Piling incident upon incident, the film trips along much like a slapstick soap opera, interleaving all the rape, murder, heartache, and family feuding with great dollops of sumptuous cooking, gossip and mythmaking, great maternal smooches, and even a little flirting when the moment allows. As Reverse Shot’s Michael Koresky enumerated in his review of Talk to Her last month, Almodóvar’s supposedly middle-of-the-road recent themes include “transsexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia, and gobs of gay sex.” Just how jolly these matters seem in the director’s films is proof enough that Pedro hasn’t lost his edge, though perhaps his weapon of choice is now more often a roofie than a cudgel. If anything, the director’s retro-rainbow mise-en-scène and spiraling successions of circumstance serve to make palatable increasingly outré subject matter in the form and manner of the great cinematic melodramatists. Almodóvar may be playing well to older urbanites and poolside auteurists these days, indeed his career may even warrant a nationwide retrospective from his American distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, but a brief glance at his recent output reveals it to be anything but tame exercises in pretty décor, spicy cooking, and jaunty flamenco. Chaplin - I’m a ballet mistress, and nothing is that simple. Short of “going Hollywood,” the advances of which Almodóvar has only lately rebuffed, this purportedly marks the director’s deterioration into the style of “Arthouse for Dummies,” situating his recent work in a niche usually reserved for Il Postino and Eat Drink Man Woman.īut - with apologies to Mr. This last point, in spite (or, more likely, because) of the enormous international middlebrow fêting of All About My Mother and Talk to Her, is the most interesting sortie in the offensive, claiming that Almodóvar’s more polished, mature (read: studied) style, mesmerizing though it might be to undiscerning cinephiles, is anodyne in comparison to the bracing, scandalous tenor of his early days. Peter Matthews, writing in September’s Sight & Sound, skewers the Spaniard for his triviality, his ongoing, empty self-parody, and the descent in his career from iconoclastic madcap comedy to bourgeois pablum.
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Lately, however, this characteristically topsy-turvy worldview has been subject to an inevitable (and rather interesting) backlash. This is the key aspect of Almodóvar’s melodrama, in which each detail is accorded its own degree of baroque excess, and each bend in his maze-like plotting is lent the nonchalant air of everyday life. No trauma is too awful not to shrug off or laugh at, and yet no image or emotional response, however fleeting, passes as insignificant. In each of the Spanish director’s films, life shares in both simplicity and complexity in equal measures. In establishing an opposition between the simple and the complex at the end of his earlier masterwork, Almodóvar sides with neither the teary Argentine, Marco Zuluaga, nor Geraldine Chaplin’s resigned, yet bubbly ballet mistress. This dialogue comes not from Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Volver, but from the last scene of his 2002 film, Talk to Her, and yet it sums up a great deal about the director’s new work and about his body of work as a whole. I’m a ballet mistress, and nothing is simple.
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MARCO: Yes, and it will be simpler than you think. KATERINA: One day, you and I should talk.