Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian Video Introduction To
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Virtual May 5, 2020 (XL:14) Pedro Almodóvar: PAIN AND GORY (2019, 113m) Spelling and Style—use of italics, quotation marks or nothing at all for titles, e.g.—follows the form of the sources. Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian video introduction to this week’s film Click here to find the film online. (UB students received instructions how to view the film through UB’s library services.) Videos: “Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas on Pain and Glory (New York Film Festival, 45:00 min.) “How Antonio Banderas Became Pedro Almodóvar in ‘Pain & Glory’” (Variety, 4:40) “PAIN AND GLORY Cast & Crew Q&A” (TIFF 2019, 24:13) CAST Antonio Banderas...Salvador Mallo “Pedro Almodóvar on his new film ‘Pain and Glory, Penélope Cruz...Jacinta Mallo Penelope Cruz and his sexuality” (27:23) Raúl Arévalo...Venancio Mallo Leonardo Sbaraglia...Federico Delgado DIRECTOR Pedro Almodóvar Asier Etxeandia...Alberto Crespo WRITER Pedro Almodóvar Cecilia Roth...Zulema PRODUCERS Agustín Almodóvar, Ricardo Marco Pedro Casablanc...Doctor Galindo Budé, and Ignacio Salazar-Simpson Nora Navas...Mercedes CINEMATOGRAPHER José Luis Alcaine Susi Sánchez...Beata EDITOR Teresa Font Julieta Serrano...Jacinta Mallo (old age) MUSIC Alberto Iglesias Julián López...the Presenter Paqui Horcajo...Mercedes The film won Best Actor (Antonio Banderas) and Best Rosalía...Rosita Composer and was nominated for the Palme d'Or and Marisol Muriel...Mari the Queer Palm at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. It César Vicente...Eduardo was also nominated for two Oscars at the 2020 Asier Flores...Salvador Mallo (child) Academy Awards (Best Performance by an Actor for Agustín Almodóvar...the priest Banderas and Best International Feature Film). Luis Calero...brother José Maria Amodóvar—PAIN AND GLORY—2 Sara Sierra...Conchita The director’s first Super 8 movies are too damaged to be shown today. They exist only in his retelling. He projected them for friends in bars, discos, and art galleries. He improvised dialogue, sometimes commenting on the acting, while Agustín, who had followed him to Madrid, provided a soundtrack with recorded music. Almodóvar worked hard on his screenplays, giving them plenty of twists (he’s often referred to himself as a ‘frustrated novelist’). His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, was shown at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 1980. Some critics savaged the low production values, but others argued that this attested to the film’s urgency and cultural authenticity. Who cared if the director hadn’t miked the actors properly? El Periódico perceptively praised Almodóvar as “a stubbornly PEDRO ALMODÓVAR (b. September 24, 1949 in passionate defender of substandard movies.” The film Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real, Castilla-La became a staple of late-night Madrid—a “Rocky Mancha, Spain) grew up mostly in the company of Horror Picture Show” for the Spanish—and highly women. His father was a mule driver who led a team profitable. The film featured transvestites, transgender of twenty animals across the Sierra Morena to deliver people, bondage, rape, and lots of drug use and sex. wine to Jaén, in Andalucía. As a young boy, His stories blurred the lines between gay and straight, Almodóvar was raised by women and saw them as a coerced and consensual, comedy and melodrama, the communal force. They were Spain’s secret power. “It funny and the repulsive, high and low art. It was all was because of women that Spain survived the delivered with a puzzling cheerfulness that made the postwar period,” he says. Also, at this time, he and his movies far more transgressive than if their tone had younger brother Agustín became regular moviegoers. been serious. Spain had just emerged from decades of By then, Almodóvar had realized that he dictatorship and repression, and Almodóvar’s films wanted not just to see movies but to make them. At suggested that the country had leaped from Opus Dei the age of seventeen, he told his parents that he was to the Mudd Club in a single bound. Critics could not moving to Madrid to pursue a career in film. His decide whether Almodóvar was the most trivial father, he recalls, “threatened to turn me in to the filmmaker in history or the inventor of an important National Guard.” Almodóvar intended to enroll in new strain of postmodernism. Spanish producers film school, but the city had only one, and Spain’s began courting Almodóvar, but he fought them over dictator Franco, viewing it as a center of Communism, creative control. had all but closed it. Instead, Almodóvar bought a In 1985, the brothers founded their own film Super 8 camera and began to shoot short films on his company El Deseo, in part to protect Almodóvar from own. “I had no budget, no money,” he says. “The such creative battles. Agustín ran the business side. important thing was to make movies.” He wrote out By profession, he was a chemistry teacher, but his complete scripts, even though his camera couldn’t relationship with Pedro was the crucial thing in his record sound, and changed the characters depending life. Agustín has said that his sole purpose at El Deseo on which of his friends showed up for a shoot. He is to help “Pedro make the movie he wants.” He has avoided filming where he might bump into the also played bit parts in most of his brother’s films. authorities, so he made several Biblical epics in the Creating his own production company allowed Pedro countryside, giving them, he says, “a bucolic and an unusual luxury: he could often shoot a movie from abstract air, the opposite of Cecil B. De Mille’s.” first page to last, rather than in the least expensive Since he had no money to buy lights, many of the order. Almodóvar felt that a chronological approach scenes in his Super 8 movies were filmed on rooftops, yielded more persuasive performances. “I owe in parks, and by windows. “Fortunately, Spain is a Agustín the independence and liberty that I enjoy as a place with a lot of natural light.” Amodóvar—PAIN AND GLORY—3 director,” he says. “It’s completely without precedent. Almodóvar has often bristled at this designation. In an Not even Scorsese himself has been able to do that.” interview with The New Yorker, he recalls, with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown frustration, a journalist asking him, “What’s your Almodóvar’s eighth feature and his second under El boyfriend’s name?” “That’s the first thing they ask Deseo, was released in you in the United States!” 1988. The movie began he says. “That and your with a script based on box-office numbers.” He Jean Cocteau’s play The eventually got used to Human Voice, in which a Americans describing him woman is heard on the as “openly gay” and came phone speaking to an to realize why many unseen lover who is Americans found it breaking up with her. necessary to counter Almodóvar provoked homophobia by coming major outcries over his out. “In Spain, in that era, next feature Tie Me Up! you didn’t need to say Tie Me Down! (1990), with its plot of an actress being anything,” he noted. “People just knew it. I’d never held captive by and falling for a mentally unhinged had to make any confession.” man, and the MPAA also giving the film an X rating In 1989, the film executive Michael Barker for its sex scenes. The director followed up with High arranged a meeting between Almodóvar and his idol Heels (1991) and Kika (1993), which was Billy Wilder. They had lunch, and at the end of it controversial as well over its treatment of women. Wilder told him that he had one piece of advice: Live Flesh was released in 1998 and featured “Don’t come to Hollywood, no matter what.” At that Penélope Cruz in her first film with the director moment, Almodóvar says, he saw in Wilder’s eyes (seeing Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! as a teenager made “memories of compromises, failures, and her want to go into film), while Almodóvar's next misunderstandings.” Though he has flirted with the work, All About My Mother (1999), featured Cruz idea of making a film in Hollywood, even going as far again along with actress Cecilia Roth portraying a as to initially ask Meryl Streep to play Juilet in Julieta woman who has lost her son and seeks out his father, (2016). Yet, he always returns home in the end. The who is a transvestite. The acclaimed, riveting work director has held steadfast to Wilder’s advice and one saw Almodóvar win an Academy Award for best might argue his films are better for it. foreign language film, with an emotional Antonio His latest, and tonight’s feature, Pain and Banderas and Cruz presenting him with the award. Glory (Dolor y gloria) was released in Spain on 22 Almodóvar received another Oscar, this time for March 2019 to positive reviews and made its screenwriting, with 2002’s Talk to Her. international debut at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, His next work, the noir-ish Bad Education where the film was selected to compete for the Palme (2004), starring Gael García Bernal and Fele d’Or, while Banderas won the award for Best Actor Martínez, told the story of two boys who attended a and Alberto Iglesias won for Best Soundtrack. It was Catholic boarding school together is said to be the chosen by Time magazine as the best film of the year. director’s most autobiographical. In more recent Almodóvar has written and directed 39 films, years, Almodóvar has broadened his subject matter some of which are A Manual for Cleaning Women and his tone.