Word: almodovar
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...scarcely knows her. He fell in love with her from afar and exchanged only a few words with her as he quietly stalked her when she was still vital. Now he chatters endlessly to her--mostly about music, plays and movies, including an erotic silent film, brilliantly concocted by Almodovar, in which a tiny, shrunken man is seen traversing the nude body of the lover who shrank...
...this point, the movie's message is clear--a variation on E.M. Forster's famous dictum "Only connect." Now, though, Almodovar raises the stakes. The silent movie turns out to be the symbolic heart of the film. While we are transfixed by its hilarious transgressiveness, Benigno commits a real transgression: he makes love to helpless Alicia--and impregnates...
Escandalo. Contempt. Prison. But also, for Alicia, a miracle--a birth and, yes, a rebirth. For us in the audience, there is nothing but bliss as we acknowledge the perfect dramatic balance Almodovar has achieved between his characters' states of being--between hope and fatalism, action and passivity, speech and silence...
Stasis is always a danger when the emotional forces of a film are so neatly measured out. But formalism is a beginning, not an end, for Almodovar. For his sensibility is shaped by Spanish Surrealism and giddily influenced by his love for the sober-delirious improbabilities of old-fashioned American movie genres. He offers this rich blend, he says, "in the most natural presentation possible: dreams without any change in lighting." In short, his is a cinema wildly alive to unsettling juxtapositions and strange coincidences, at once true to the banalities of life as we generally see them yet even...
...also an accurate reflection of his own nature. At 52, Almodovar has a face that remains round, open, boyish, surmounted--almost contradicted--by spiky Bride of Frankenstein hair. He talks in a rush of movie references, psychological speculation and social observation, delighted by his own wise-child spontaneity, bemused by his fame...