and Enrique shared as boys
before a pedophile priest cruelly intervened. The script, and the
lost days it recalls, carefully unfurls into a series of brooding
movies-within-movies and memories-inside-memories, which allow
the , multiple-role-playing Bernal to give the performance
of his young career--among other things, he makes a stunningly
convincing drag queen--and Almodóvar the rtunity to movingly
suggest that people will pay any price to ensure that their
stories are told. -- Steve Wiecking
More Stills from Pedro Almodovar Classics Collection(click for
larger image)
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More Pedro Almodovar at .com
Songs of Almodóvar CD (
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The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (
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