Sex was my way of coping with death
From paedophile priests to psychotic transsexuals, Spain’s most outrageous director has tackled ever more raucous themes as he captured the dark underbelly of his country. Now, in the highly acclaimed Volver, Pedro Almodovar confronts the one topic that had eluded him – death. But, asks Peter Conrad, why does Penelope Cruz wear that prosthetic bum?
Pedro Almodovar is a man who used to be synonymous with a city – raucous, frenetic, brazenly lively. Recently, however, he became a park and seems determined to lead a quieter, more pensive life.
The films Almodovar made in the 1980s captured the ribald vitality of Madrid after the death of Franco. The permissive city, to which the young Almodovar fled from his family home in La Mancha, was the place where he cast off provincial inhibitions: in Pepi, Luci, Bom, his first film, he treated himself to a role as the judge in an erection contest and performed the task with lip-licking relish. Despite his affronts to respectability and his mockery of religion, the success of films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown turned Almodovar into a national treasure.
In 1995, he suddenly announced: ‘I’m a park.’ His hometown in La Mancha, forgiving the runaway, had named a patch of grass after him. He accepted the honour, he said, because it was ‘a homage to mothers’ who took their children to play in the park. He responded to the municipal tribute by wondering ‘how a good park behaves’. It behaves, I think, bucolically, placidly.
Almodovar’s emotional life has been monopolised by his mother, a dotty harridan who died later in 1995; his new film, Volver, which means ‘The Return’, is about a dead mother who bounces back to life as a meddling ghost.
He was once the embodiment of Madrid’s flaming youth. But when we met in Madrid to discuss Volver, the only flamboyant thing about him was his tropical shirt. Plumply enthroned behind a desk in the office of his production company, he might have been posing for a statue of himself in that eponymous park. Statues don’t converse with you and Almodovar addressed me indirectly. Though he speaks fluent English, he chose to entrust his communiques to a hunched translator, who scribbled dictation and then made his own fudged paraphrase.
Where, I asked myself as the stilted exchange got under way, was the zany, unguarded comedian who made the films which are populated with adorable grotesques of his own devising? As if in reply to my silent question, Almodovar primped his shock of grey hair with his fingers. ‘I am maturing,’ said the translator on his behalf. ‘The tone has changed. Today, I am less baroque.’
Volver begins in a rural cemetery, where women clean, polish and bedeck with flowers the tombs they will eventually occupy. The film demonstrates, as Almodovar remarked, that ‘the dead don’t die’. In the superstitions of what he calls ‘deep Spain’, the departed don’t go far and are liable to exhume themselves in times of need.
‘I never understood death before,’ he told me. ‘My only way of coping with it was through sex. So I decided to do a film about the culture of death, to see if I’d made progress. Now I can look death in the face.’
He glared, as grim as the reaper he was confronting. I asked what had happened to the charnel-house humour of the early films, which treat death as an existential joke or a necrophiliac pleasure. In Matador, two lovers who are also killers kill each other while making love. The heroine tells her male partner that only men have scruples about murder or consider it a crime: it is a female prerogative, like giving birth. ‘They are discussing the orgasm,’ said Almodovar. ‘It is dangerous to use that line in ordinary life.’
But if the edicts of ordinariness are to be respected, how come a man in Volver can be skewered with a kitchen knife by his stepdaughter and surreptitiously buried without exciting the interest of the law? Are crimes of passion exempt from punishment? Do women, as the murderess in Matador claims, have a biological licence to kill? Almodovar babbled at length in reply, while the translator covered pages in his notebook. ‘Penelope Cruz conceals the crime, but she treats her husband’s corpse with great tenderness. She respects his body, which is some kind of expiation. Justice is possible, though no thanks to cops or judges. I do try to solve the problems of my characters, but I work with different morals. I have my autonomous moral system.’
Once, he would have jeered at such equivocations, but his new mood is more timid. Perhaps Almodovar’s amoralism was a casualty of the al-Qaeda bombings in Madrid in 2004. In his more reckless younger days, he used to laugh about terrorism. Women on the Verge contains a running gag about a gang of Shiites who plot to bomb a plane at the airport in Madrid; a sadistic lesbian in Pepi, Luci, Bom boastfully tells her partner: ‘I’m worse than a terrorist’, while the other woman writhes in gratified torment.
After the al-Qaeda attack, Almodovar challenged the government by repeating rumours about withheld information and a plan to postpone elections. Politicians said he deserved to be arrested or at least sued for defamation, while nastier threats were relayed to his office. The national treasure for a while became a national disgrace. These days, he minds his words or retains a translator to act as his censor.
Discouraging discussion of the episode, he beckoned me into a remoter past. ‘For the first time, I am looking back at my childhood. It is a gate I kept closed until now.’ Prised open, the gate reveals two very different vistas: idyllic in Volver, psychotic in his previous film, Bad Education, which draws on memories of Pedro’s pubescent crush on a fellow choirboy and their mistreatment by a vicious, envious priest.
For the young Almodovar, nothing was sacred and no taboo went unviolated. A wife enjoys being battered by her husband in Pepi, Luci, Bom and in Kika, the ditzy heroine only mildly objects to being raped by a psychopath while her voyeuristic husband films the scene. Making Bad Education, he became squeamish: ‘I had child psychologists on the set. The little boys were playing characters who grow up to have sex changes, get addicted to heroin and commit murder; all that could have left ghosts in their minds. I worried about directing the scene where they go to the movies and start fondling each other and then you see their wrists jerking away. My assistant finally said, “They’re 13; they know all about masturbation!”
‘Even so, the shoot was a nightmare. We had to close down several times; I thought we’d never finish it. I was like Coppola during Apocalypse Now, having a nervous breakdown while a typhoon raged through the Philippines.’
The stormy analogy was a cover-up. What, I asked, caused the trouble?
Almodovar blustered at length and the translator produced a grudging precis. ‘An actor,’ he said, ‘had an issue. It was about his body-image.’ The obstructive force, I deduced, was Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays one of the grown-up boys; he is required to wear drag and to serve as a film director’s catamite, so it’s easy to see why the assignment might have perturbed him. Film directors in Almodovar’s films are always his surrogates. One of them, in The Law of Desire, imperiously ravishes Antonio Banderas (who begs him to be gentle), and in Bad Education, another unscrupulous auteur dares Bernal to shed his Y-fronts for a dip in the pool and later, while Bernal bites the pillow, clambers on to his back. ‘He allowed me to penetrate him many times,’ reports the directorial voice-over, ‘though only physically.’
A third director, in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, has a poster of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom on his office wall; it is about a serial killer who films his victims while he rapes and stabs them. Looking innocently unaware of his rampant demons, Almodovar said: ‘Maybe I should not make films about men. The stories are so turbulent and aggressive, they make me suffer.’
Volver soothed his professional and personal distresses. Excluding men from the central roles, Almodovar rounded up a sorority of submissive, adoring actresses, who collectively won the best actress award at Cannes, confirmation of his belief that women are communal creatures, sponsors of society, while men remain imprisoned in the testosterone-fuelled inferno of the ego. The locations in La Mancha included his mother’s birthplace. ‘It had a curative effect on me,’ he said. ‘I absorbed serenity from the townspeople. It was like being back in my childhood, surrounded by all those women who used to sit on their patios and gossip. There was something almost spiritual about working there.’
Almodovar used to be a cheerful blasphemer, celebrating a convent as a lair of erotic and narcotic delights in Dark Habits, defrocking paedophile priests in Bad Education. Now he seems nostalgic for the consolations of faith. ‘Critics say that my characters are like angels, only less solemn. They call them saints without religion. Yes, sometimes they have an aura of miracle.’
In Kika, the heroine twice resurrects her cataleptic boyfriend, the second time by jabbing his mortified toe in an electric socket. Almodovar also mentioned the dead son in All About My Mother, whose name and identity are passed on to a new baby. ‘That child is born with HIV but somehow recovers. The doctors are going to study him – he might save millions of lives.’ Almodovar’s eyes glowed at the beatific prospect; it worried me that he was so eager to believe in his own overoptimistic fictions.
Volver prays for the second coming of Almodovar’s mother. So far, no revenant has visited him in his bedroom but the film does mark the return of Carmen Maura, cast as the ghostly matriarch. Maura, who played a homicidal housewife in What Have I Done to Deserve This? and a distraught actress in Women on the Verge, was the young Almodovar’s rambunctious muse. Then, 18 years ago, they quarrelled. When I asked about their long estrangement, Almodovar’s limber Spanish tongue wagged for several minutes while his eyes rolled and his hands illustratively flapped. The translator scribbled, digested the revelations, and then, as his master’s voice, said: ‘We had issues.’
I started the inquiry again and this time extracted something a little more emphatic: ‘The issues were serious.’ Finally, a diplomatic formula wormed its way out of the translator’s mouth: ‘These were typical problems of working so intensely. We were a couple – an artistic couple, you understand – and such things happen.’ Almodovar, who has a tendency to blow up tiffs into geopolitical crises, once presented Maura with a lump of cement chipped from the Berlin Wall, in the hope that the barrier between them could be toppled. As for the reason why the wall went up in the first place, it seems, if you believe internet gossip, to have been utterly trivial: Almodovar jilted Maura by inviting someone else to the Oscars.
He disclosed more truths when hinting at the unhealthy closeness of their collaboration. He has sometimes jokingly called himself a vampire, feeding on performers and compelling them to enact his fantasies. What must Maura have felt about playing a man who has undergone a sex change in The Law of Desire? Almodovar endowed her with balls, then required her to chop them off. That, surely, is sufficient reason for an ‘issue’. Rejoicing in the manipulative power of the director, Almodovar described her as ‘an instrument that was perfectly tuned for my hands’.
Those hands push, pull and prod, but they don’t caress his actresses. I was intrigued by Almodovar’s attitude to Penelope Cruz, who is Maura’s daughter in the film. Like all his actresses, she has had to play perverse or distorted versions of the maternal role: in Live Flesh, she is a hooker who noisily gives birth on a Madrid bus, and in All About My Mother she is a nun impregnated by a drag queen. In the official press hand-out for the new film, Almodovar extols Cruz’s ‘neck, her shoulders, her breasts!!’ The two exclamation marks recall a gratuitous camera angle in Volver that stares down into the gulf of her cleavage, the earth mother’s nurturing centre of gravity. For Almodovar, Cruz’s only disqualification came in the gluteal area: ‘Characters like these always have big arses. Penelope is too slim.’ He fitted her with a prosthetic bum.
From a heterosexual director, reveries like these would be evidence for the feminist complaint that movies are a sleazy contrivance of male voyeurism. But what does a gay man see in a woman’s boobs and buttocks? Fussing over Cruz’s mascara and making finicky choices about the cardigans she wore, Almodovar is like a little boy playing with a doll. ‘No, no,’ he retaliated. ‘The role is about her humanity, her heart as well as her face. Pretty girls don’t usually get such parts. In America, they don’t know how to use actresses. I saved her from Hollywood.’
The more Almodovar insisted on his new state of Shakespearean ripeness, the more I hoped he was wrong. One word that cropped up frequently in his monologues was ‘Manichaean’; his translator omitted it from his edited summaries. It refers to the almost schizophrenic dualism of the Persian prophet Mani, who taught that there were two rival creations, one bright and good, the other gloomy and immitigably evil. Almodovar illustrated the point in Kika, where he plays a flouncing designer who paints a scar across Victoria Abril’s face while preparing her for a catwalk show, the theme of which is ‘Spain Divided’.
The duality slices through the country, dividing sunny Spain with its beaches and orange groves from the dark, mad realm of Goya and Lorca. It also bifurcates Almodovar, who sees an unbridgeable distance between what he calls ‘the female universe’, a place of healing and sympathy, cemented by the squelchy kisses the women exchange in Volver, and the hell of phallic violence inhabited by men. No wonder he so admires his transsexual characters, whose surgical sacrifice enables them to heal the breach.
But which camp does he belong to? Although he dotes on his mother’s memory, his arrogant directorial exercise of power links him with his angry, unloving father, who is absent from Almodovar’s family romance: the man was a thuggish muleteer, who refused to believe that the prissy Pedro was his child and threatened to set the National Guard on him when he absconded to Madrid. As Wilde put it: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’ Emotionally that may be Almodovar’s tragedy, too, but artistically it is his good fortune. He ought to be grateful for all those unresolved conflicts, which will go on generating dramas. He left me with a glimpse of what his florid shirt concealed. ‘I may be more peaceful these days,’ he said, ‘but my work is not therapy. I make films to be more neurotic, not less. I turn myself inside out in them.’
Sunday August 13, 2006, The Observer