“I wanted to talk about the mass graves, but not in a gratuitous way,” he says. Almodovar decided when the law was passed that he wanted to make a film about these mass murders that were now being officially forgotten. In 1977, two years after Franco’s death, the new democracy declared an amnesty that effectively drew a line under the crimes committed under the old regime, a so-called “pact of forgetting” that people thought at the time was the price of stability. As many as 200,000 people were “disappeared” over the course of the Civil War and 36 years of dictatorship – five or six times as many civilians as were killed in Argentina under the junta – but that truth had been literally buried.Īlmodovar has spoken in the past of the “pathological fear to speak of the war”. There you have it: the mix of melodrama and maternal glory we have come to know and love in Almodovar’s femo-centric films.Īlongside this story of private life, however, the director tackles a subject that is public, explicitly political and not at all what we expect from an Almodovar film: the push to exhume mass graves of ordinary people killed under Franco’s Falangist regime. Ana (Milena Smit) is 17, frightened and, as we will learn, traumatised by her own parents’ indifference and the awful circumstances that led her to the maternity ward. Janis is thrilled with her accidental pregnancy and triumphantly going it alone Cruz was named best actress at last year’s Venice Film Festival for her performance in the film. Penelope Cruz, in her seventh film with her mentor, plays a successful 40-ish photographer called Janis, after Joplin, by a hippy mother who died, like her child’s namesake, of an overdose. At the centre of their friendship, however, is a terrible lie. Now he has made Parallel Mothers, about two very different women sharing a hospital ward who give birth at the same time and become close. His last feature, Pain and Glory (2019), was a powerful fictionalised review of his own life, assailed by illness but also by painful ruptures and estrangements. Every film pushed the old repression further into the past.Īlmodovar has long since expanded his cinematic universe to include a breadth of human experience at 72, he is seemingly at the height of his creative powers. He was making films, he said at the time, as if Franco had never existed. In his candy-coloured version of Spain, peopled with flamboyant queer folk, excessive party-goers and fabulous viragos, there was no room for repression. Pedro Almodovar was both chief chronicler of La Movida – in a torrent of scurrilous short films and his ’80s features, such as What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – and its gay disco-king personification. Pedro Almodovar: “This is another form of motherhood I’m showing in the film.″ Credit:Getty Images
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