Behind his desk, Almodóvar, in a royal blue polo shirt and his trademark shock of now-grizzled hair, is genial and accommodating, knitting and unknitting his sausagey fingers as he considers the balance between serious subjects and playful expressiveness in his work. Speaking in Spanish, he occasionally interrupts the translator in characterfully imperfect English.
‘That’s perhaps what I’m specialising in,’ he says, ‘in dealing in that line. It is my greatest concern when I write and when I film – I try to navigate through these tremendously dark, tragic elements in a light-hearted manner, shedding light on all these issues. I do create a universe where these [monstrous] events happen, but it doesn’t make the characters monsters. What I always do is treat my characters with utmost humanity, and when you treat them like that, humour appears.’
Almodóvar’s sixteenth feature, Volver, arguably marks the most sophisticated treatment to date of the balance between tragedy and farce that has run through his work, from his raucous 1980 feature debut Pepi, Luci, Bom… to his international breakthrough Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, from the bittersweet identity crises of The Flower Of My Secret to the ruinous revenging of Bad Education.
It’s also, by the director’s own account, his most autobiographical work yet.
Meaning ‘to return’, or ‘coming back’, Volver stars Penélope Cruz as Raimunda, a young Madrid wife and mother who, like Almodóvar himself and many of his leading characters, grew up in a small village in La Mancha. She still visits it, with her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) and 12-year-old daughter (Yohana Cobo), to tend her mother’s grave and look in on her aged aunt. When Raimunda’s husband suddenly dies and Sole starts receiving visitations from their mother (Carmen Maura), both find that living with death can be a practical as much as an emotional struggle – yet ultimately, a catalyst for sisterly solidarity.
Filming was divided between Madrid and location work at the village of Almagro in Ciudad Real, a national heritage site only 20km from Almodóvar’s birthplace. ‘We were shooting in the place where I was born, where I spent the first eight years of my life, and I did really have a very strong emotional response to it,’ he says. ‘The streets are just the way they were 50 years ago – that’s the place where I heard my first words, where I would watch the neighbours chatting. I had a very strong feeling that it was my life.’
Such intensity stemmed from ‘not only recognising the places, but also the absolute presence of my mother in all of them. Nearly all the dialogue is dialogue that I heard my mother speak, and my mother is very much present in all the characters.’
Almodóvar has mixed feelings about the region he couldn’t wait to leave as a teenager. Volver started as a story of la España negra, or ‘black Spain’ – the rural, superstitious and conservative part of the country still often associated, he says, with violence, tragedy, even backwardness: ‘It looks like they are living a century before. But I tried to demonstrate that the same Spain, in the same local places with the same local characters, could be called “white Spain”, because the neighbours are completely solidar, and all the women help themselves a lot and create a kind of family among them. The movie really talks about women who survive, women who fight fiercely.’
This is hardly a surprise. Rarely since the postwar heyday of the ‘women’s picture’ has a male director offered as sympathetic and celebratory a conception of the female experience as has Almodóvar. Where his male-centred films – Matador, The Law of Desire, Live Flesh, Bad Education – offer abject lessons in the bitter fruits of libido and grudge, the female-centred ones – Dark Habits, High Heels, All About My Mother etc – spin the beautifully hopeful gold of self-possession and compassion from the most egregious abuses. It’s not a clear-cut line, but Almodóvar concurs that ‘The movies I make about men are darker than the movies I make with women, which are more luminous and more optimistic. I feel that women live in a more light-hearted world. They have fewer prejudices. They’re better at surviving, but they’re also better at living.’
This is further reflected in the degree to which such movies rely on powerful performances rather than visual action. In Volver, the two major crises that propel the plot are not seen but reported in extended accounts that bind the audience to the emotional consequences of violence, rather than offering it up as spectacle. ‘I have far more trust in the power of actresses and the power of words than in an act of violence,’ Almodóvar says. ‘I was far more interested in the character’s reaction than in just the event. And something I’m discovering unintentionally is that this way of treating action through words has a lot more to do with writing for the theatre.’
Almodóvar’s technique has grown ever more sophisticated, his essential interests have been more or less constant; to watch his back catalogue is to witness an ongoing conversation of subject, style and characterisation. ‘If I look at my career, the chain between each film is a coherent chain,’ he agrees, ‘but in the point of pure creation, when you have to take those big decisions that make this film and not a different film, I do rely on instinct and intuition. It’s certainly not calculated at all.’
Nor is it necessarily pleasurable. ‘Sometimes there are things that are very painful to put down, but I have to do it because the story is demanding it. In general it’s related to desire. Desire is an essential source of vital energy that I really need to live, but it is also a source of tremendous pain. When I was writing parts of The Law Of Desire or Bad Education, there were things that I knew I had to write, but the upheaval in the story affects you because you have to in some way live through it to be able to write it.’
While the autobiographical aspects of Volver made its creation an intense experience, the confrontation with mortality it represents proved more cathartic than traumatic. It is perhaps the first Almodóvar film in which a consciousness of death at large – rather than an individual mourning – infuses the characters’ daily lives. ‘This film talks about the tremendously natural way in which people in the area where I was born deal with death and relate to death. And I found that terrifically liberating. I have a very tragic sense of death, but in La Mancha people co-exist very naturally with death, with the dead, and this has been a tremendous lesson.’
Now closer to 60 than 50, the erstwhile enfant terrible has spent the past few years anxiously eyeing the ticking clock. ‘I think at some point in your 40s, this whole concept of time just lands in front of you – the time that’s passed and the time that’s left. Talking about time implies talking about death, and death and physical deterioration are things that I’m really concerned about. Death is something that I haven’t quite come to terms with – I’m an agnostic, I don’t believe there’s an alternative after death and I find it frustrating that the cycle is so short.’ Accordingly, he is already preparing a new project, provisionally called Tarantula, which sounds like something of a departure. ‘I’ll be making certain formal experiments,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t tell you the plotline, but let’s say it’s a story of revenge located in the immediate future. You could say it’s a German expressionist film from the silent era mixed in with Buñuel’s Belle de Jour.’
Almodóvar shows little sign, then, of complacency or a declining appetite. ‘Despite the fact that time passes, you still have needs that are more natural to youth,’ he sighs. ‘I thought that as one got older those needs would change, but many of them remain the same. I still have very juvenile needs. You have to choose between being healthy and living intense emotions, and this is a choice that I hate to have to face, but that’s probably what getting older is all about.’ And has he made his choice? He laughs. ‘Depends on the day.’
Volver is out in cinemas this month.
