Romantic Comedy film has come a long way. While recently the genre itself might have taken a complete downturn in artistic integrity in America, Romantic Comedy/Melodrama has taken roots in other places and has through the films of the 1960s and 70s, the era of radical independent film making that questions and subverted the social, political and artistic conventions held at the time by society via Hollywood and/or those in authority (read censor), internationally, the genre has survived and continuing the legacy of the film makers of that great decade of sex, love and rock n'roll. An example of such a film maker is Pedro Almodovar, perhaps Spain's best director to achieve international acclaim and recognition since Luis Buneul. Almodovar has a notorious reputation as a writer/director who makes films and tells stories that subverts and shows alternative lifestyles of drug users, hippies, criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, and transvestites all while questioning Spain's culture during one of repression and, till modern times, one of sexual liberation and political emancipation. Consequently, much of Almodovar's films deals with the subjectivity of women in society, their roles in a patriarchal dominant culture, while also questioning the logic of feminism, its theories and practice, of modern women in Spain, though the implications can be felt by any international viewer of his films.
While Almodovar's films can be analyzed using a myriad of interpretations and theories, such as Communist/Marxist, Feminism, Psychology, Deconstructionism, Existentialism, or Queer Theory to name a few, it really is near impossible to narrow it down to just one. However, a close reading of the text in the films seems to revolve around Almodovar's auterism and use of a fairy tale structure. Like other auteur filmmakers before him (Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman), Almodovar is not a filmmaker of style per se, but of content. His constant use of women as the protagonist, subject matter (melodramatic love stories that are either comedies of some nature), and thematic, that defines him as an auteur. His constant use of relationships, whether seriously or farcical, as a way to allow his audience to understand and empathize with his characters, but also to question the nature of traditional roles of women (as lovers, daughters, wives or mothers) and men ( fathers, lovers, brothers and husbands). Furthermore, he questions the concept of identity and sexuality held by society and shows how intertwining these ideas are detrimental or beneficial to the men and women, along with how it's present in either sex. The use of sexuality and its cultural definitions lends itself to Almodovar's style of storytelling, while under the guise of romantic comedy or modern melodrama, it is essentially modernization of classic fairy tales such as Snow White and Cinderella, but also a deconstruction of the patriarchal transgression structure inherent in the romantic comedies and melodramas genre, yet still conforming to the neo-traditional classical narrative structure.
In Marsha Kinder's article "Reinventing the Motherland", Kinder offers an analysis of Almodovar's work in which she dubs three of his films as the "Brain-Dead Trilogy". The article affirms Almodovar's auteurism, calling him an auteur in the Global Age, while demonstrating his originality in his mainly autobiographical films and the criteria that defines him as an auteur. The films that comprises the BDT are "La flor de mi secreto" (The Flower of My Secret) <1995>, "Todo sobre mi madre" (All About My Mother) <1999>, and "Hable con ella" (Talk to Her) <2002>, which could be said when looking in Almodovar's canon of films, could be attributed to other films such as "Law of Desire", "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown", or "Tie me Up! Tie me Down!" the same attributes deign relevant to the comparison offered by Kinder. Nevertheless, these are the three main films that demonstrates the real use of the fairy tale structure, (not to mention his most critically acclaimed films winning him numerous awards), but also because it conforms itself into the definition of a Neo-Traditional RomCom as defined and analyzed by McDonald in his genre study book "Romantic Comedy". According to McDonald,
"These films…adopt a much more conservative and traditional ending…<It> stresses its return to the conventions of earlier comedies, ignoring the elements that made the radical comedies…they reference times when, it is assumed, romance was more straightforward." (p85-86)
What essentially McDonald is arguing for is that contemporary RomComs have lost the sub-genre's radicalness, i.e. it no longer questions and subverts society's rules and norms of sexuality, identity and relationships, but panders to a fairy tale ideal of love. A great analysis of this aspect of modern RomCom is seen in McDonald's example of the film "Kate and Leopold" in comparison with "The Goodbye Girl", saying that "the audience is expected to get the reference to the older movies and realize the kind of romantic love she seeks is old-fashioned, but not impossible." However in the BDT, Kinder demonstrates that Almodovar's use of his own cross film narrative concept, when use in reference, defines him as an auteur, but also categorizing him as a Neo-Traditionalist, which he is. What makes Almodovar "radical" though is his ability to subvert the "references", (whether it is other films, plays, dance, literature, arts or music), i.e. fairy tale love/relationship, to the story subject and characters in his films. How he subverts the references he uses is often complex, interweaving it into the plot of his stories and his characters, yet it represent a key to the understanding of the themes of lives lived in modernity concerning the alienation and disenchantment of basically, if not modest by American standards, of the Consumerism and Capitalism that has pervaded Spanish society. Though Almodovar's film concern itself with Spanish culture and society, it reflects society from any class and nationality because of his ability as a writer and director to capture in his stories the bases of desire of humanity that which is the concept of family and the relationships wherein. Furthermore, Almodovar adds to this by transgressing the patriarchal structure in Latin, if not all traditional, society by displaying the various sexual identities inherent in contemporary society as a result of sexual, political and social upheavals of the 60s and 70s in Spain, from a despotic, conservative regime to one of democracy, even if it's only in a form that's only ideal in theory if not practice.
According to Kinder's article, the BDT represents a metaphorical representation of a woman in sleep, where brain dead can be a coma, drug induced sleep or a "living death"; a woman in a patriarchal society is repressed sexually, mentally and spiritually by men or society in general. This "brain dead" state of women (or men as different case may be), is reminiscent of traditional fairy tales like Snow White or Cinderella wherein the female protagonist is under a deep magical sleep and can only be awaken by a "prince". However it's not that simple. Almodovar uses various technique of this structure as bases for his plots, but subverts it by having his female characters transgress the traditional roles that society deign is the role women should play—the lover, the wife and or the mother. Almodovar depicts the dilemma of his female protagonist by putting their sexual female desire in conflict with their maternal desire, questioning whether the concepts of womanhood and motherhood are synonymous or are they even possible for a female identity free of maternal connotations.
In analysis of Almodovar's BDT, we will look at how each film represents the male and female sexuality, how the concept of maternity is constructed and how it relates to the character's identities. Also in analysis is how the fairy tale structure is used to signify the meaning in the stories, i.e. the themes that runs concordant in each three film. By doing so we will see how each film constructs the sexual identity of the characters, transgresses it and relate it to the traditional roles society constructs.
The idea and ramification of what "brain-dead" means in Almodovar's "The Flower of My Secret" (FMS) is first seen and really used, not as a plot device as in the other two film in the trilogy, but deceptively in the introduction of the film as a thematic device for understanding the core plot of the film. At the beginning of the film "the protagonist happens to see the end of an educational video <lectured by her best friend> that trains medical personnel how to councel loved ones of brain-dead patients. The video's goal is to get survivors to let go of the dead and donate their vital organs for life-giving transplants. Signaling a shift to a darker tone for his hyper-plotted melodramas both emotionally and visually, this painful opening inaugurate a new line of experimentation for Amodovar, introducing a new ways of mobilizing the body to represent social, political, and generic change." (p11, Kinder)
Later we are introduced to the protagonist, Leo (Marisa Paredes), a writer of romantic fictions of the cheap, over the counter type found in supermarkets and airports. This clearly is a reference to the 80s RomCom adventure "Romancing the Stone", not just in the career and profession of fiction writer of both film's protagonist, but also their emotional turmoil and estranged relationship with men. Here "brain-dead" refers to Leo's existential mid-life crisis, she's in a marriage with a NATO military strategist officer that is indifferent to her, leaving her physically impotent, but more importantly leaving her in a form of "living-death", an existential ennui that makes her incapable of producing the cheap romances her publishers want, along with driving her to drinking and drugs. Like the fairy tales she writes, in which she uses the pen name Amanda Gris to "hide" her true identity, she seeks reconciliation with her husband on grounds that are more fantasy then reality because she believes in the construct of marriage as defined by a patriarchal society—that of the good wife. However, she is a modern independent woman, as seen in contrast with her sister and mother, who fights and bicker between each other, which represents differences in class and independence. Yet Leo is not a woman who gives in easily. Though fashionably lean, the love-starved Leo tries to find solace by accepting her friend's invitation to meet a newspaper editor, incidentally named Angel, and rejuvenate her creativity (writing) if not her sexual desires (her article is to be titled "Life and Pain" a reference to a popular Spanish song about love and abandonment). This however, proves to be only a short respite, for when after a confrontation with her absent husband, she learns that he is going to leave her (and later that it was for her best friend too), that she attempts suicide by an overdose on "pain-killers". Like in true fairy tale fashion, she is rescued from her suicidal nightmare and death-in-life condition, not by a prince (Angel), but by the voice of her mother on the answering machine. Later she accompanies her mother back to the "village", i.e. the Motherland where she is made healthy. In what Almodovar calls the "cradle of Female craft", FMS " shows how earlier images of Spain and its traditional resources can be regendered female and recuperated as vital organs that can be transplanted for the 21st century." (p14, Kinder) Nevertheless, while the story might be expressing a embrace of womanhood and sorority, when Leo returns to Madrid, the city, she finds her new identity of a liberated woman -- figuratively as a mystical journey to the country, and literally her divorce and transfer of the Amanda Gris, along with the literary obligations absorbed by Angel, her new lover and "prince"—she reintegrate herself into Angel's life as a partner, not as a wife, but as a lover, enclosing the film in a very ambiguous conclusion that leaves the viewer wondering whether she is satisfied with it or not.
Where the idea of "brain-dead" and the transfer of "life-giving" organs are used as a metaphor in FMS for the theme of abandonment and existential ennui, in "All About My Mother" (AAMM) the concept of "brain-dead" becomes a 20-minute prologue that is crucial to the main plot that introduces the female protagonist Manuela (Cecilia Roth) who is a healthcare worker in charge of transporting valuable, precious organs to donors. Early in the film we see Manuela with her son Esteban, an aspiring writer, who is infatuated with Huma Rojo, an actress currently playing Blanche DuBois in Tennessee William's "A Streetcar Named Desire" in Madrid. At this point in the film many of the references used intertextually to construct a paradigm that immerses the viewer of the interconnectivity between reality (the main plot) and fantasy ( "Streetcar" and the 1940s film "All About Eve" in which Esteban claims should be "Todo sobre Eve", and later in the film when Manuela is accused of being like Eve Harrington). In a sequence that is heart-breaking, we witness Esteban get killed by a car while trying to get Huma Rojo's autograph and Manuela, grievingly signing his organs away at the hospital. The irony here is most poignant being that like in the FMS training video scene, previously in Manuela's introduction, it was at a similar video conference that we see what Manuela does as part of her job.
Where in FMS, the protagonist journey is is an internal one; Manuela's journey constitutes an external one. In very touching voice narrations made by Esteban, we learn that Manuela's son's last wish was to find out who his father is and this starts her journey to Argentina, her Motherland. The rest of the story is Manuela's journey to find her lost husband, while encountering a spectrum of femininity, like Agrado the transvestite prostitute, a shamed nun with AID, and the actress Huma Rojo who is a depressed, suicidal lesbian. These four women form a bond of "otherness" each rejected and chastise for their action, behavior and or sexual identity by very traditional Catholic society.
The film's thematic, like that in FMS of abandonment and solitude, AAMM forms an extension of those themes. Whereas Leo in FMS hides behind her false identity created by her profession (Amanda Gris) and that of being the perfect wife, Manuela is represented differently by Almodovar as being content as a mother and nurse, very feminine roles. She is only comfortable then being a mother or maternal in some aspect as the film proves by displaying her relationships to each of the three other women as nurse, mother and caretaker. In other words, Manuela is comfortable with womanhood as maternal, and the fairy tale structure becomes a journey to confront the wrongs or a series of trials that challenges her identity as a mother and woman. Here the play "Streetcar" is very poignant as a subliminal message to Manuela's past (she left her husband, like Stella, which she plays for one night in Argentina) and explains the many roles a woman must play, that of prostitute, mother and saint.
The end of the film though is critically denounced by many critics basically because Almodovar reestablishes the patriarchal structure by returning the women in his films to a role of maternity and submission. In an article by Barbara Zecchi titled "All About Mothers: Pronatalist Discourses in Contemporary Spanish Cinema", she states
"Almodovar rescues the female figure, but in doing so, he transforms her into a self-abnegated mother…at the end of the movie, by adopting Rosa's son (the nun), does Manuela recuperate her maternal identity, and becomes a sort of a mythical 'virgin' mother of a miracle child, who can save humanity, if not from original sin, from AIDs…The absence of the law of the Father is precisely the origin of the characters' problems, and only the return of and to the Father will lead to order."
Nevertheless, when Manuela finally finds her husband, now a transvestite prostitute called Lola, does Almodovar incorporate the idea that sexual mobility and identity is a matter of subjectivity; "the film demonstrates not only are all genders and sexualities cultural constructs, but the ability to love and identify across barriers of gender, sexuality, and class is a courageous leap of faith." (p17, Kinder) What Almodovar try to show is that womanhood is a matter of individual subjectivity and not necessary what is socially acceptable that makes her identity.
In what is perhaps his masterpiece up to date, "Talk to Her" (TH), is the most poetic and elegantly moving of his trilogy. TH transports the idea and concept of "brain-dead" and transplants it literally in a very fairy tale like story that is anything but simple. The story protagonists in this film are men, but the subject matter is still the construct of maternity, not in women, but symbolically in men in relation to their feminist identity. The transgression here in identity and sexuality, even though under the guise of the male gaze, is not necessary so because its one sided, but rather because it requires a complex logic of trans-subjectivity that fuses identification with desire and the formation of interesting sexual mobility or relationships.
The film opens with a brief introduction in which we are introduced to the two male protagonists, Marco and Benigno, watching "Café Muller", a dance performed by the troupe of world famous German choreographer Pina Bausch. Almodovar quickly engages the viewer by using close-ups of the blind female dancers dancing among wildly strewn furniture while a male dancer dressed in black helps move the many chairs and tables. "Taking over the introductory functions of the brain-dead video prologues from the earlier two films…this nonverbal performance prefigures the double brain-dead drama of the main plot." (p19, Kinder) In his earlier two films, Almodovar's concerns were with the state of women in modern society, but here he concentrates on the subjectivity of the sexual desires and identity of men. The story revolves around the two men and their respective love, Alicia, a ballet dancer, and Lydia, a female matador, both are in comas, and also the bond these two men build together and the tragedy that envelope both their lives.
While the title of the film might give the impression of the verbal expression as the definite form of communicating, this proves to be illusionary and Almodovar shows that the physical body can say as much if not more than words can ever tell. In other words the physical is grounded in reality, verbal expression is and sometimes contrary and a secondary form of expression. Marco is the masculine hero of the story, a travel journalist who's seen the world, but is attracted to pain and suffering, especially to the one thing he is unable to express—his emotions. On the other hand, Benigno, a male nurse and Alicia's caretaker, who finds himself unable to empathize with women on a physical sexual level, adapting the identity of the feminine male, i.e. homosexual, and is the primary advocate for words in the film a contrast with that of Marco. While the plot delineates in a series of flashbacks and forwards that tells the relationships of the characters, it also helps deconstruct the line between fantasy and reality by setting up the very crucial story/dream/film sequence, "The Shrinking Man", that acts as a buffer to the rape scene between Benigno and Alicia later in the climax, and by doing so it also allows the viewer to discover the plotlines as the characters do. The non-linear story telling creates an atmosphere of a dream like state, but also through the use of his cinematography and production design, Almodovar renders the dialogue to a secondary position allowing the audience to freely immerse them-selves in the movement of body.
"The Shrinking Man" sequence acts as a device that further emasculate the logic of the film, it being an imaginary story of a silent film told to Alicia by Benigno that is touching and evocative of his feelings for her that transpose the crime of rape considered done by others in the film. Through some "magical" way Alicia is brought back from her "brain-dead" state by Benigno's act, whether it be a physical one or a psychological one is imperative to the tale because it reinforces the use of the fairy tale structure like the kiss that awakens the princess. Furthermore, it reinforces Almodovar's theme of rejecting patriarchal institutions and because it is a silent film, also the simplicity in its honesty of physical coupling. "The film suggests that the relationship between any two individuals (such as Benigno and Marco) can potentially have erotic dimensions, even if they are not explicitly developed on screen." (p22, Kinder)
As written in the Film's press book:
"Talk to Her is a story about…silence as eloquence of the body, about how a film told in words can…install itself in the lives of the person telling it and the person leistening…about the joy of narration and about words as a weapon against solitude, disease, death and madness."
Bibliography
- "All About Mothers: Pronatalist Discourses in Contemporary Spanish Cinema", Zecchi, Barbara. College Literature, 32.1, Winter 2005, pp. 146-164 (Article)
- "Reinventing the Motherland: Almodóvar's Brain-Dead Trilogy", Marsha Kinder
Film Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Dec. 1, 2004), pp. 9-25 - "Romantic Comedy", McDonald, J. Tamar.
All films directed by Pedro Almodovar
- "All About My Mother" (1999)
- "The Flower of My Secret" (1995)
- "Talk to Her" (2002)
- "All About My Mother" (1999)
