Just as his new film, All About My Mother, confirms his status as a master, Pedro Almodvar is about to swap Europe for the US
Damon Wise
The day Pedro Almodvar’s latest movie, All About My Mother, made its European debut at Cannes this year was the day the festival truly started.
Until then, Cannes 1999 had been a string of often European disappointments, from the dismal bombast of The Barber of Siberia, unaccountably the opening night attraction, to the vilified pretensions of Leos Carax’s long-awaited Pola X and the baffling absurdity of Sokurov’s avant-garde Hitler biopic, Moloch.
With All About My Mother, however, the mood changed. The film confirmed Almodvar as a European master. Comparisons were drawn with Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and even (on account of his festival-friendly showmanship) Jean-Luc Godard. And with the film’s cheeky director credit, he even managed to weigh himself in with the all-time giants of cinema – like Federico Fellini and Alfred Hitchcock before him, he was now simply “Almodvar”.
Strangely, Almodvar had resisted almost all of festival organiser Gilles Jacob’s advances. He’d never had a film in competition before, and it took a lot of persuasion to make him enter All About My Mother. “I don’t like to compete,” he said at the time. “And I hate the conditions of the festival: the champagne, the money, the work. It’s a nightmare.”
All About My Mother, however, almost came to represent the festival. Just about every international critic showered it with praise – including Variety’s phlegmatic reviewer Todd McCarthy, who awarded it a generous 18 out of 20 in a festival poll. The disbelief was palpable when David Cronenberg’s jury slipped the Palme d’Or to the little-seen Belgian movie Rosetta, saluting Almodvar with best director as a consolation prize. Almodvar accepted his trophy with good grace. “Pardon me if I don’t cry,” he said wryly.
But just as Almodvar was being measured up as the new saviour of modern European cinema, he had a surprise waiting. Instead of revelling in his near- sainthood, he announced that he was contemplating taking the Hollywood dollar for an adaptation of Pete Dexter’s The Paper Boy, a thriller by the writer of the 1950s cop drama, Mulholland Falls. Almodvar’s acolytes were surprised, to say the least. This was the same director who once said, “When I see American films directed by Europeans – like Stephen Frears’ Hero [1992] – I tell myself it’s exactly what one shouldn’t do. Those directors fell into every trap lying in wait for them.”
Almodvar has threatened to go mainstream before. In the early 1990s, he was interested in Ruth Rendell’s novel Live Flesh, about a released criminal who inveigles himself into the life of the policeman he was convicted of shooting. Somehow this was transmuted into the opening scenes of the feeble but handsome crime-culture satire Kika (1993). But later, the director returned to the novel and optioned it, making plans to shoot it in its native country. “Setting the film in England would be very different; there would be a greater element of sincerity,” he explained. “But I don’t want to hide the fact that it’s me who’s telling the story. Everything will be seen from the point of view of a Spanish film-maker.”
By the time the film went into production, however, Almodvar had changed his mind. At first he was fascinated by the unarmed British police, but over time he began to feel this weakened the plot. The setting was now Madrid, not Theydon Bois, the language Castilian, not English.
So Almodvar may not go the Hollywood route after all. Maybe his patriotic instincts will take over and reshape the material. But if is he serious, what can we expect? After all, Hollywood is treacherous enough for its American journeymen, let alone European outsiders with delusions of artistry.
Wim Wenders learned this all too well when, in the late 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola – after seeing Wenders’s series of American-influenced road movies – hired him to make Hammett. Wenders met interference at every turn, and composer John Barry is still amused by the director’s petulance.
Hammett was held in limbo for three years and partially reshot by Coppola. Significantly, Wenders’s signature film – the Palme d’Or-winning Paris, Texas – was a French-German co-production.
The American adventure also seems to have diluted Wenders’s vision. While he was excluded from United States culture, he was able to use his outsider status, feeding European thought and emotion into the country’s landscapes. Nowadays, he’s almost as American as Michael Douglas, hanging out with U2 and making curiously unrooted films like The End of Violence.
It may be that Wenders held American culture in too high esteem, and, by going there, he was messing with his own mythology.
The ex-pats who succeed in Hollywood have their own agenda. Douglas Sirk and Fritz Lang, who fled Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, found ways of delivering films the public adored while simultaneously provoking them. Lang’s targets were the lynch-mob mentality, media manipulation and police corruption, while Sirk’s florid, sentimental style allowed him to take in all the passions, lies and tensions that build up in human relationships. More recently, Holland’s perverse and intelligent Paul Verhoeven has learned this particular code, seeming to deliver rousing, all-American morality tales (Robocop, Starship Troopers), while actually debunking the country’s political, economic and social structure.
Which is where Almodvar might fit in. But can he find it in himself to disguise his liberalism? After Franco, freedom of expression became a political cause in Almodvar’s homeland, and the director is so broad-minded he’s almost priestlike in his tolerance. All About My Mother concerns a mother, Manuela, whose 17- year-old son dies without ever knowing his father. Trying to cope with her grief, Manuela travels to Barcelona to find him and break the news. They haven’t met in years, but she knows where to find him: working the streets, like most of the city’s other drug-addicted pre-op transsexuals.
It would be easy to accuse Almodvar of selling out his European audience and whoring his art. It would be tempting to tell him not to join his protg Antonio Banderas in the tomato-tanned, poodle- haired cult of tabloid celebrity. But Almodvar likes a challenge, loves to shock, and the prospect of taking on a mainstream audience is not something he’ll pass up lightly.
His work is in a constant state of evolution, ever improving, ever refining but still overwhelmingly individual. This, after all, is a man with big ideas. “I would truly like to do a musical, which is a genre that is done badly,” he said after the release of Live Flesh. “And I would like to do an adventure movie. But I would do them as a vehicle for a point of view. So I guess it would still be an Almodvar movie.”
All About My Mother opened at cinemas countrywide last Friday