WORLD VIEW
AS EUROPE convalesced from the intellectual numbness of World War Two, the burgeoning cinema industry took hold of the squall of public grief and produced works which overflowed with the passion which cried out of the stolen youth of this politicised generation. During this period Spain, stuck in the vice of Franco’s dictatorship, there underwent a period of painful intellectual smothering.
Upon the death of the dictator about twentyfive years ago, the country awoke though it would take decades for any apparent recovery. The frail flame of newfound liberty which caught following the burial of Franco and his regime, however, burned with phosphorescence behind a new movement that lit Madrid. Dislocated youths would play out a dance, fuelling their dark spirit of revelry with drink and drugs.
One of those youth of the Madrid streets, now also one of the world’s best directors, makes films which portray debauched environments, where morality is skewed and no emotion is straightforward or secure. Pedro Almodóvar’s motley characters range from rapists to kidnappers, transvestites to nuns, murderers to make-up artists. Often they are more than one of these. His protagonists are always scarred, emotionally and sometimes physically.
His films unravel the secrets of these characters’ past lives in an attempt to discover how they have reached this condition. In his Oscar-winning Todo Sobre mi Madre, when Manuela’s son dies in an accident, she returns to Barcelona in search of his transvestite father. During her journey, however, she discovers more about her own role as a mother and a woman as her past is revealed.
His latest film Volver, due to appear in next week’s Cannes film festival, makes a direct return to Castile and to the foundation of Spanish society: family. The past is not as simple as it seems at first. Incest and murder are covered up with mud and money, only to come out when the matriarch returns from beyond the grave. The film offers a sense of resolution, ending with a serenity which is rare in Almodóvar, overtly suggesting the reparability of the bruised Spanish psyche.
18th May 2006