This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.
I skipped this year’s Oscars for many reasons, not the least of which were the nominees in the “Best Actress” category. Amy Adams and Sandra Bullock are perfectly acceptable screen presences, but no acting either has done could compare to the intensity and range of the performances non-nominees Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux gave in Blue Is The Warmest Color. The Academy Awards take place in the U.S. and usually honor U.S. films, but Marion Cotillard won for the French film La Vie en Rose, in 2008—which insiders credit to skillful studio lobbying, Cotillard’s charm with Academy voters and the fact that even the most mediocre film biographies can win Oscars for its stars. In 1962 Sophia Loren won for the Italian film Two Women, but in that era the film-going public were more used to having to read subtitles to take in a decent movie. Art houses today are more likely to fill their bills with U.S. “independent” fluff like The Grand Budapest Hotel which, in spite of featuring Tilda Swinton and playing once an hour on the hour at two separate movie theaters in my city right now, I have no desire to see.
Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was able to ride the wave of art house popularity starting in the 80s when theaters were more likely to program subtitled films. He came to prominence in no small part because of his star, Carmen Maura who first gained the attention of U.S. audiences in Law of Desire, Almodóvar’s 1987 film, as Tina, the transsexual actress who is the sister of the main character, the gay director, Pablo (Eusebio Poncela).
Maura is electrifying in all of her scenes (including toward the end with a very young Antonio Banderas). With her tight, bright, short dresses, red permed hair and long earrings, her hands held up for balance as she minces in her high heels, Tina could easily devolve into caricature, especially with the convoluted history Almodovar gives her. Tina had an affair with her own father pre-transition leading to her parents’ divorce–and later she had gender reassignment surgery at her father/lover’s urging. Maura’s Tina can be outrageous: in one famous scene she convinces a municipal worker with a street cleaning hose to soak her whole body and writhes in ecstasy under the forceful blast of water. But Tina is allowed to have poignant moments as well. While she is playing the lead in Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice (her brother is the director), her lover, a woman (played by trans actress Bibí Andersen, later known as Bibiana Fernández) looks on from the wings, preparing to leave Tina for a man. When the lover is ready to turn away, Tina says “Wait,” and both in character and as herself recites part of the play’s monologue directly to her lover, trying to convince her not to go. “That would be cruel,” she says, “And you have never been cruel.” The lover leaves anyway.
Tina’s bond with her brother is also believable and touching: the many twists of the plot (an Almodóvar specialty) wouldn’t work if the audience weren’t convinced the two genuinely care for one another. When her brother is in the hospital with temporary amnesia after a car accident she tells him the story of their family: their mother is dead, their father left Tina years before.”You’re everything to me,” she says to Pablo, and even though her brother still has no memory he asks for a hug (since he’s too injured to do so himself). Toward the end of the film when Pablo has regained his memory he puts himself in danger to save his sister, and we can’t help thinking that if one of them has to die, we’d miss Pablo a lot less than we’d miss Tina.
Maura also carried Almodóvar’s next film: the breakthrough American hit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in which she played the protagonist, Pepa, a woman who lives in a penthouse that looks like it came from the Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall vehicle How To Marry a Millionaire. Like the main character in The Human Voice, Pepa is trying to talk to her lover on the phone, but the (circa 1988) technology keeps getting in her way, as she leaves message after message for her lover and waits in vain for him to call back (and repeatedly abuses her phone in retaliation for his silence). Unlike the main character in the solo Human Voice, Pepa’s life is constantly traversed by others: her lover’s grown son (Banderas again), a naive friend who was the unwitting host of a gang of Shiite terrorists, the lover’s vengeful ex-wife (also his son’s mother) and even a gazpacho-loving, hard-to-please young woman (played by another of Almodóvar’s film regulars, Rossy de Palma) who wants to rent Pepa’s apartment.
I saw Verge when it first came out and remember being disappointed, perhaps because the film had zero queer content (unlike Law of Desire, which had hardly any straight characters) or because the film seemed much more conventional than Law. Part of the pleasure of Almodóvar’s films is his trademark absurdity, usually midway between the sensibilities of the other out gay directors popular when he started his career, Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Germany and a pre-Broadway-musical John Waters in the U.S.: Almodóvar at times matched the tragedy of the former’s work and the camp of the latter’s. In 1988 Verge struck me as having too little of either, but seeing it now, I have a new appreciation for the film–and for Maura’s performance in the lead. Pepa might wear high heels, 80s-style high “fashion” and carry an assortment of colorful shopping bags, like Tina, but she would never ask to be hosed down, she just wants to be listened to. And when she realizes her lover has no intention of doing so, in spite of her increasingly desperate messages, she knows she’s better off alone. In a scene near the end, perfectly played by Maura, Pepa tells him that she would have taken him back a day before or even earlier that day, but not at the moment–and never again in their lives. Her resolve will be familiar to any of us who have cried and humiliated ourselves over lovers and then made the decision to finally stop.
After Verge, Maura and Almodóvar had a falling out and didn’t work together for nearly twenty years. In many of the films Almodóvar made during that time, especially those that were part of his 90s resurgence, he still seemed to be writing roles for Maura: the author in The Flower of My Secret, the cop’s wife in Live Flesh, the actress in All About My Mother. In 2006’s Volver (which translates as “Returning”), Maura played the “ghost” mother, Irene, who “returns” to her two grown daughters (including Penelope Cruz’s Raimunda) four years after her “death.” The mother wears house dresses and knee highs but, as the earlier characters Maura played might have, makes one of her first requests that her hairdresser daughter cut, style and color her long, straggly, grey hair.
As usual in an Almodóvar film, in Volver men do great wrongs to the women in their lives, (Almodóvar does not usually talk about his romantic relationships with men, but one can infer from his films that many of them have not gone well), so women have to rely on each other for emotional sustenance. As in Law Maura plays the scenes with her family with heart-breaking conviction. When her granddaughter asks her why she has returned she answers, “Because I was lonely.” When Maura and Cruz’s characters cry, on separate occasions, in discovery of the other, four years older than at their previous meeting and later reconcile, the scenes have the emotional resonance of the reunion of two long-lost lovers–or of a great writer-director and the equally great actress for whom his films seem custom-made.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2AJmNoUgo”]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.