The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Pedro Almodóvar gets political
Pedro Almodóvar’s new film about motherhood is actually a story about modern Spain, he tells Robbie Collin
Julieta was almost Juliet. When Pedro Almodóvar broke ground on his 20th film, an adaptation of three linked short stories from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, he was sure it would be his first set entirely outside his native Spain and that Meryl Streep would be his first English-speaking leading lady.
For one thing, Munro’s crisp, windswept writing was about as Spanish as a polar bear crunching plaintively across an ice floe; for another, the project as Almodóvar envisioned it would take a Streepsized blast of star power to pull off. Then, suddenly, he felt the umbilical tug of Spain again.
As he refined the script, he kept finding guilt in the story that Munro hadn’t put there – not simmering Anglo-Saxon self-loathing but bright blooms of Mediterranean regret. The theme of familial separation and finely drawn, dominant female characters (a constant in Almodóvar’s work) struck him as obviously Iberian.
“In the moment I transposed the script to Spanish geography and culture and put guiltiness into the story, everything became bound together,” he says.
He called Streep, and their collaboration was reluctantly postponed. His first English film was going to be in Spanish after all.
The apparent inescapability of his home country shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone even glancingly familiar with the director’s work, because it can be hard to tell where Spain stops and Almodóvar begins. His vision of Spain – as seen in films such as Talk To Her, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – has struck a chord around the world. If filmgoers now think of Spain as vivacious, cultured, metropolitan and, above all, feminine, it is thanks in no small part to Almodóvar, and one Oscar and four Baftas later, un film de Almodóvar is one of the trustiest auteur brands going.
I catch the 66-year-old at his hotel on the afternoon of Julieta’s UK premiere at Somerset House, in central London. Saying that meeting a director feels exactly like being in one of their movies is a standardissue film critic anecdote, but with Almodóvar, it can’t be ignored.
He talks effusively and poetically (in Spanish), frequently corrects his translator (in English) and jots notes to himself throughout in lipstick-red ink. (If you’re not sure whether you’re watching an Almodóvar film, look for the predominant accent colour: if it’s red, it’s Ped.)
He is on day two of a migraine, and apologises “if I don’t sound very clever”, before launching into a nuanced appraisal of Munro’s writing and the challenges it presents. He read the source for the film, Munro’s Runaway, when it had been translated into Spanish – and realised, as soon as he read the story in which the thenyoung heroine takes a night train from Toronto to Vancouver and encounters sex and death in tight proximity, that he had to make its trio of Juliet stories into a film.
Julieta – in which the aforementioned heroine tries to reconnect with her estranged daughter – is perhaps his most sober film ever. But it’s still blustery, ravishing and sexually alive. He attributes the change in tone to his age – “the films I’ve made reflect my physical state when I’m making them” – but concedes art “always finds a way to reflect reality at that moment”. By that he means the film’s pensive, searching tone matches the political uncertainty in Spain, which led to two general elections in six months, neither of which produced a viable coalition government. (A threatened third, later this year, is unlikely to clear things up.)
For someone who more or less owes his career to the birth of Spanish democracy, this has been particularly hard to take. “It’s a desperate situation for all citizens,” he says, “because there are no apparently clear solutions… from despairing over politicians, we’re beginning to despair over democracy itself.”
He notes two linked forces at work: the resurgence of the right wing, via the staunchly Catholic People’s Party, and what he calls the “dictatorship of the politically correct”, weighing down on the hard-won freedoms of his youth.
“In the Eighties, we were celebrating a new sense of freedom and absolute possibilities,” he says. “But when my films from the Eighties are screened on television, friends tell me I’d have far more problems making them today than I had back then.”
Even now, his early stuff remains as bracing as a glass of lemonade in the face. Pepi, Luci, Bom, his 1980 debut, is a merry rondo of lesbianism and sadomasochism: Almodóvar himself has a cameo as the ebullient judge of a penismeasuring competition.
Law of Desire, his first explicitly gay film, has a young Antonio Banderas throwing a love rival off a cliff, while Dark Habits is one of those black comedies about cocaine-snorting lesbian nuns they don’t really make anymore.
Does he think he might make an English film in the future? He hasn’t ruled it out. He has stories by Henry James in mind as potential source material, and others by a writer he calls “Yawan Ma-Keewan”, a Jedi Knightsounding figure I eventually realise is Ian McEwan.
However, he is perplexed by English-language cinema’s seeming inability to work with older actresses. He notes that Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Emma Thompson have had “fertile careers” in the UK, but he laments the lack of equivalent roles in Hollywood, saying that most American female characters are created with “non-formed beings” – adolescents – in mind.
He outs himself as a fan of the political thriller series Homeland, praising Claire Danes’s bipolar CIA officer as the kind of “complex, darker treatment of human nature through female characters” that the film industry largely eschews.
“What I would say is that if cinema forgets women, it forgets life itself. Men carry epic [films] and other things, but without women, you deny yourself access to a treasure trove.
“They carry reality.”
‘The situation in Spain is desperate because there are no clear solutions’