Volver ( /ˌvɒlˈvɛər/; Spanish: "return", pronounced: [bolˈβer]) is a 2006 Spanish drama film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Headed by actress Penélope Cruz, the film features an ensemble cast also starring Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo, and Chus Lampreave. Revolving around an eccentric family of women from a wind-swept region south of Madrid, Cruz plays Raimunda, a working-class woman forced to go to great lengths to protect her 14-year-old daughter Paula. To top off the family crisis, her mother Irene comes back from the dead to tie up loose ends.

The plot originates in Almodóvar's earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995), where it features as a novel which is rejected for publication but is stolen to form the screenplay of a film named The Freezer. Drawing inspiration from the Italian neorealism of the late 1940s to early 1950s and the work of pioneering directors such as Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Volver addresses themes like sexual abuse, loneliness and death, mixing the genres of farce, tragedy, melodrama, and magic realism. Set in the La Mancha region, Almodovar's place of birth, the filmmaker cited his upbringing as a major influence on many aspects of the plot and the characters.

Volver was one of the films competing for the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. It eventually won two awards: Best Actress (shared by the six main actresses) and Best Screenplay.^[1] The film's premiere was held on March 10, 2006, in Puertollano, Spain, where the filming had taken place. Penélope Cruz was nominated for the 2006 Academy Award for Best Actress, making her the second Spanish woman ever to be nominated in that category.

Plot[link]

Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Soledad (Lola Dueñas) are sisters who grew up in Alcanfor de las Infantas, a small village in La Mancha, but now both live in Madrid. Their parents died in a tragic fire three years prior to the beginning of the film. The events which occurred on the night of the fire are only gradually revealed, but are central to the plot.

Sole returns to the village for the funeral of her elderly Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave). Aunt Paula's neighbour Agustina (Blanca Portillo) confesses to Sole that she has heard Paula talking to the ghost of Sole's mother Irene (Carmen Maura). Sole encounters the ghost herself, and when she returns to Madrid, she discovers that the ghost has stowed away in the trunk of her car. Irene has brought luggage, intending to stay with her daughter for a while, and Sole, though frightened, agrees to let her mother stay with her: Sole operates a hair salon in her apartment, and Irene will assist her, posing as a Russian woman to hide her true identity. Sole tries to determine why her mother's ghost has returned to Earth, asking her if she left anything undone in her life. Irene says that she does have issues to resolve, relating to the questions of why Raimunda hates her and why she is afraid to reveal herself to Raimunda.

Meanwhile Raimunda and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) have a different death to cope with. Paula's father Paco (Antonio de la Torre) attempts to rape her, claiming that he is not really her father, and Paula stabs him in self-defense. Raimunda quickly hides the corpse in the deep-freezer of a nearby unused restaurant. The owner of the restaurant building, Emilio (Carlos Blanco), is out of town and entrusted Raimunda with the keys so that she can show it to prospective tenants. When members of a film crew happen upon the restaurant, Raimunda strikes a deal to cater for them, and suddenly finds herself back in the restaurant business.

Raimunda reveals to Paula that Paco was not, in fact, her biological father, and promises to tell her the whole story at a later time. Agustina is diagnosed with cancer and must go to Madrid for medical treatment. Raimunda visits her in the hospital. Agustina asks Raimunda if she has seen her mother's ghost. Agustina hopes that the ghost will be able to tell her about the fate of her own mother, who disappeared three years ago without a trace. Raimunda undertakes the task of disposing of Paco’s remains: she leaves Paula with Sole, rents a van and transports the freezer to a convenient spot by the river Júcar, 180 kilometres away. While staying in Sole's apartment, Paula meets her grandmother's ghost and grows close to her. The next night, Agustina comes to the restaurant to renew her request to Raimunda to ask her mother’s ghost about her own mother's whereabouts. She reveals two startling secrets: that Raimunda's father and Agustina’s mother were having an affair and that Agustina's mother disappeared on the same day that Raimunda’s parents died.

Sole finally confesses to Raimunda that she has seen their mother's ghost and that the ghost is, in fact, watching television in the next room with Paula. Raimunda is confused, angry, and frightened, but Paula urges her to tell her the truth: is she really alive, and not a dead spirit? Irene admits that she did not, in fact, die in the fire, and reveals the whole truth. We learn that the reason for Raimunda and Irene's estrangement is that Raimunda's father sexually abused her, resulting in the birth of Paula; thus Paula is Raimunda’s daughter and also her sister. Raimunda had been angry with her mother for never noticing and ending this abuse. Irene tells Raimunda that she had never understood Raimunda's anger and distance until her Aunt Paula told her about what her husband had done to her daughter, and Irene became furious with herself when she found out.

Irene explains that, due to her husband's abuse of Raimunda, she started the fire that killed him. The ashes that had been presumed to be Irene’s were, in fact, the ashes of Agustina's mother, the woman with whom Irene's husband was having an affair. After the fire, Irene wandered for several days in the countryside, until she decided that she wanted to turn herself in. But first, she wanted to say goodbye to her sister Paula, who had lost the ability to look after herself and with whom Irene had been living prior to setting the fire that killed her husband. Paula, who was living in the past due to her senility, welcomed Irene home as if nothing had happened, and Irene stayed, caring for her sister and expecting that the police would come soon to arrest her. Due to the superstitious and closed nature of the community, however, the police never came and the residents, who are accustomed to tales of the dead returning, explained the rare sightings of Irene as "un fantasma", a ghost.

The film ends with the family reunited at Aunt Paula’s house. Irene reveals her presence to Agustina, who believes Irene to be a ghost. Irene pledges to stay in the village and care for Agustina as her cancer worsens, saying to Raimunda that it was the least that she could do after killing Agustina's mother. In the last scene Raimunda visits her mother at Agustina's house. The two embrace and tell one another that they now have time to repair their relationship.

Cast[link]

Production[link]

Origins[link]

Volver was first developed by Pedro Almodóvar, based on a story actress Marisa Paredes told him during the production of their 1995 film The Flower of My Secret, another film set in the La Mancha region.^[2] The story revolved around a heartbroken Puerto Rican man who opts to kill his mother-in-law in hopes of reuniting with his beloved wife, who left him and broke off contact, at her mother's funeral. Owning a restaurant, he leaves it in his neighbour’s care, when he is about to kill his victim.^[2] Fascinated by the story and its background, Almodóvar decided on incorporating elements of it into the screenplay of The Flower of My Secret, making it the plot of a movie-within-the-movie based on the main character's novel in the film.^[2] While working on the script for Volver, he would however settle on outlining the role of the neighbour Raimunda, as the film's central character, while Emilio, the Puerto Rican, eventually became a supporting role only.^[3]

Almodóvar says of the story that “it is precisely about death...More than about death itself, the screenplay talks about the rich culture that surrounds death in the region of La Mancha, where I was born. It is about the way (not tragic at all) in which various female characters, of different generations, deal with this culture.”^[4]

Casting[link]

Penélope Cruz was the first reported to have landed one of the starring roles in Volver, having previously worked with Almodóvar on his films Live Flesh (1997) and All About My Mother (1999).^[5] In preparing for her role, the actress watched Italian neorealism films from the 1950s, many of them starring Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, to study "the Italian maggiorate" that Almodóvar envisioned for her performance in the film.^[2] Cruz, who had to wear a prosthetic bottom while filming, noted the role of Raimunda as "the best gift an actress can get."^[6]

Carmen Maura, the star of Almodóvar's debut Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980) and five additional films with the director, was the first to be cast in the film alongside Cruz.^[5] Her engagement marked her first collaboration with Almodóvar after a period of 18 years and a reported fallout during the production of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1989).^[7] Maura commented on the "borderline character" of Irene as a "very complicated [role to play]."^[7]

Reception[link]

Almodóvar and Cruz on the red carpet at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

Box office[link]

In the US alone, the film had made $12,897,993 (15.4% of total) in the box office, after 26.4 weeks of release in 689 theatres. The box office figure from the rest of the world is somewhere in the region of $71,123,059 (84.6% of total) according to BoxOfficeMojo. The total worldwide gross was estimated at $84,021,052.^[8]

As of January 22, 2007, the film had grossed $12,241,181 at the Spanish box office.^[9]

Critical reception[link]

The film received rave reviews when it was released in Spain. Fotogramas, the country's top film magazine, gave it a five-star rating.^[10] Upon its U.S. release, A. O. Scott made it an "NYT Critics' Pick" and wrote:^[11]

To relate the details of the narrative—death, cancer, betrayal, parental abandonment, more death—would create an impression of dreariness and woe. But nothing could be further from the spirit of Volver which is buoyant without being flip, and consoling without ever becoming maudlin. Mr. Almodóvar acknowledges misfortune—and takes it seriously—from a perspective that is essentially comic. Very few filmmakers have managed to smile so convincingly in the face of misery and fatality: Jean Renoir and Billy Wilder come immediately to mind, and Mr. Almodóvar, if he is not yet their equal, surely belongs in their company. Volver is often dazzling in its artifice—José Luis Alcaine's ripe cinematography, Alberto Iglesias's suave, heart-tugging score—but it is never false. It draws you in, invites you to linger and makes you eager to return.

Roger Ebert gave it his top rating of (four stars out of 4), calling it "enchanting, gentle, transgressive" and notes "Almodovar is above all a director who loves women—young, old, professional, amateur, mothers, daughters, granddaughters, dead, alive. Here his cheerful plot combines life after death with the concealment of murder, success in the restaurant business, the launching of daughters and with completely serendipitous solutions to (almost) everyone's problems."^[12]

As of 2012, The film has a Certified Fresh rating from critics at Rotten Tomatoes, scoring a 92% based on 147 "fresh" reviews out of 160 critics; the rating among the website's "top critics" was even higher, with 40 of 42 of them giving it a fresh review.^[13]

Top ten lists[link]

The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2006.^[14]

Awards and nominations[link]

Volver received a standing ovation when it was screened as part of the official selection at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Best Screenplay award as well as the award for Best Actress — which was shared by the six stars of the film.^[1]

The film received two nominations at the 63rd Golden Globe Awards: Best Actress for Penélope Cruz as well as Best Foreign Language Film. Cruz was nominated for "Best Actress" at the Academy Awards, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Music[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The tango Volver by Carlos Gardel with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera is converted to flamenco and is sung in the movie with the voice of Estrella Morente and lip synced by Penélope Cruz. The dance tune playing at the party prior to Raimunda's lip syncing is called Good Thing by the British three-piece indie-dance combo Saint Etienne.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Audio and Transcript from a 4 August 2006 interview about Volver with Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz at the National Film Theatre
• Volver at the Internet Movie Database
• Volver at AllRovi
• Volver at Rotten Tomatoes
• Volver at Metacritic
• Official website: Volver at Sony Pictures Classics
• Volver Production Notes from moviegrande.com

Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar (2008)
Born	Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (1949-09-25) 25 September 1949 (age 62) Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real, Spain
Occupation	Filmmaker
Years active	1974–present
Website
pedroalmodovar.es

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpeðɾo almoˈðoβar kaβaˈʎeɾo]; born 25 September 1949)^[1][2] is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.

Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humor, strong colors and glossy décor. Desire, passion, family and identity are among Almodóvar’s most prevalent themes. His films enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the stage of world cinema.

He founded Spanish film production company El Deseo S.A. with his younger brother Agustín Almodóvar who has produced almost all of Pedro’s films. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.^[2]

Early life[link]

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by Don Quijote. He was born as one of four children (two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, who could barely read or write, worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. Almodóvar's mother, Francisca Caballero, turned her son into a part time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader and transcriber for the neighbors. When Pedro was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in the west of the country, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.^[3]

While Calzada did not have a cinema, the streets where he lived in Cáceres contained not only the school, but also a movie theater.^[4]“Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received from the priest,” he said later in an interview.^[5]

Almodóvar was influenced by such directors as Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alfred Hitchcock, John Waters, Ingmar Bergman, Edgar Neville, Federico Fellini, George Cukor, Luis García Berlanga and neorealist Marco Ferreri.

Against his parents' wishes, Pedro Almodóvar moved to Madrid in 1967. His goal was to be a film director, but he lacked the economic means to do it and besides, Franco had just closed the National School of Cinema so he would be completely self-taught. To support himself, Almodóvar worked a number of odd jobs, including a stint selling used items in the famous Madrid flea market El Rastro. He eventually found full-time employment with Spain's national phone company, Telefónica, where he worked for twelve years as an administrative assistant. Since he worked only until three in the afternoon, he had the rest of the day to pursue his own interests.

Beginnings[link]

In the early seventies, Almodóvar grew interested in experimental cinema and theatre. He collaborated with the vanguard theatrical group, Los Goliardos, where he played his first professional roles and met Carmen Maura. He was also writing comics and contributing articles and stories to a number of counterculture magazines, such as Star, Víbora and Vibraciones.

Madrid’s flourishing alternative cultural scene became the perfect scenario for Almodóvar's social talents. He was a crucial figure in La Movida Madrileña (Madriliene Movement), a cultural renaissance that followed the fall of the Franco regime. Alongside Fabio McNamara, Almodóvar sang in a glam rock parody duo. He published a novella, Fuego en las entrañas (Fire in the Guts). Writing under the pseudonym "Patty Diphusa", he penned various articles for major newspapers and magazines, such as El País, Diario 16 and La Luna. He kept writing stories that were eventually published in a compilation volume, El sueño de la razón (The Dream of Reason).

Short films[link]

Almodóvar bought his first camera, a Super-8, with his first paycheck from Telefonica when he was 22 years old, and began to make hand-held short films.^[6] Around 1974, he made his first short film, and by the end of the 1970s they were shown in Madrid's night circuit and in Barcelona. These shorts had overtly sexual narratives and no soundtrack: Dos putas, o, Historia de amor que termina en boda (1974) (Two Whores, or, A Love Story that Ends in Marriage); La caída de Sodoma (1975) (The Fall of Sodom); Homenaje (1976) (Homage); La estrella (1977) (The Star) 1977 Sexo Va: Sexo viene (Sex Comes and Goes) (Super-8); Complementos (shorts) 1978; (16mm)..^[7]

“I showed them in bars, at parties… I could not add a soundtrack because it was very difficult. The magnetic strip was very poor, very thin. I remember that I became very famous in Madrid because, as the films had no sound, I took a cassette with music while I personally did the voices of all the characters, songs and dialogues.^[8] After four years of working with shorts in Super-8 format, in 1978 Almodóvar made his first Super-8, full-length film: Folle, folle, fólleme, Tim (1978) (Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Tim), a magazine style melodrama. In addition, he made his first 16 mm short, Salome. This was his first contact with the professional world of cinema.^[9] The film's stars, Carmen Maura and Felix Rotaeta, encouraged him to make his first feature film in 16 mm and helped him raise the money to finance what would be Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón.

Film career[link]

Almodóvar at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival

Asked to explain the success of his films, he says that they are very entertaining. "It's important not to forget that films are made to entertain. That's the key."^[6] He was heavily influenced by old Hollywood movies in which everything happens around a female main character, and aims to continue in that tradition.^[6]

Almodóvar is openly gay,^[10] and he has incorporated elements of underground and gay culture into mainstream forms with wide crossover appeal, thus redefining perceptions of Spanish cinema and Spain.^[11] He acknowledges, however, that his films are also very personal--"[M]y films are very Spanish, but on the other hand they are capriciously personal. You cannot measure Spain by my films." ^[12]

[edit] Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980)

Almodóvar made his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón), in 1980 with a very low budget and a team of volunteers shooting on weekends. The film was based on his photo-novella, General Erections, previously published in the magazine El Víbora (The Viper). Pepi, Luci, Bom… consists of a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a fully formed plot. It follows the adventures of the three characters of the title: Pepi, who wants revenge from the corrupt policeman who raped her; Luci, a mousy, masochistic housewife; and Bom, a lesbian punk rock singer. The central theme of the film, friendship and female solidarity, appears repeatedly in Almodóvar’s filmography.

The film was plagued by financial and technical problems. However, Almodóvar would look back fondly to his first film: "Pepi, Luci, Bom… is a film full of defects. When a film has only one or two, it is considered an imperfect film, while when there is a profusion of technical flaws, it is called style. That’s what I said joking around when I was promoting the film, but I believe that that was closer to the truth.^[13]

The film captured the spirit of the times – above all the sense of cultural and sexual freedom – and established Almodóvar as an agent provocateur. With its many kitsch elements, campy style, outrageous humor, and explicit sexuality (there is a famous golden shower scene in the middle of a knitting lesson), the film amassed a cult following. It toured the independent circuits and then spent four years on the late night showing of the Alphaville Theater in Madrid which provided the funds for Almodóvar's second film.

[edit] Laberinto de Pasiones (1982)

Labyrinth of Passions (Laberinto de Pasiones) is a screwball comedy about multiple identities, one of Almodóvar’s favorite subjects. The plot follows the adventures of two sex-crazy characters: Sexilia, an aptly named nymphomaniac pop star, and Riza, the gay son of the leader of a fictional Middle Eastern country. Their unlikely destiny is to find one another, overcome their sexual preferences and live happily ever after on a tropical island. The campy roundelay also involves Queti, Sexilia’s “biggest fan”, whose delusional father rapes her. The film is an outrageous look at love and sex, framed in Madrid of the early 1980s, during the so called Movida madrileña, a period of sexual adventurousness between the dissolution of Franco's authoritarian regime and the onset of AIDS consciousness. Labyrinth of Passions caught the spirit of liberation which then ruled in Madrid and it became a cult film.^[14]

Almodóvar said about Labyrinth of Passions: "I like the film even if it could have been better made. The main problem is that the story of the two leads is much less interesting than the stories of all the secondary characters. But precisely because there are so many secondary characters, there's a lot in the film I like."^[14]

[edit] Entre Tinieblas (1983)

Dark Habits (Entre Tinieblas) heralded a change in tone to somber melodrama with comic elements. This film has an almost all-female cast featuring many of Almodóvar's favorite leading ladies: Carmen Maura, Julieta Serrano, Marisa Paredes and Chus Lampreave. The narrative centers upon a cabaret singer, who, running away from justice, finds refuge in a convent of destitute nuns, each of whom explores a different sin. The mother superior, a lesbian drug addict, falls in love with the singer.

The film is a satire of Spain's religious institutions, portraying spiritual desolation and moral bankruptcy. Dark Habits explores the force of desire in characters who are ruled by their intuition rather than reason. This is also Almodóvar’s first film in which he clearly uses popular music to express emotion: in a pivotal scene, the mother superior and her protégé sing along with Lucho Gatica’s bolero: Encadenados (Chained together).

Dark Habits was a modest success, and cemented Almodóvar’s reputation as the enfant terrible of the Spanish cinema.

[edit] ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984)

Almodóvar's next film, What Have I Done to Deserve This? (¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?) was inspired by the Spanish black comedies of the late 50s and early 60s. It is the tale of a struggling housewife named Gloria and her dysfunctional family: her abusive husband, who works as a taxi driver; her oldest son, a drug dealer; the youngest son, who sells his body to the local perverts; and the grandmother who hates the city and just wants to return to her rural village.

The theme of the downtrodden housewife coping with the travails of everyday life arises repeatedly in the director's work, as do other issues of female independence and solidarity. What Have I Done to Deserve This? is also a critique on consumerism and patriarchal culture. In one scene, the housewife trades her own son so she doesn't have to pay a dentist bill, and in another the only witness of a crime is a lizard, aptly named “Money.”

What Have I Done to Deserve This? was more successful than Almodóvar’s previous films and became his first with international distribution.

[edit] Matador (1986)

Almodóvar's subsequent films deepened his exploration of sexual desire and the sometimes brutal laws governing it. Matador is a dark, complex story that centers on the relationship between a former bullfighter and a murderous female lawyer, both of whom can only experience sexual fulfillment in conjunction with killing. The film offered up desire as a bridge between sexual attraction and death.

Written together with Spanish novelist Jesús Ferrero, Matador drew away from the naturalism and humor of the director’s previous work into a deeper and darker terrain. Almodóvar established the interrelation between sexuality and violence as seen in his cinematographic quotation of the final sequence from King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. The violent elements of the film caused some controversy. Almodóvar justified his use of violence explaining "The moral of all my films is to get to a stage of greater freedom." Almodóvar went on to note, "I have my own morality. And so do my films. If you see Matador through the perspective of traditional morality, it's a dangerous film because it's just a celebration of killing. Matador is like a legend. I don't try to be realistic; it's very abstract, so you don't feel identification with the things that are happening, but with the sensibility of this kind of romanticism".^[15]

[edit] La Ley del Deseo (1987)

Almodóvar solidified his creative independence when he started the production company El Deseo, together with his brother Agustín Almodóvar, who has also had several cameo roles in his films. From 1986 on, Pedro Almodóvar has produced his own films.

The first movie that came out from El Deseo was the aptly named Law of Desire (La Ley del Deseo). The narrative follows three main characters: a gay film director who embarks on a new project; his sister, an actress who used to be his brother (played by Carmen Maura), and a repressed murderously obsessive stalker (played by Antonio Banderas).

The film presents a gay love triangle and drew away from most representations of homosexuals in films. These characters are neither coming out nor confronting sexual guilt or homophobia; they are already liberated, like the homosexuals in Fassbinder’s films. Almodóvar said about Law of Desire : " It's the key film in my life and career. It deals with my vision of desire, something that's both very hard and very human. By this I mean the absolute necessity of being desired and the fact that in the interplay of desires it's rare that two desires meet and correspond".^[16]

Almodóvar's films rely heavily on the capacity of his actors to pull through difficult roles into a complex narrative. In Law of Desire Carmen Maura plays the role of Tina, a woman who used to be a man. Almodóvar explains: "Carmen is required to imitate a woman, to savour the imitation, to be conscious of the kitsch part that there is in the imitation, completely renouncing parody, but not humour."^[17]

Elements from Law of Desire grew into the basis for two later films: Carmen Maura appears in a stage production of Cocteau’s The Human Voice, which inspired Almodóvar’s next film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; and Tina's confrontation scene with an abusive priest formed a partial genesis for Bad Education.

[edit] Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988)

Almodóvar’s next film was his first huge international success: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios), a feminist light comedy that further established Almodóvar as a "women's director" like George Cukor and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Almodóvar has said that women make better characters: “women are more spectacular as dramatic subjects, they have a greater range of registers, etc.”^[18]

The film, staged as a faux adaptation of a theatrical work, details a two-day period in the life of Pepa, (Carmen Maura) a professional movie dubber who has been abruptly abandoned by her married lover and who frantically tries to track him down. In the course of her search she discovers some of his secrets, and realizes her true feelings.

Inspired by Hollywood comedies of the 1950s, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown became the stepping stone for Pedro Almodóvar's later work. This light comedy of rapid-fire dialogue and fast-paced action remains one of Almodóvar’s most accessible films (with no drugs or sex, although there is a sequence in which a sleeping woman dreams that she is having sex, and we see only her reactions). The film received public and critical acclaim worldwide, and brought Almodóvar to the attention of American audiences. Women was showered with many awards, and received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film.

[edit] ¡Átame! (1990)

Almodóvar's next film marked the breaking-off with his reference actress, Carmen Maura, and the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with another great actress of Spanish and European cinema: Victoria Abril. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!) was also the director's fifth and most important collaboration with Antonio Banderas.

In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Ricky (played by Antonio Banderas), a recently released psychiatric patient, kidnaps and holds hostage an actress (played by Victoria Abril) in order to make her fall in love with him. “I’m 23 years old, I have fifty thousand pesetas and I am alone in the world. I will try to be a good husband for you and a good father for your children,” he tells her.^[19]

Rather than populate the film with many characters, as in his previous films, here the story focuses on the compelling relationship at its center: the actress and her kidnapper literally struggling for power and desperate for love. The film’s title line ¡Tie Me Up! is unexpectedly uttered by the actress as a genuine request. She does not know if she will try to escape or not, and when she realizes she has feelings for her captor, she prefers not to be given a chance.

In spite of some dark elements, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! can be described as a romantic comedy, and the director's most clear love story, with a plot similar to William Wyler's thriller, The Collector. Nevertheless, the film was the subject of heated debate; it was decried by feminists and women's advocacy groups for what they perceived as the film's sadomasochist undertones. Its U.S. release was marked by further scandal and controversy. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which determines film ratings in the U.S., marginalized its distribution with the stigma of an 'X' rating. The film's distribution company, Miramax, filed a lawsuit against the MPAA over the X rating, but lost in court. However, numerous other filmmakers had complained about the X rating given to their films, and in September 1990 the MPAA dropped the X rating and replaced it with the NC-17 rating. This was especially helpful to films of explicit nature that were previously regarded unfairly as pornographic because of the X rating.^[20]

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which did not enjoy the wide acclaim of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, rather had a negative reception among some Spanish critics, who declared that Almodóvar had lost his sense of direction; similar criticism was leveled at his two subsequent films.

[edit] Tacones Lejanos (1991)

Almodóvar with Victoria Abril, star of High Heels, at the 1993 César Awards in Paris.

The family melodrama High Heels (Tacones Lejanos) is built around the fractured relationship between a self-involved mother, a famous torch song singer, and the grown daughter she abandoned as a child, who works as TV newscaster. The daughter has married her mother's ex-lover and has befriended a female impersonator of her mother. Popular songs, always a key element in Almodóvar’s work, are never more present than in this film full of boleros. High Heels also contains an unexpected prison yard dance sequence.

The film has the feel of other mother-daughter melodramas like Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life and particularly Autumn Sonata, which is quoted directly in the film. High Heels was an interpretative tour de force for two essential actresses of the "Almodovarian universe": Marisa Paredes and Victoria Abril.

[edit] Kika (1993)

After the melodramatic intensity of High Heels, Almodóvar took another sudden turn in his career by shooting one of his most unclassifiable movies: Kika, a choral film where each character belongs to a different film genre, thus generating a very free and heterodox movie. The plot centers on Kika, a clueless but good-hearted make-up artist involved with an older expatriate American writer and his bewildered stepson. A vampy, oddball television reporter who is constantly in search of sensational stories follows Kika's misadventures.

Kika is a critique of mass media, particularly its sensationalism. Here Almodóvar gives a cameo role to his real life elderly mother, Francisca Caballero, who plays an ill-qualified hostess of a literary T.V. program. She reads badly and not much as her eyesight is bad, but she explains to the audience that she has been given her job as presenter by her son, the director (a self-reflexive Almodóvar), so that mother and son can spend time together.

Kika created a certain amount of controversy in the United States thanks to a humorous rape scene that was perceived as being both misogynistic and exploitative. The film was not well received by critics, but opened the door to a new era in the director’s career.

[edit] La flor de mi secreto (1995)

Almodóvar changed gears with his next effort, 1995's The Flower of My Secret (La flor de mi secreto). It is an exploration of denial in its various forms, a film in which melodrama is treated more as theme rather than as plot line. The Flower of My Secret is the story of Leo Macias, a successful romance writer who has to confront both a professional and personal crisis. Estranged from her husband, a military officer who has volunteered for an international peacekeeping role in Bosnia and Herzegovina to avoid her, Leo fights to hold on to a past that has already eluded her, not realizing she has already set her future path by her own creativity and by supporting the creative efforts of others.

Starring Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes, this psychological drama was hailed as his most mature film to date, and remains one of the director's humblest films. Leaving Almodóvar's usual choral exercises aside, the story centered on the love-torn writer. The Flower of My Secret has many common elements with All About My Mother and Talk to Her. The three films are about “loss, growth and recovery”.^[21]

The Flower of my Secret heralded a change in Almodóvar's filmography to a more mature period. It is the transitional film between his earlier and later style. It is worth noting, however, that many leading critics did not respond well to this film.

[edit] Carne trémula (1997)

Almodóvar has written all of his films, but with Live Flesh (Carne trémula) the director shared script writing credits. This was his first script adapted from a book, Ruth Rendell’s novel Live Flesh. All that remains in the film from the book is the plot line of the two male protagonists: David, a police detective, and Víctor, the man accused of wounding and paralyzing him. Upon his release, Víctor, looking for revenge, is soon entangled in the lives not only of David and his wife, but also of David’s former partner, Sancho, and Sancho’s wife.^[22]

Live Flesh explores love, loss, and suffering with a sober restraint only briefly glimpsed in the director's earlier work. The film tells the story of several characters implicated in each other's fates in ways that are beyond their control. Live Flesh is historically framed from 1970, when Franco declared a state of emergency, to 1996, when Spain had completely shaken off the restrictions of the Franco regime. With this film Almodóvar started his collaboration with Penélope Cruz.

[edit] Todo sobre mi madre (1999)

Almodóvar then continued to work in more serious dramatic confines, directing All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre). The film grew out of a brief scene in The Flower of My Secret, telling the story of a mourning mother who, after reading the last entry in her dead son's journal about how he wishes to meet his father for the first time, decides to travel to Barcelona in search of the boy's father. She must tell the father that she had their son after she left him many years ago, and that he has now died. Once there, she encounters a number of odd characters - a transvestite prostitute, a pregnant nun, and a lesbian actress - all of whom help her cope with her grief.

The film revisited Almodóvar's familiar themes of the power of sisterhood and of family. Dedicated to Bette Davis, Romy Schneider and Gena Rowlands, All About My Mother is steeped in theatricality, from its backstage setting to its plot, modeled on the works of Federico García Lorca and Tennessee Williams, to the characters' preoccupation with modes of performance.

The comic relief on the film centers on Agrado, a pre-operative transsexual. In one scene, she tells the story of her body and its relationship to plastic surgery and silicone, culminating with a statement of her own philosophy: “The more you become like what you have dreamed for yourself, the more authentic you are”.^[23]

All About My Mother received more awards and honors than any other film in the Spanish motion picture industry.^[24] Its recognition includes an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a Golden Globe in the same category, Best Director Award and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury Award at Cannes;^[25] the French Cesar for Best Foreign Film, the Goya Award as best film of the year, best Actress in a Leading Role for Argentine actress Cecilia Roth and a twelfth Annual European Film Award.^[24]

[edit] Hable con ella (2002)

Two years later, Almodóvar hit another career high with Talk to Her (Hable con ella). The film revolves around two men who become friends while taking care of the comatose women they love. Their lives flow in all directions, past, present and future, pulling them towards an unsuspected destiny. Combining elements of modern dance and silent filmmaking with a narrative that embraces coincidence and fate, Almodóvar plots the lives of his characters, thrown together by unimaginably bad luck, towards an unexpected conclusion.

The film was hailed by critics and embraced by arthouse audiences. Almodóvar won numerous honors across the world for his film, including a French César for Best Film and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

[edit] La mala educación (2004)

Almodóvar followed two worldwide cinematic successes with Bad Education (La mala educación), a richly baroque tale of child sexual abuse and mixed identities. Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear in a religious school at the start of the 1960s. Father Manolo, the school principal and their literature teacher, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three characters meet twice again, at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s, or so it seems.

Bad Education has a complex structure that not only uses film within a film, but also stories that open up into other stories, real and imagined to narrate the same story: A tale of child molestation and its aftermath of faithlessness, creativity, despair, blackmail and murder. Almodóvar used elements of film noir, borrowing in particular from Double Indemnity. The film's protagonist, Juan (Gael Garcia Bernal), was modeled largely on Patricia Highsmith’s most famous character, Tom Ripley,^[26] as played by Alain Delon in René Clément's Purple Noon. A criminal without scruples, but with an adorable face that betrays nothing of his true nature. Almodóvar explains : "He also represents a classic film noir character - the femme fatale. Which means that when other characters come into contact with him, he embodies fate, in the most tragic and noir sense of the word."^[27]

Almodóvar (left) and Tim Burton (right) at the première of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in Madrid, in 2007

[edit] Volver (2006)

Volver (Return), a mixture of comedy, family drama and ghost story, is set in part in La Mancha (the director's native region). The film opens showing dozens of women furiously scrubbing the graves of their deceased, establishing the influence of the dead over the living as a key theme. The plot follows the story of three generations of women in the same family who survive wind, fire, and even death. The film is an ode to female resilience, where men are literally disposable.

Many of Almodóvar's stylistic hallmarks are present: the stand-alone song (a rendition of the Argentinian tango song "Volver"), references to reality TV, and an homage to classic film (in this case Luchino Visconti's Bellissima).

Volver started as a story of la España negra, or 'black Spain'--the rural, superstitious and conservative part of the country still often associated, the director says, with violence, tragedy, even backwardness: "It looks like they are living a century before. But I tried to demonstrate that the same Spain, in the same local places with the same local characters, could be called 'white Spain', because the neighbors are in complete solidarity, all the women join together and create a kind of family. The movie really talks about women who survive, women who fight fiercely.^[28]

The storyline of Volver appears as both a novel and movie script in Almodóvar's earlier film, The Flower of My Secret.

The film reunited Almodóvar with Carmen Maura, who had appeared in several of his early films.

[edit] Los Abrazos Rotos (2009)

Almodóvar’s next film Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos), was released in Spain on 18 March 2009, is the director’s longest and most expensive feature. The plot follows the tragic fate of a former film director, who was blinded in a car accident fourteen years before. The film has a fractured puzzling structure, mixing past and present and film within a film that Almodóvar explored previously in both Talk to Her and Bad Education. Broken Embraces is built up as homage to the craft of film making and takes some cues from Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and Almodóvar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

[edit] La Piel que Habito (2011)

Identity, creativity and survival, frequent themes in Almodóvar's films, are given an unexpected twist in La Piel que Habito (The Skin I Live In) which is his eighteenth film and his first incursion into the physiological horror genre.^[29] The Skin I Live In centers on Vera, a beautiful woman held captive by an amoral plastic surgeon who performs skin experiments on her. The doctor is played by Antonio Banderas, reunited after 21 years with the director who launched him to international stardom.^[30] The film's odd set of characters also include: a housekeeper and jailer with secrets of her own; a rapist wearing a tiger costume; the doctor's mentally disturbed daughter and an elfin young man caught in the doctor's web.

The Skin I Live In has many cinematic influences most notably the French horror film Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) directed by Georges Franju,^[29] but also refers to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the style of the films of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Umberto Lenzi and Lucio Fulci while also paying tribute to the films of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau.^[29] Moving away from the comedies and female driven melodramas that made him famous, Almodóvar set this tale of voyeurism and a cruel act of revenge, loosely based on Tarantula,^[31] in a cold and austere atmosphere.

In February 2012, El Deseo announced that Almodovar would start filming his next project, a "witty comedy entitled Los amantes pasajeros (The Brief Lovers), in summer 2012.^[32]

Filmography[link]

Notes[link]

[edit] References

• Allinson, Mark. A Spanish Labyrinth : The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, I.B Tauris Publishers, 2001, ISBN 1-86064-507 - 0
• Almodóvar, Pedro. Some Notes About The Skin I Live In. Taschen Magazine, Winter 2011/12.
• Bergan, Ronald. Film, D.K Publishing, 2006, ISBN 0-7566-2203-4
• Cobos, Juan and Marias Miguel. Almodóvar Secreto, Nickel Odeon, 1995
• D’ Lugo, Marvin. Pedro Almodóvar, University of Illinois Press, 2006, ISBN 0-252-07361-4 - 4
• Edwards, Gwyne. Almodóvar: labyrinths of Passion. London: Peter Owen. 2001, ISBN 0-7206-1121-0
• Strauss, Frederick. Almodóvar on Almodóvar, Faber and Faber, 2006, ISBN 0-571-23192-6

External links[link]

• Viva Pedro Official website of the Viva Pedro series, featuring the theatrical re-release of 8 of the celebrated auteur's films.
• Pedro Almodóvar at the Internet Movie Database
• Almodóvar Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
• Official Webiste of Pedro Almodóvar

See also[link]

• List of Spanish Academy Award winners and nominees

Persondata
Name	Almodóvar, Pedro
Alternative names	Caballero, Pedro Almodóvar
Short description	filmmaker
Date of birth	24 or 25 September 1949
Place of birth	Calzada de Calatrava  Spain
Date of death
Place of death

Penélope Cruz
Cruz promoting Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
Born	Penélope Cruz Sánchez (1974-04-28) April 28, 1974 (age 38) Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1989–present
Spouse	Javier Bardem (2010–present)
Children	1

Penélope Cruz Sánchez (Spanish pronunciation: [peˈnelope kruθ ˈsantʃeθ]) (born April 28, 1974) is a Spanish actress. Signed by an agent at age 15, she made her acting debut at 16 on television and her feature film debut the following year in Jamón, jamón (1992), to critical acclaim. Her subsequent roles in the 1990s and 2000s included Open Your Eyes (1997), The Hi-Lo Country (1999), The Girl of Your Dreams (2000) and Woman on Top (2000). Cruz achieved recognition for her lead roles in Vanilla Sky and Blow. Both films were released in 2001 and were commercially successful worldwide.

In the 2000s she has appeared in films from a wide range of genres, including the comedy Waking Up in Reno (2002), the thriller Gothika (2003), the Christmas movie Noel (2004), the action adventure Sahara (2005), the animated G-Force and the musical drama Nine. Her most notable films to date are Volver (2006), for which she earned Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), for which she received an Academy Award. She was the first Spanish actress in history to receive an Academy Award and the first Spanish actress to receive a star at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.^[1][2]

Cruz has modeled for companies such as Mango, Ralph Lauren and L'Oréal. Penélope and her younger sister Mónica Cruz have designed items for Mango. She has donated both her time and money to charities. Cruz has volunteered in Uganda and India, where she spent one week working for Mother Teresa; she donated her salary from The Hi-Lo Country to help fund the late nun's mission.

Early life[link]

Penélope Cruz Sánchez was born in Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain, the daughter of Encarna Sánchez, a hairdresser and personal manager, and Eduardo Cruz, a retailer and auto mechanic.^[3][4] She was raised Roman Catholic.^[5] Throughout her childhood, Cruz lived in Alcobendas, a working-class town, although she spent "a lot" of time at her grandmother's apartment.^[4] Cruz is the oldest of three siblings;^[4] she has a younger brother, Eduardo, who is a singer, and a younger sister, Mónica, who is an actress.^[6] She has said that she had a happy childhood, and Charlie Rose of 60 Minutes described Cruz's childhood as a "simple life."^[4] In a foreshadowing way, Cruz remembers when she was four years old, "playing with some friends and being aware that I was acting as I was playing with them—I would think of a character and pretend to be someone else."^[7]