Pedro Almodóvar – Bitch Flicks

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

The New York Film Festival (NYFF) wraps up this weekend. Here are the best of films about women or directed by women (or both) that still have NYFF weekend screenings (including some “encore” shows on Sunday) or are streaming or open today in theaters: including Ava DuVernay’s ’13th,’ Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Certain Women,’ and Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Julieta.’

Written by Ren Jender.

Julieta

I wanted to laugh when writer-director Pedro Almodóvar said after the press screening that this film is a “restrained” one. Compared to his other films, Julieta is subdued, but it also shows that even when he tries, Almodóvar can never tamp down his love of bright colors, ’80s fashion, overwhelming emotion and dramatic music — thank God! Julieta is one of his best films, a meditation on secular guilt, focusing on one woman’s life. Julieta (non-Spanish speakers: say, “who’ll-YAY-tah”) has all the little regrets most of us have, but circumstances beyond her control lead to some of those regrets becoming deep sorrow. He and Canadian writer Alice Munro (who wrote the short stories the film is based on) are a perfect, if unlikely, match. And Munro is two for two, so far, in films I’ve seen based on her work: Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (with Julie Christie as the “her” of the title), another very different examination of guilt, was magnificent.

I was a little hesitant about Julieta before I saw it: Almodóvar swings wildly from making films that are my favorites to making ones that bore and offend me at the same time. The trailer shows that its lead actresses spend time in bad wigs (the film spans 30 years and in one amusing scene, we see the covered face of the actress who plays the younger Julieta, Adriana Ugarte, and when she’s uncovered she is Emma Suárez, the actress playing the older Julieta) but the wigs are the only non-outstanding elements in Julieta.

Praising a male director like Almodóvar for putting women characters at the center of his films and making them multilayered, with complicated lives that don’t revolve around men may seem retro. But after sitting through Paterson, with its I Love Lucy wife who has a wildly different ambition every day and plies her husband to fund her far-fetched “dreams,” and the fraudulent Manchester by the Sea, which in spite of some good acting (by Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck — and only those two), has not one main woman character who seems to have a job or much of an identity beyond “wife/mother/girlfriend,” congratulating male directors for not being cavemen is apparently still necessary.

Karl Marx City

This documentary about the pervasive spying — using ordinary citizens as well as trained professionals — in the former East Germany where the co-director (with Michael Tucker), Petra Epperlein, was born and raised, blends satiny black and white cinematography with clips of vintage surveillance film and video. We follow Epperlein back home as she tries to get some answers about who was an informer and who wasn’t.

Epperlein transcends the divide between personal documentaries and the “talking heads” kind as she interviews everyone, not just her own family, but those in charge of disseminating the files meticulously kept on nearly everyone in the country until that country didn’t exist anymore. One of her best friends in school had parents who were officials who spied on the populace; she gets them to talk about their work (which they now regret). Epperlein explains that in a place where, the joke went, in every gathering of three people, one was an informant, people couldn’t trust one another so, “everyone was the enemy,” including, perhaps, her own father. Epperlein doesn’t just expose this culture of mistrust, she recreates it in this extraordinary film.

13th

At first, I was slightly disappointed with Ava DuVernay’s documentary but she confirmed when she spoke after the press screening something I had suspected: this film is not really meant for those of us who have already heard Bryan Stevenson speak about racism in the justice system or for those who have already seen Angela Davis, in a vintage clip from The Black Power Mixtape, speak about the particular history of violence Black people in this country have faced. 13th is an overview of the oppression of Black people by the U.S. criminal justice system meant for people who haven’t been exposed to this info in other venues — which is the majority of those who will see it on Netflix (the producer of the film, currently streaming it).

Still I can’t help wishing the film had fewer professors and writers explaining events — though one does have a great riff on how Angela Davis, when she was on trial, presented herself differently than other Black defendants would. Much more powerful is the cross cutting of Donald Trump’s incitements of violence, violence against protesters at his rallies, and a clip from the Civil Rights era in which an older man in a suit is attacked by young white men. Also unforgettable are the clips of the original Birth of a Nation with commentary explaining that the burning cross was an invention of the film, becoming a signature of the real Ku Klux Klan after it was reinvigorated by Birth of a Nation’s heroic portrayal. Don’t tell me harmful stereotypes in film don’t foster violence ever again.

Toni Erdmann

I liked this feature from German writer-director Maren Ade, but I’m shocked so many other people like it too. Toni Erdmann has no score, no real laugh-out-loud moments past its first ten minutes, and its “jokes” go on for far too long. But as Ade explained after the press screening, the film is about humor but it’s not a comedy. A bear-like father (Peter Simonischek) puts on a (bad) wig and tells strings of lies in front of his grown, corporate-consultant daughter (Sandra Hüller), but unlike many “jokers,” his impulse doesn’t seem sadistic. As he glances out of the corner of his eye at his daughter Ines, he seems nothing more than a little boy who wants to play. Ines is matter-of-fact about the ruthless nature of her work, but she’s also melancholy and frustrated.

This film isn’t the kind that ends with the daughter giving up her career to start a clown college with her father. The changes the characters go through are small ones, and the connections they make are fleeting. But this lack of an easy resolution and the film’s portrait of the mendacity and absurdity of the corporate world are precisely what resonates with its audience.

Certain Women

I fell asleep during part of writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s new film, and sleep is legitimate criticism: whatever is happening on-screen isn’t engaging the viewer. But Lily Gladstone, the Indigenous actress who plays the young, soft-butch, half-Crow rancher in the film’s last interlude is an actress I could watch all day. Gladstone is the only one of the main cast who is from Montana, where the film takes place (and where Maile Meloy, the author of the collection of short stories the movie is based on, is from). The openness of her smile, her calm voice, and steady gaze make her character, Jamie, stick with us in a way the other characters (including Kristen Stewart’s Beth, the adult ed teacher and lawyer Jamie has a crush on) do not. Gladstone is beautiful wearing little to no makeup, but she looks like a woman who works on a ranch: she’s not as sylphlike as the other actresses in the film, and her hair, even when she’s trying to look “nice” is unstyled. I hope Gladstone becomes the big star she deserves to be, but I also hope she can remain unscathed by Hollywood’s physical expectations for actresses. We’ll see.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5_4osOZK8″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Village Voice, The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Carmen Maura: Pedro Almodóvar’s Essential Star

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).

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).

Tina and her brother in Law of Desire — Tina and her brother in *Law of Desire*

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.

Carmen Maura in Volver — Carmen Maura in *Volver*

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.