Pedro Almodóvar: Culture Against Impunity

"My name is Virgilio Leret Ruiz, aviator, head of the aerial forces of Western Morocco. I refused to support the upheaval of soldiers in Melilla and at dawn on July 18 1936, my colleagues made me the first person to be executed during the Civil War. I had no trial, no lawyer and no sentence. My daughters continue to look for me. For how long?".

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar stepped into the shoes of one of the victims of executions during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), one of 15 people "2assassinated in an arbitrary and unjust manner" to whom an equal number of Spanish intellectuals and artists have dedicated a video "against the impunity of Franco's regime".
Pedro Almodóvar, Maribel Verdú, Hugo Silva, Juan José Millás, Carmen Machi, Juan Diego Botto, José Manuel Seda, María Galiana, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Miguel Ríos, Pilar Bardem, Almudena Grandes, Juan Diego, Paco León and Javier Bardem play the 15 characters in this this short film, that tells the story of 15 real people murdered during the Spanish during the Civil War and the dictatorship, whose families still wait for justice.

Volver by Pedro Almodovar

Mitchell Warren reviews Volver.

Volver plays like a melodrama more than a piece of visionary film making, like a Mike Leigh film (Secrets And Lies) with far more pleasant scenery. There is also some dark comedy in the film, with Raimunda's unfortunate problem of disposing of a corpse. Performances are excellent, even if subtitled, most notably Penelope Cruz and followed by Blanca Portillo as Agustina and Carmen Maura as Mother Irene. By the time the final tear is dropped, there is much that is left unsaid, and even unrevealed to we the audience. However, the film's central plot is the main emphasis for the story. We didn't get to meet Raimunda or Solie as much as we got to merely witness an episode in their life, like eavesdropping on a mother-daughter chat from a nearby hospital bed. Volver is still exciting though in a nonexplosive, character-driven way. Pedro Almodovar knows how to create cinema life out of anything, even the very small and unassuming. His younger contemporaries are still fascinated with all the big guns and apocalyptic visions - the sort of little boy toys that Almodovar abandoned so he could spend more quality time with women. Read More

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Spanish Cinema

I Gave You All I Had by Zoe Valdes

Zoe Valdes's rambunctious new novel is an appetizingly rich stew, full of the varied flavors of Latin culture -- part bolero, part Brazilian soap opera, with hints of the nostalgia of Oscar Hijuelos and the nutty adrenaline of Pedro Almodovar, not to mention the acrobatic literary abandon of Valdes's fellow Cuban expatriate Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Set in Cuba from the swinging 1950's to the grim periodo especial of the 1990's and exuberantly translated by Nadia Benabid, ''I Gave You All I Had'' is a sumptuous story of love and sorrow, a story that -- like so much in Valdes's native country -- is both personal and political.

Valdes's heroine, Cuca Martinez, is a spindly Cinderella born in 1934 in the provincial city of Santa Clara. At the age of 16, she flees to Havana and falls painfully in love with Juan Perez, a smooth operator with two unfortunate attributes: bad breath and mob ties. Even more unfortunately, Juan will vanish after a brief but chaste encounter, only to reappear eight years later as a nightclub impresario and sometime manager of Edith Piaf (an example, we're told, of ''intelligence and sensuality rolled into one, and when those two things meet in one woman, you might as well . . . head for the exit quick or you're a goner'').

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Cuban Literature

In the National Board of Review Awards, held yesterday, Pedro Almodovar's "Volver", which swept the European Film Awards at the start of the week, won best foreign language film.
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Spanish Film

Almodovar's colors

An article about Viva Pedro! festival, a retrospective of Almodovar's films, and the predominance of Red

Attending this month's Pedro Almodovar film festival will have you seeing red.

Not from anger, disillusionment or disappointment. Far from it.

Literal red. The brilliant Spanish director's movies are awash in the color, symbolically used to evoke revenge, murder and, most of all, passion.

In "The Flower of My Secret," a woman's sexy red dress at once captures her physical desire and her bottomless desperation. In "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," a scorned woman's smart red pantsuit signals her determination to get even.

In "Matador," a fantastic yet overlooked thriller, the action culminates with lovers completing a murder-suicide pact, their nude bodies collapsing onto a bed of crimson bullfighter's capes at the moment a solar eclipse turns the Castillian countryside the shade of blood.

The bold use of color is just one of the many stylistic ticks you pick up when you watch Almodovar's best films back to back. And that's what makes Cinema 21's two-week Viva Pedro! festival particularly enticing. The double-feature screenings that begin Friday (and precede the Dec. 22 opening of Almodovar's latest, "Volver") span two decades of work, pairing the director's hits with lesser-known rarities. Seeing these eight films during the course of days, not years, you notice artistic brushstrokes and recurring themes that might otherwise get lost.

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Spanish Film

Interview with Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz

Despite 35 or so films to her credit, Penelope Cruz is better known for her glam-rag covers and famous beaus (Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey) than her acting prowess.
The Spanish beauty, 32, just has never fully translated on-screen.

Until now. Maybe it is the fake bottom, designed after Dustin Hoffman's shapely derrière in Tootsie, which causes her to trot with such fiery determination. Or the zest for life her housewife Raimunda acquires once her layabout husband is put on ice. Literally.

What is clear is that the cine-magic finally happens for her in Volver, director Pedro Almodóvar's vibrant valentine to Cruz that manages to be a ghost story, a murder thriller, a multilayered chick flick and a celebration of motherly devotion all in one. The pair sat down together to talk about their third collaboration after All About My Mother (1999) and Live Flesh (1997).

Q: I liked the sense of community of the women in Volver — most Hollywood movies are more about the men. Is it crazy to work with that many at one time?

Almodóvar: Do you know, it was very easy. I think it is more complicated to make promotion with many actresses. Then there is the light, the makeup, the dresses, all the things that make them feel more secure or more competitive. But on the set, I was really lucky that they really felt like family.

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Volver directed by Pedro Almodovar

A few reviews of Pedro Almodovar's Volver:

For a black comedy whose tangled sequence of events is completely improbable, Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" feels absolutely authentic. So, think of everything as metaphor and enjoy one of the year's most delectably twisted treats.

The title of the Spanish filmmaker's 16th feature means "return," and that's partly what he does in telling a story (subdued by his standards) about a family from La Mancha, the village south of Madrid where he grew up.

But you won't find any men in "Volver" dreaming the impossible dream. The dreamers are all women; the men are all dead, or about to be.

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Volver, Pedro Almodóvar's 16th film, was rumored to mark the Spanish director's long-awaited return to comedy, or at least the dark, unsettling humor of many of the early movies (Labyrinth of Passion, Dark Habits, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) that earned him an international audience.

But although Volver, which opens Wednesday, does have its share of amusing moments, and is overall lighter in tone than Almodóvar's past few pictures (Bad Education, Talk to Her, All About My Mother), it cannot be labeled as a mere comedy. Like many of the movies he has made throughout his career, but especially true of his output over the past decade, Volver (which translates as To Return) is too complex and unpredictable to fit into any one genre.

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Pity Pedro Almodóvar. He's so good so often that the world has come to expect a masterpiece with every new picture.

Such demands are understandable but unwarranted for "Volver," his 16th film and his most easily digestible movie since 1995's "The Flower of My Secret" (no bendy narratives this time). If that lack of formal ambition sounds disappointing, this comedy brings the director back to La Mancha, the town of his youth in south central Spain that Cervantes centuries before made famous. The homecoming, even when measured against the accomplished feeling in Almodóvar's recent films, proves magnificent.

The story here is a kind of fairy tale, set entirely in working-class burghs, and it gets less dark as it goes on. The clouds are perpetually parting. Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), a wife and mother, spends her days cleaning at the airport only to come home to her small Madrid apartment and clean some more.

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Pedro Almodovar set to win Prince of Asturias of the Arts Prize

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is favorite to win this year's Prince of Asturias of the Arts Prize. The finalists are composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the violinist Anne Sophie Mutter and architect Tadao Ando.
Among the winners of the last editions are Santiago Calatrava, Sebastião Salgado, Vittorio Gassmann, Woody Allen, Paco of Lucía, Miquel Barceló and in the dancers Mayan Plisetskaya and Tamara Rojo.

Volver directed by Pedro Almodovar

"Volver" brought Almodovar and Maura back together after a 17-year split. Maura starred in many of the director's features, perhaps most memorably in "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" in 1987.

After that film, the two quarreled and split although they have never told the world why.

"Volver" also marks Cruz's return to Spanish cinema in an impressive lead performance, after spending the last six years establishing an international career in Hollywood.

"I still don't really believe that I was lucky enough to make this film," Cruz gushed. "It was like a gift from God."

The film's title has many meanings for Almodovar.

"There are several returns for me. I've gone back, a little bit, to comedy. I've gone back to the feminine universe, to La Mancha ... (and) to the maternal role as the origin of life and fiction," he wrote in notes for the film.

Almodovar has often said that his addiction to stories comes from listening to conversations between women as a child.

Mostly filmed on location in La Mancha, "Volver" seems set for box office success, at least in Spain.

Apart from the pull of the director and the lead actress, village life is a nostalgic ideal for many Spaniards who moved to Madrid and Barcelona seeking work in the 1970s and 80s.

You can find the review here