The legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s hotly anticipated new film Pain and Glory, in cinemas 23 August, tells the quasi-autobiographical story of an ageing filmmaker who re-examines his life and life’s work as his deteriorating physical health dampens his ability and desire to make movies.
What a great opportunity to take a look back at Almodóvar’s own spectacular filmography and re-examine a couple of the films which elevated the auteur to the esteemed position which he holds in cinema today.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
The film which earned Almodóvar his first Oscar nomination and which established the director as a name outside of his home country. The film includes many of the motifs which have come to define the director: stand-out female performances, iconic costumes, discussions of sexuality, a rich palette of colours and a meta involvement of cinema and its working parts. The cast of Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano and Rossy de Palma are all frequent collaborators of the director and come together perfectly here for a hilarious, but wistful take on the romantic break-up movie.
All About My Mother
Without a doubt, the saddest film on this list, All About My Mother forgoes much of the light-hearted playfulness characteristic of Almodóvar’s earlier work to deliver a truly poignant story about love, gender, and loneliness. Placed in the more than capable hands of Cecilia Roth, Penélope Cruz, and Marisa Paredes, the delicate subject matter of a mother who goes looking for her dead son’s father, a transgender woman, is treated with confidence and nuance, never descending into parody or farce. It was no coincidence that the film earned Almodóvar his first Oscar gong, for Best Foreign Language film.
Talk to Her
The set-up of Talk to Her is classic Almodóvar: Beningo and Marco care for two different comatose women who reside in the same hospital. However, while Beningo falls ever more deeply in love woman he is caring for, Marco slowly drifts away. The film is yet another illustration of Almodóvar’s uncanny ability to transform a kitchen-sink type melodrama into a fully blown theatrical picture, raising polarizing issues of morality and caring in the process.
Related: Pain and Glory review
The Skin I live in
What if Frankenstein’s monster were a woman? This is the question which Almodóvar asks in The Skin I Live In. The film stands out in the director’s filmography as being a conventional genre film, replete with melodramatic plot-twists and hammed-up performances. However, while the story sticks to traditional horror-movie tropes, the script asks familiar questions of the audience in regard to the autonomy of women’s bodies and their treatment within cinema.
Pain and Glory
Almodóvar has never been one to shy away from self-reflection in his movies, but none have done so in such detail, or with such elegance as Pain and Glory. The film recruits a few of the director’s favouries with Antonio Banderas Penélope Cruz and Julieta Serrano taking centre stage but it also offers opportunities to new collaborators, including the astonishing young Asier Flores, who manages to hold his own against the screen legends he acts besides. This is definitely one to watch this summer.
PAIN AND GLORY IS IN CINEMAS 23 AUGUST
