Word: almodovar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...where she scrubs floors. Matador: a beyond-gorgeous woman picks up a stranger, makes violent love, then stabs him to death with her hatpin. Law of Desire: a young stud is directed through some steamy autoeroticism by an unseen older man. Shock the bourgeoisie? The opening scenes in Pedro Almodovar's films seem designed to shock the Borgias. And that's just for appetizers. The one aesthetic commandment of this Spanish writer-director might read: Begin in delirium, then floor it till the closing credits...
...post-Franco Spain, whose artistic class has been liberated into hedonism, a figure like Almodovar can serve as both court jester and king. He was so proclaimed last week when the Spanish newsmagazine Cambio 16 named him Man of the Year: "Our best representative in a world in which Spain is in fashion." And now the 37-year-old man from La Mancha is world cinema's flavor of the month. His latest film, the relatively benign Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is a solid international hit. The comedy has earned $2.5 million in just ten weeks...
Imitation, it has often been said, is the sincerest form of Hollywood. So movie moguls are now hot to remake Women on the Verge, with perhaps Jane Fonda, Sally Field or Goldie Hawn playing the main role -- taken in the original by Almodovar's house superstar Carmen Maura -- of a TV actress whose lover has just moved out. This week Almodovar goes to Los Angeles in hopes of picking up a Golden Globe statuette. Women on the Verge has already won the Felix, Europe's highest movie prize. And on Academy Award night, Felix may find an odd-couple mate...
...quickly one progresses these days from anonymity to notoriety to fame. And how perfectly Almodovar and his films are suited to this chic spotlight. He is a poor country boy made good: he came to Madrid at 17, fronted a rock band, wrote a porno photo-novel, and for a decade worked for the state phone company, where he wrote the scripts for his first two pictures. He had no fear of leaping from phones to films: "When I wanted to become a director, I became a director." And his films have all the exuberance of somebody who wants...
...Almodovar says his movies are about the "five essential themes: death, liberty, equality, beauty and, of course, love." Scanning Dark Habits (1983), one finds not love but revenge. It is your basic anticlerical Latin comedy: Reform School Girls set in a convent. The film can be seen as Almodovar's payback for a Catholic education "full of hypocrisy -- you can't learn by being terrorized." But the convent's mother superior isn't kidding when she tells the chanteuse, "My only sin is to love you too much," for that is the only sin and salvation of any Almodovar heroine...