The early films in this programme give us plenty of that. I mentioned freedom, while the great American critic Pauline Kael emphasised another quality of Almodovar's movies: pleasure.
This retrospective is much appreciated for bringing his early films to the big screen here for the first time. Only in the mid-2000s did some of his films begin to show up in Bangkok cinemas ( Bad Education, Volver, etc). Like many Thai film fans, I confess to having watched early Almodovar on bootlegged VHS tapes acquired through various dealings, savouring his madcap energy and tales of Madrid housewives mired in domestic nuisances and betrayals. The mini Almodovar retrospective in Bangkok gives us samples of both periods: What Have I Done To Deserve This? (1984), Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988), High Heels (1991), The Flower Of My Secret (1995), All About My Mother (1999), Talk To Her (2002) and Pain And Glory (2019). Then from around 2000 and with All About My Mother, which won him an Oscar, Almodovar found a way to channel his love of old Hollywood melodramas into moving stories of matriarchal society, sexual awakening and the pain of old age, without losing his gift in celebrating the messy surprises of life. From 1980 to around 2000, he put out sexual comedies and high-style soap-opera romps that doubled as subversive statements to Spanish society at its critical, post-dictatorship juncture.
Seven of the director's films are in the programme curated by the embassy and shown at the Alliance Francaise from now until Dec 9, with repeated screenings later at the Thai Film Archive (see box).Īs scholars have duly noted, Almodovar's films can be broadly (though not categorically) classified into the early and later periods. It's a great opportunity that the Embassy of Spain in Bangkok has brought us the Spanish Film Festival 2021, which is in fact a mini-retrospective of Pedro Almodovar. That's much more valuable than anything - either in Spain in the post-Franco period, when Almodovar started his filmmaking career, or in Thailand at present.
Almodovar, the internationally best-known Spanish filmmaker, thrives on something much simpler, I think. Or even better, he isn't bothered all that much whether the candy-coloured hijinks, the sexual anything-goes, the carnal perfidy and maternal heartbreak in his movies are a form of art or a celebration of camp. Pedro Almodovar's films turn camp into art, or art into camp.