imdb entry

Another Almodovar film. Patterns are starting to emerge. First of all, although Almodovar famously makes films about women, even where there are no men at all, those men who are mentioned totally dictate the stories of the lives of the women. For instance, by being corpses, or from having disappeared. Secondly, Almodovar does do men as well as women (Talk to her is about two men), and when he does, the lives of the men may revolve around women, who may also be missing or dead, or in this case, in comas and/ or “persistent vegetative states”. His fundamental interest is the ways we are defined by our relationships with both the same and the opposite sex, by birth, death and marriage as well as friendship. These are great big dramatic themes, which I would argue come more from his sense of the tragic genre, through Gabriel Garbia Lorca, than through soap opera. Almodovar respects the old-fashioned “high” arts, and doesn’t seem to have a lot of time for junk TV at all.

It annoys me when artists are not taken seriously just because they seem to belong to some minority or other. “Gay” doesn’t have to mean “lightweight”. Almodovar writes about oddball characters for sure, but he uses them to represent humanity. Teenage girls become accidental murderers, anyone’s absent father might turn out to have been transsexual- only bigotry separates “those people” from “people like us”, in reality. Almodovar is truly revolutionary, as all great artists should be, in the way he makes the extraordinary seem mundane, and reveals the extremes behind mundanity. Dullness isn’t even a choice, only a delusion. He’s right about that. Life itself is bizarre and wacky. Almodovar makes you feel uncomfortable with your prejudices, and that’s a good thing. Individuals don’t conform to generalities, and expecting them to is narrow-minded.

There always seems to be something scary about watching an Almodovar film. You never know what will happen, but you always expect it to be bad. It generally is. Life is like that too. But then people work with it and around it and get over it, and on the way they do beautiful funny things and love each other.