SOMETIMES IT HURTS TO BE PEDRO ALMODÓVAR
Spanish director is facing up to old age, and he’s not such a big fan
Pedro Almodóvar is fun at parties, but parties aren’t always fun for Pedro Almodóvar. “Socialising has really exhausted me as time has gone by,” Almodóvar said last September, not long after he had jetted from his home in Madrid to the Toronto International Film Festival to present his latest movie Pain And Glory, now in Thai cinemas. It was a surprising thing to hear from a director whose early films, including Law Of Desire (1987) and Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988), often possessed the anything-goes spirit and mischievous cast of a crowded bacchanal. In two days in Toronto, Almodóvar had breezed through an ambitious schedule of press obligations as if he were born to make small talk in a second language.
But when he returned to Madrid, Almodóvar telephoned to confess that, as he had gotten older in recent years — his 70th birthday was on Sept 25 — he had begun to purposefully isolate himself.
“People have stopped surprising me so much, they’ve stopped exciting me as much. And secondly there’s the pain.” He paused. “Pain is not something you can share with other people.”
The startlingly personal Pain And
Glory will change that for him: After trying his hand at a pair of adaptations in Julieta (2016) and The Skin I Live In
(2011), and then a fizzy farce in I’m So
Excited! (2013), Almodóvar has turned inward. A look back at the desires and deep feelings that have shaped him, all sprung from a body that has begun to turn on him as he exits middle age,
Pain And Glory is a quiet, career-capping masterpiece.
Antonio Banderas stars as Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker patterned so obviously on Almodóvar himself that he wears the director’s own clothes and lives in a replica of Almodóvar’s chic apartment. Mallo made his name with sensational Spanish sex comedies, but, when we meet him, he’s so racked with the pains of getting older that he doesn’t have the energy to create anymore.
Those aches take many forms, both physical and spiritual. Mallo is debilitated by frequent migraines and back spasms, and he’s also haunted by a past relationship torn asunder by drugs, as well as a mother he feels he has failed. All of these maladies were taken from Almodóvar’s own life, and that candour caught Banderas off guard when he read the script.
“There were things I never thought he was going to expose, not even to his friends,” Banderas said. “Pedro is a very private person.”
That’s not to say that Almodóvar was ever shy: Forged by La Movida Madrileña, a raucous countercultural movement that swept through Madrid when he arrived there in 1969, Almodóvar has long held one of the most provocative points of view in moviemaking. Unafraid to tackle societal and sexual taboos, he regularly packs his films with a surplus of heart, comedy, lust and colour, like a child who goes to select a crayon and then absconds with the entire box.
But Pain And Glory was different. For all his open-book ebullience, there were still things Almodóvar had kept hidden, especially the extent to which he must navigate wrenching pain as a daily indignity.
After he sent the screenplay to Banderas and his other frequent collaborators, including actress Penélope Cruz and his brother, producer Agustín Almodóvar, “all of them came back to me really worried”, Almodóvar recalled. “They were saying, ‘Are you really as bad off as Salvador is? Are you suffering that much?.’”
Fortunately there are a few key differences. Mallo turns to a newfound heroin habit to cope with his pain, while Almodóvar swears he’s never touched the stuff. And though Banderas wears his hair greyed and unruly for the role, it’s no match for the actual Almodóvar’s famous, dandelion-like pouf, a sign that this is much more than an easy impersonation. (In May Banderas took the Best Actor trophy at the Cannes Film Festival for his deeply felt performance.)
Socialising may take its toll on Almodóvar these days, but he’s still good at it. When I sat down with him in Toronto, he was talkative and funny, and he pumped me for details on a party he’d skipped the night before. (“Was Jennifer Lopez there?” he asked, ready to gossip.) Across from us sat his translator. Though Almodóvar speaks fast, fluent English, he frequently toggles over to Spanish like someone breaking into song in a musical.
It’s easy to see what beguiled Banderas so long ago in Madrid’s Café Gijón, where the young actor had gathered with other thespians from the nearby Teatro María Guerrero. It was 1981, and Almodóvar, fresh off his first full-length feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom And
Other Girls Like Mom (1980), had wandered over to the group to hold court.
“He appeared with this red plastic briefcase, and he talked — a lot — in this beautiful monologue,” Banderas recalled. “After 20 minutes he stood up, looked at me and said, ‘You should do movies. You have a very romantic face.’ And he left.”
Banderas asked his fellow actors who the mystery monologist was: “They said to me, ‘His name is Pedro Almodóvar. He just directed a movie, but he will never do another one.’” Banderas snorted at the memory. “They tried to be a prophet, which is a very common thing in my country. And they failed horrendously.”
As their profiles rose, especially after the Oscar-nominated Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), Hollywood came to court both men. Only Banderas made the leap, working in major films including Philadelphia
(1993) and The Mask Of Zorro (1998). Almodóvar, offered the chance to direct studio comedies like Sister Act (1992), decided to stay in Spain.
“I have to confess that I missed him a lot in the beginning of the 90s,” Almodóvar said. “I had the impression that one day, when we were older, we would meet each other again, but I was in no rush for that re-encounter. In my head I wanted to reconnect with an older, more mature, more adult Antonio, as if all that youthful energy had already exploded.”
But it would take two decades for that reunion and, when it arrived, things did not go smoothly. Almodóvar cast Banderas as a sociopathic plastic surgeon in The Skin I Live In, and both men had changed considerably in the interim. Almodóvar was in a new phase of his career, directing polished, Oscar-winning melodramas like All About My
Mother (1999) and Talk To Her (2002), while Banderas had become a Hollywood star, blossoming outside Almodóvar’s tutelage.
Eventually Banderas acceded to his director’s demands and, once he saw the final cut, he said, he was impressed by what Almodóvar had pulled from him. Still, after all that, he had no reason to expect that his old collaborator would give him another starring role. Time had passed, and perhaps their moment had too.
“Pain is passive,” Almodóvar said. “Someone suffering from pain isn’t easy to film — it’s not cinematic at all.” So when he began writing Pain And
Glory, he did not have Banderas in mind to play the lead: What use would the actor’s boundless vitality be in a muted role like that?
Then Almodóvar happened across a photo of Banderas as he was recovering from surgery after a 2017 heart attack.
“I saw the experience of pain in his face, and that was something very important to the character,” Almodóvar said. He knew he had his Mallo, and now, in an irony worthy of his movies, it would be Almodóvar serving as the muse for Banderas.
This time on set, director and actor were in sync: Instead of impersonating Almodóvar, Banderas should go small.
“He still ended up stealing the scenes from other characters because of that subtlety,” Almodóvar said, laughing. But the role served as an olive branch: Banderas played it as a tribute to the man who had transformed his life and, when Almodóvar went to embrace his actor on the final day of shooting, he burst into tears.
“It was shocking for everybody on the set — the casting director, the art director, everybody,” Banderas said, adding: “He’s not like that. Pedro is a hard cookie.”
Almodóvar was as surprised as anybody. Despite the fact that he had drawn so much of the film from his own life, when he was on set, he had tried to treat Mallo as a character, someone separate from himself. Now, as he embraced Banderas, that all fell away and he couldn’t stop crying.
Instead of remaining stoic in his 70s, then, “I think I need to break away from that”, he said. “I need to open up more.” It’s true that Almodóvar has found his pain hard to share with other people. It’s also true that, in that moment, he found it harder not to.
Pain is passive. Someone suffering from pain isn’t easy to film