Art, Angst, and Almodóvar

I’ve long been fascinated by the brilliant Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. And I’m hardly alone. The new Academy Museum has, until recently, devoted one large gallery to provocative (and hardly child-friendly) clips from Almodóvar’s best work. And on April 28, he’ll be honored by Film at Lincoln Center with its 50th Chaplin Award. But I can’t pretend I know all there is to know about the man behind such international hits as Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, and Talk to Her. That’s why I dove into a slim but tightly packed new book from Columbia University Press, titled The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films.

Author James Miller is not your usual film scholar. A professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, he has turned a COVID-era movie-watching project into a serious exploration of Almodóvar’s entire life and career. Clearly a methodical thinker, he lays out at the beginning of his book his conviction—following a close viewing of every Almodóvar film—that his subject “was essentially a man of the sixties, forged in Spain’s belated version of that decade’s global counterculture and seriously pursuing his own quest for philosophical insight and personal liberation.” He sees in Almodóvar’s films a passion for self-examination, one deeply rooted in European philosophical tradition. Miller’s preface ends with the assertion that “Almodóvar has long been fascinated by the blurry line between fiction and reality, between cultural memory and personal memory, between autofiction and autobiography.” The author  announces here his plan to analyze the master’s creative process “in a way that allows Almodóvar to emerge both as a real person as well as a fictional character represented in multiple alter egos in various films.”

To this end, Miller selects seven of Almodóvar’s films to discuss in depth. Each reflects, though hardly in a conventional way, some aspect of Almodóvar’s private life. Instead of arranging the movies chronologically in terms of their release dates, Miller chooses to match them with key periods of Almodóvar’s own personal chronology. That’s why he begins, following a biographical sketch of the artist’s life trajectory, with the 2006 release Volver, viewing it as Almodóvar’s return to the rural La Mancha of his boyhood and to the hard-scrabble working class section of Madrid in which he spent his youth. 

The next film he discusses is 2004’s Bad Education (its original Spanish title,  La mala educación can also mean “bad manners”). This often startling work contains a cinematic version of a key moment in Almodóvar’s own childhood. As a boy with a keen mind and an angelic singing voice, he was a prized pupil at a boarding school run by Catholic priests. He suffered sexual abuse at the hands of one of them. Bad Education contains this horrendous moment, but also jumps ahead in time to a film being made about the incident and its aftermath, with the victim himself apparently playing one of the lead characters. In the unique way with which, in Miller’s terms, Almodóvar “nests” various story elements inside one another, Bad Education then turns into a kind of film noir, with eerie mistaken identities pointing toward a latter-day crime that becomes downright Ripley-esque. 

The later films on Miller’s list explore the period of Almodóvar’s young manhood in the gaudy so-called La Movida movement of the 1960s as well as (in 2019’s Pain and Glory) the mature filmmaker’s acknowledgment of his own homosexuality. As always, the latter film’s director character is and is not the master himself. But he’s certainly worth our attention.