In Almodóvar's early works, there are always some "eccentric" characters on the edge of society, he shoots transvestites and transgender people, shoots drug addicts and homosexuals, which is easy for the outside world to have a certain misunderstanding of Almodóvar, it is not difficult to imagine that Almodóvar himself never despised these misunderstandings, in more than 40 years of film career, Almodóvar through his own light and shadow, memory, large pieces of gorgeous and rich to nearly saturated colors, and the best at the performance of the play-in-play, as well as all the moving songs in memory, Film clips "plagiarized" from his own favorite Buñuel, Fassbinder, or Hitchcock, along with stories based on life and imagination, work together to collage the world's unique ammodóvar film kingdom, in which, as Luquesia's award speech said, "Where people can live better."
Wen | dwarf wood
Edited | Golden Turn
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Today, we want to talk about the world's most interesting and unbridled Spanish director Pedro The story of Almodóvar.
Regarding his relationship with the film, Almodóvar once said with a sad-sounding comment, "The years have treated my films much better than they have treated me."
At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Almodóvar with the new film "Pain and Glory" the sixth impact of the Palme d'Or failed, he is 70 years old, his physical condition is not ideal, and the faint summary meaning revealed in "Pain and Glory" also makes his fans worry, this worry is not in the popular sense of the almodóvar is the "Spanish little plum" ridicule, the award is not the second, everyone is just very reluctant to see him grow old, so those who know and love him will have a complicated view of "Pain and Glory". People wishfully hope that Almodóvar will always be young, always fierce, always loving, and hope that his royal male protagonist Antonio Banderas, too, will always live forever with his savage sensuality.
In Pain and Glory, Antonio Banderas plays a well-known Spanish director who is plagued by health and career problems as he ages
There is a deeper implication – the fear is that in an age of increasingly difficult and vocal expression, at a time when the film itself is increasingly eroded and wrapped up in so-called "right", in a world that is increasingly divided by antagonism and prejudice, we may need Almodovar more than ever.
This sentiment came at the Venice Film Festival, which ended two weeks ago, with the help of the president of this year, luquescia Berger, a well-known Argentine female director. Martel's award speech was vividly expressed. Almodóvar won the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Venice Film Festival, and Luquetia, a peer, friend and partner, choked up several times in her speech, and the award speech was brilliantly written to say exactly what Almodóvar meant to the world in which we live:
"In Almodóvar's morality, there is no such thing as 'what it should be like,' but it must be created, it must be conceived, and he destroys the false Taoism hidden in various genres of cinema, he mixes genres and raises popular cinema to a height beyond the feature film. He turned the absurd into an unprecedented weapon against abuse.
If we marvel that cinema expands the world we know, then the world has changed a lot since Pedro released his short films in the mid-'70s, and his films have opened the curtain on a new paradise where people can live better."
After Almodóvar won the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement, he sold the Cute Kiss Trophy in the image source Visual China
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In these ongoing human tragedies, a man kills a lover just to spend an hour with his lover before destroying himself (1987, The Law of Desire); a man who grew up in an orphanage and a psychiatric director kidnaps his favorite actress after leaving a mental hospital, ending up with two people falling in love. (1990, "Tie Me, Tie Me"); a selfish mother who chose to lie to the gods before she died in order to be able to make up for her inner debt to her daughter (1991, "Love High Heels"),) the mother who lost her son returned to Barcelona to help her son fulfill his wish to find his father, and finally learned the news that the other party had become a sex worker and contracted AIDS (1999, "All About My Mother"). The male nurse who takes care of the vegetative person in the hospital tells him about the movie or ballet every day to the vegetative girl he loves deeply, and he spends the most abundant four years of his life, and also commits the crime of making the girl pregnant, and then the girl wakes up (2002, "Say It to Her")...
Almodóvar's "The Law of Desire" portrays a delicate and moving male love triangle story from the Douban movie
We can summarize Almodóvar's interests from these stories, he loves those strange stories, not tolerated by the marginal characters of mainstream society, always stimulates his curiosity to find out, obscured, ignored, forgotten marginal human beings, crying and laughing in Almodóvar's film kingdom, which makes people watching movies suddenly perceive their own prejudices: it turns out that everyone is the same person.
Almodóvar's way of seeing the world was never sinful or non-sinful, moral or immoral, normal or abnormal, and he always had a hopeless romanticism toward human emotions, so he was also keen to narrate the hopeless romances.
These hopeless romances are the great power of Almodóvar's films, and in his film career of more than forty years, he has used his innocence and stubbornness to make those human beings on the margins, those who have been easily rejected by vicious labels in the past human history, have an incredible opportunity to be understood, respected and even loved in addition to the originally doomed sad fate.
Almodóvar movie "Say It to Her" is one of the classic dialogues of the image source Douban movie
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Women, women of all kinds. Leaving aside those bizarre parts, women have always been the brightest landscape in Almodóvar's films, from the ancient "Pebby, Lucy, Bang and Other Humble Girls" (aka "The Legend of the Spirited Woman"), "The Habit of Darkness", "Why Should I Be So Destined?". To "The Woman on the Verge of Collapse", "Love High Heels", "Living Color", to the 1999 collection of "Everything About My Mother", and the subsequent "Return", no director has ever been as persistent and sincere as Almodóvar to write the stories of women, not the popular Westerns of his youth or the vase characters in the Hollywood love movies after that, but struggling everywhere in the world, with their own desires and hearts, mixed with perfume, sweat, the smell of the earth, Even bloody, living women.
In "The Woman on the Verge of Collapse", a woman who has been crazy for 20 years, after hearing a sentence from her lover 20 years ago on the TV radio, "I love you", fled the mental hospital, another nervous girl had an emotional relationship with terrorists, and four women on the verge of collapse got together under the same roof, provocatively competed with each other, and snuggled up to each other for warmth. Later, the heroine ran to the lawyer for help, and after the lawyer mechanically said the answer of "turn herself in to the police station, then watch the jury mood, and then go to jail", the heroine slapped her back and said, "The only crime she committed is love and fear".
"The Woman on the Edge of Collapse" image source Douban movie
He filmed the bravery and fearlessness of women, and the opening scene of "Alive and Fragrant", the Spanish rose Penelope , which had only a few minutes of scenes, was filmed. Cruz plays a dying sex worker, on the street during the curfew of the Franco dictatorship, the brothel bustard rushes to a bus ready to leave work, stops the bus for Penelope with his arms, and the night of that era is as silent as death, Penelope on the bus that originally did not know where to go, giving birth to the male protagonist of the story for the next 20 years.
At the beginning of "Alive and Fresh", Penelope · Cruz plays a sex worker who produces on a bus, and the source film "Living Colors"
In "All About My Mother", the mother who lost her son, the transsexual who was denounced as a demon, the girl with AIDS, the actress with her own secret heart, all twisted and deformed under the blow of fate, licking her own pain alone. These women are arrogant and beautiful, using their bodies to hold all their pain, and can not be stingy about their kindness at the moment when each other's fates intersect, Almodóvar said that the film "is to show the ability of women to bear pain." Men and women can be lonely and miserable, but women are women and their reactions to anything will be more dramatic and thrilling."
The movie "Everything About My Mother" is the source of douban movies
Too many people should go back to Almodóvar's films in the eighties and nineties to get a good idea of women themselves, and probably the way we see the world is going through a shocking and sad regression. The preciousness of Almodóvar is that the women under his lens never belong to any doctrine, they are weeds growing in life, most of these vivid women are bad intuitive animals, for the sake of their own identification of feelings can be desperate, but also in the moment of deciding not to love, they do not surrender to morality or power, always honest about their own desires, which also gives Almodóvar's vulgar and obedient stories have the power to travel through time and space: women are not deliberately refined and beautified character but great and lovely, They are attractive only because they are women.
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But classifying Almodóvar as a female director is certainly self-inflicted, and another passage in Luquetia's award speech is: "They reconcile us with stupidity, with incomprehensible proverbs, with misunderstandings, and Pedro has made us heroes long before we women, gays, transgender people begin to grow tired of our miserable place in history." He has long called for the right to self-creation. He had already put together the false breasts, the dildo and the spoon, the steamer, and looked at them as if they were any practical object. Now he's throwing concerns at men, and that's crucial, thank you, Pedro."
An artist's greatest virtue is to be true to one's own intuition. In Pain and Glory, or earlier in Her and Bad Education, we can see the transformation of Almodóvar's later period, the world busy using the political correctness of the era to make money and flattery, and Almodóvar began to cast a concerned eye on the male group.
This fat Spanish man who likes to wear a floral coat cherishes his freedom, he knows that his films have no chance of being released in many places, but he is not willing to sacrifice his expression to deny and cover up the world he knows. Having made films for so many minorities, there is no shortage of people in any corner of the world who classify him as a peer, and of course he is regarded as a helper to attack others, but Almodóvar has always insisted that the world is a complex kaleidoscope, because it is mixed and complex and beautiful, as the world's most prestigious gay director, he once refused to participate in the gay movement in the United States, and he hated the modern way of seeing the world like a grass: if you are gay, you can only be gay, if you are underground, You can only be underground.
He liked the people of the ambiguous places and wishfully hoped that his audience would sympathize with them. "All About My Mother" established Almodóvar's reputation as a world-class director, but Almodóvar said that the biggest success of the film was that "while people were touched by great motherhood, people accepted the image of the breasted father that appeared in the last moments of the film, and people saw this image in the film without prejudice, and this was my success."
Almodóvar, wearing a floral shirt, and Antonio Lopez, who played the gay director in Pain and Glory, were the only ones who played the gay film. Banderas Image source EFE
He does not shy away from sympathizing with the transgender people in the film who do not hesitate to restructure their bodies and bring suffering to several women, this character is not a spectacle made up out of thin air for the audience to enjoy, but arising from a deep desire in his own heart, at the age of forty, He very much wants to be a father, this real desire once made him miserable, but also let the father in the film finally win the forgiveness of everyone.
The male protagonist of "Say It to Her" Benino is Almodóvar's most moving male character, this love between male nurses and female vegetative patients, is handled by Almodóvar into a story that has nothing to do with others at all, modern people are domesticated into a kind of roughness that wields the moral stick at any time and anywhere, And Almodóvar uses "Say To Her" to try to stubbornly prove to the world that all the prejudices and filths in the world exist in these self-righteous roughness.
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Returning to Almodóvar's own story, the plot of Writing letters to his neighbors in Pain and Glory comes from his real memories of his childhood, a love of reading and writing since childhood that once left him lonely in the crowd. But it was also these experiences that made Almodóvar understand early on that whether it was reading, writing, or the movies he later fell in love with like crazy, it was actually a kind of power, a power to build while releasing. This power provided Almodóvar with another possibility in his life, the school, the church, or the Franco dictatorship of the time to turn people into hypocritical and polite fools, And Almodóvar chose to become a lifelong man who said no to all this, which laid the foundation for almost all his subsequent works, and at the age of 12, Almodóvar, who had already sensed the hypocrisy of church schools, saw the American playwright Tennessee Thomas. The film adaptation of Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," the head that is at odds with the atmosphere of conservatism and obedience around me, thinks, "I belong to this sinful, depraved world."
Elizabeth on a Hot Tin Roof Taylor and Paul Newman Source Film "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"
Almodóvar named his film company "Desire", and his fascination and love for desire made people's love or dislike for him very intense. The indulgence, chaos and freedom of the Sixties in the Western world dissolved in The blood of Almodóvar, which allowed him to construct his own method of knowing the world in the subsequent film career, the church is not sacred, the power is naturally not sacred, but the human body is sacred, the body is the sacred instrument that holds the soul, so the conception is sacred, and the intercourse of two lovers is naturally sacred.
Spanish folk have always had a tradition of building altars in their homes, where people offer their own gods to their homes in order to gain some kind of comfort in life or courage about tomorrow. Almodóvar's approach was to portray Marilyn Berger in the film around 1987 when filming The Law of Desire. Monroe built an altar, and all the images of the saints and saints on the altar were pictures of Monroe, illuminated by flickering candlelight on each step.
The human body will rot, desire will never. The depiction of "desire" makes Almodóvar's films continue to maintain an endless power, just like his trademark use of color, his film world has been colorful, unlike Akira Kurosawa or Akira Kurosawa's clumsy imitators, orientals use color to emphasize hierarchy and order, must distinguish between high and low, distinguish between internal and external enemies, such aesthetic trade-offs are still haunted in many places in today's human society, but in Almodóvar's films, the cuteness of this world, It is precisely because of that complexity and chaos, the colors that accompany the characters in his films, they are civilian, marginal, but also crazy and chaotic, like the nervous protagonists in the film, with a certain primitive life of wildness, rampage, arbitrary.
The wild and uninhibited characters in the movie "The Law of Desire" are sourced from Douban Movie
Almodóvar's childhood lived in a small village in Spain, a conservative village, from the age of three, his mother had to wear a black veil every once in a while, and when he looked back at his film path as an adult, Almodóvar regarded the beautiful colors in his films as a rebellion against his childhood life, "My colors are like the natural reward for my mother to give birth to me, I grew up in strict plain colors, and human nature has the right to rebel, My mother used it to feed a child who later had the power to rebel against this blackness."
Venice's award speech had a very powerful ending, luquesia was interrupted by a long applause and his own choking in his speech, sitting in the audience, 70-year-old Almodóvar smiling and listening to this echo from the depths of time:
"But now, Pedro, the far right, looks up in the world as if nothing has happened, and we need you more than ever. Because we're wearing bikinis and still soaking in a sea of floating dead people, thank you, Pedro."