John Waters aptly expressed both his and my feelings about Pedro Almodóvar‘s latest film, Pain and Glory—among my favorites of the year and one of the Spanish iconoclast’s best works—when, in his annual top ten list for Artforum, the filth maestro himself declared it the “first Almodóvar movie to shock me.” Anyone familiar with Almodóvar’s work who’s not yet seen the film, now awash in award season buzz, can only wonder what Waters means. At this point in his career, it would seem unlikely that Almodóvar could outdo himself, having made two films that received an NC-17 rating and many more handsomely appalling melodramas that incorporate such verboten activities as rape, drug and sex abuse, and incest, in addition to his general inclusion of characters whose sexualities are wholly liberated from the paltry limitations of labels.
In the contemporary setting, Salvador experiences choking bouts due to a growth in his throat, and his malaise surrounding this and other physical ailments affects his creative voice. Almodóvar’s own voice, however, persists even throughout this apparent thematic evolution. Salvador begins smoking heroin as though it were the natural thing to do; that it’s broached without any fanfare accounts for Almodóvar’s provocative—and amusing—candor. Also present is one fully realized meta production (and another, less fully realized, though I won’t say more about that one). In this case, the one-person stage show, performed in front of a vibrant red background, that symbolic color, which, like the bull to the cape, draws our eyes to the screen as we eagerly await whatever delicious visual onslaught Almodóvar has in store for us. This motif of the meta production, included in so many of his previous films, speaks to his unrelenting creative spirit; Almodóvar’s is a garish utopia, in which, at any time, a person can stage a play or make a movie.
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. R, 113 min. Now playing at Gene Siskel Film Center
