Much more than sex and drugs: how has Almodóvar turned such perverse stories into blockbusters?

Those who insist that

, the medium-length film that Pedro Almodóvar premiered in cinemas this past Wednesday, are

right who insist that it

is a condensation of his entire career.

There are the citations to his past and future work, the theme of the abandoned woman, the recourse to the theatrical piece or the chromatic and scenographic saturation, which make up a measured self-referential mechanism.

What has not been talked about so much is the daring of gambling as the infidelity to Cocteau's original text (which he honors to the same extent that he betrays) or an ending that should not be gutted, but that presents an even more incendiary nature of what at first glance it seems.

Everything is always more than it seems with Almodóvar.

Among other things, because of his ability to get away with decisions that, although on some occasions they have generated scandal, we would not even have allowed other authors.

It is not just a question of the classics sex, drugs and religious irreverence, which in any case does not usually spare us.

The fact is that it has also presented situations of at least disconcerting moral ambiguity, the result of an extremely rich and complex creative universe.

A chronological review of his work offers us numerous examples.

It all started with a rape

It cannot be a coincidence that the first feature film from Almodovar,

(1980), began with a rape.

The desire for revenge of Luci (Carmen Maura), the victim, triggers a plot where, in addition to an erection contest, a song called

and the famous golden shower administered by an adolescent Alaska, highlights a tricky representation of sexist violence .

Because Pepi (Eva Siva) is a masochistic housewife who receives the beatings of her police husband (in turn, the inaugural rapist) with ostensible satisfaction.

We are talking about other times when the social climate still allowed the matter to be exposed with a certain frivolity: curiously, this was due to the very structural machismo that Almodóvar and other moderns fought with their insolent and licentious attitude.

Because to those who ugly the director of La Mancha who did not take a progressive political stance in the middle of the Transition should be reminded that, at that time, the hedonism of a film like

(starring a hypersexual young woman and the gay heir of a Middle Eastern East camouflaged in the mud of the Madrid Movida) supposed a bomb planted on the ruins of the residual Francoism.

Rapes and incests reappear in her, but her treatment of assisted reproduction is not left behind either.

Empress Toraya del Tirán is obsessed with having a child, and for that she goes to the best world specialist in in vitro fertilization: there is much to be scandalized about healthily in the consultation scene, with that test-tube girl (a term that today we would consider quite unacceptable ) whose little hands are carefully inspected by Toraya when the mother herself does not hesitate to affirm that her daughter is "a monster."

But the bet was doubled with

(1983).

A few months after Pope John Paul II made his first trip to Spain and 150,000 young people cheered him at the cry of Totus tuus in a soccer stadium, this film was released starring nuns addicted to various drugs and ruled by a lesbian mother superior. .

The scene in which the superior and her cabaret lover inject heroin into a room full of Christian imagery is one of the most extreme and subversive moments in Spanish cinematography (and beyond), and this was understood at the Venice festival, where he managed to sneak in despite pressure against Christian groups.

Drugs reappear in the falsely neorealist

(1984) although the most difficult situation in it comes when the protagonist sells her adolescent son to a pedophile dentist (Javier Gurruchaga) to buy a hair straightener.

Similarly, in

(1986) a torrent of sex, crimes and mothers of Opus Dei is unleashed, but the fact that its main character is a bullfighter, and the eroticism with which the exercises of the apprentices are filmed in the I roll, they are even more compromised for today's sensibility.

The same occurs in

(1987): in those days it was perceived as audacity that its protagonists were homosexual men.

And it certainly was.

But what should be more shocking to the new generations is the irruption of incest in the plot.

The transgender Tina (Carmen Maura) had as a child ("then I was a boy") relationships with her father, which is not viewed with particular scandal in the context of the film.

Shortly after, the world changed, or Almodóvar did: you just have to see how in Volver (2006) the rape of a girl by her father was presented as a terrifying and traumatic episode.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

(1988) is in theory a film for all audiences, with its Madrid of colorful pop and its perfect structure of light comedy.

But the lightness also affects the treatment of international terrorism ("at home I collaborate with whoever I want") at a time when Spain was experiencing the worst years of the ETA threat.

There were no protests in this regard, although perhaps a post-9/11 scenario would not have been so permissive with this narrative and comic device.

The decade closes with

(1989) perhaps the director's most openly controversial film.

Inspired

by Wyler's

and perhaps

(Cocteau, again), it was criticized by feminist associations in its international journey.

Victoria Abril plays Marina, a porn actress in the process of professional redemption who is held in her apartment, beaten, handcuffed and forced to live with her attacker, together with whom she decides to be swept away by the gale of

.

Almodóvar would later relapse into some of these plot keys, with different and sometimes subverted variants: especially,

and

.

In addition, in the United States, due to its erotic content (rumor circulated that the sex scene between Abril and Banderas was not simulated) it was assigned the X classification. Miramax, the Weinstein brothers' distributor, appealed to the courts and lost.

The premiere finally took place without classification, and the case opened a debate that led to the appearance of a new category, NC-17, which excluded minors.

The nineties turn black

"You have to learn to solve your problems with men in a different way," urges Becky del Páramo (Marisa Paredes) to her daughter Rebeca (Victoria Abril) in High

(1991).

Because Rebeca's "way" involves a murder that goes unpunished (well, two), thanks to the happy ending of this stylized

melodrama

.

Immediately after came

(1993), one of Almodóvar's blackest films despite its rabid visual color.

There is no impunity for the murders, but there is for the rape of the protagonist, another controversial scene then and now, and that places us before the question - so current - of the limits of humor: is it legal to turn rape into a comic moment of a woman?

Perhaps influenced by the bewilderment at the question, the Spanish critics massacred the film, when it was a formal and narratively risky job that almost always worked perfectly.

He also made a criticism of the media and

television

shows that would later prove visionary.

Few elements as debatable are found in the stupendous

(1995) or in Carne tremula (1997).

Although in the latter one could point out the option of the protagonist to stay with the man who long ago broke into her house in the style of Ricky from

, originating a tragedy of which her previous boyfriend, the policeman played by Javier Bardem, was the victim.

For her part, Ángela Molina suffers the mistreatment of her police husband, this time without any complacency, which makes her the reverse of Pepi in

.

All about my mother

(1999) would be the international "rediscovery" of Almodóvar.

The audience enthusiastically embraced this mysterious and self-referential melodrama full of delusional details that, once again, only the creative talent of its author allows us to accept.

Because, from who else would we buy the matter of the pregnant nun infected with HIV by a trans and bisexual woman?

"Women are more tolerant," reasons the nun (Penélope Cruz).

"We are assholes!", Objects the character of Cecilia Roth.

"And a little dumplings."

Nothing to add, Your Honor.

Drum roll in the 21st century

The 21st century began at the top of this ranking thanks to

(2002), where he is presented as an affable character, and almost worthy of compassion, the nurse (Javier Cámara) who rapes a woman in a coma.

Again, only Almodóvar would be able to position the viewer in that place: with great cunning, he hid the aggression through an ellipsis in the form of a silent film.

By the way, in his day there was also a small scandal due to the use of bulls during filming, something that many anti-bullfighters have still not forgiven.

But later the offensive charge was diluted in Almodóvar's cinema, until it was almost extinguished in cases such as

(2009) or

(2016).

But not always.

In

(2004), there is courageous talk about sexual abuse in the Church, so nothing goes well for a clergy that in our country has traditionally dealt with the formation of children and young people.

(2011) is quite a few things, among them a reflection on the most impregnable of human identity.

But many did not understand the apparent ambiguity of the character played by Elena Anaya, who after being kidnapped and forcibly subjected to a sex change operation seems to experience a certain Stockholm syndrome towards her executioner.

The end of the film (perhaps the best of all the

cinema

) contradicts this interpretation, but until then the most sensitive viewers were in a sinvivir.

Do you want controversy?

Well, we are going with all the artillery: we maintain here that

(2013) is a fantastic comedy, as well as a steely denunciation of the economic model that sunk Spain back in the two thousandths.

Which, of course, does not prevent it from being riddled with foul jokes about penises and

from another era, things that neither the critics nor the public were willing to forgive.

It also highlights the carefree and non-moralizing use of recreational drugs, to which the passengers of the title, locked in a plane that cannot land, enthusiastically surrender to reduce the tensions of confinement (unexpected parallel with the current situation) .

Against this, the allusions to the sexual habits of the former King of Spain in the mouth of the

played by Cecilia Roth are almost harmless.

Again, in

(2019) irreverence is a matter of narcotics.

Its protagonist enters and leaves the addiction to heroin with surprising ease, when at this point the codes of decorum usually require the mandatory ordeal of monkey and rehabilitation.

Almodóvar himself had to clarify that he had not tried this drug, which in fact was proof of how convincing his sophisticated exercise in self-fiction was.

A scene like the one that showed with almost didactic precision how Antonio Banderas and Asier Etxeandia made and consumed a chino ("The drop, the drop!") Is not something that the relatively large audience of a film like this is used to contemplating .

And yet he did it without moving a tab.

In any case, one of Almodóvar's most successful and sibylline provocation exercises does not correspond to a film, but to another medium-length film.

Made in 1984 for Televisión Española,

also presents many points in common with

.

Like this one, it framed the story of an abandoned woman in a

and manifestly false setting, only that instead of Tilda Swinton we had the most cañí Josele Román.

Driven by desperation, her character does things like rob a woman at gunpoint, also forcing her to strip off her panties, and ends up taking her husband without any regard.

Then, like the actress in

, a future full of hope awaits her.

Almodóvar figuratively doused the very heart of the

(represented by public television) with

gasoline

, to ignite it with the flame of his transgression.

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