Word: madrid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Strange people and situations pile into a Madrid penthouse until the place looks like the stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Carmen Maura is the put-upon heroine in this glossy farce by Spain's naughty new auteur Pedro Almodovar...
...Carlos III and, by 1808, head of the Junta Central that organized opposition to the invading French armies. There is his group portrait of the Osuna family, who held freethinking tertulias (discussion groups) in their ducal palace to which Goya came, along with the best writers and wits in Madrid. From the Countess of Chinchon, pregnant, dithering and infinitely vulnerable in her misty white mass of sprigged muslin, to the level, sagacious gaze of his friend the art collector Sebastian Martinez, Goya left on record an extraordinary sequence of human presences...
...portrait of the Lavoisiers -- is his 1798 portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his modesty...
Dark Habits: a chanteuse brings her boyfriend to her Madrid apartment, where he ODs on heroin and dies. What Have I Done to Deserve This?: an illiterate woman has quickie sex with a muscular student in the shower stall of the kendo academy 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...
...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...