..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

"Viva Pedro!"
Making Choices At The Almodovar Fest

Part Two Of A Two Part Feature

If I had to pick a favorite film in the "Viva Pedro!" festival, I'd have to say it was the powerful, little-seen Law of Desire (1987) which is the first of these films where Almodovar has a cast of leading characters who were all homosexual. With Carmen Maura giving one of her greatest performances as Tina, a feisty, funny transsexual, and a VERY young Antonio Banderas being the breathtakingly beautiful gay boy in a deadly triangle.

Banderas is young and gay in another powerful drama Matador (1986) which opens with the title character, an ex-bullfighter, played by Nacho Martinez, masturbating to splatter films and bull-fighting scenes from his past on his VCR. He runs a bull-fighting school in Madrid and Banderas is his is young conflicted student, who THINKS he (Banderas) is a serial killer and rapist. Meanwhile, the film turns out to have TWO serial killers on the prowl, one male, one female, but never does Matador stoop to any cheap melodramatics, or gratuitous gore. I think "Matador" which directly preceded, Law of Desire, was Almodovar's first, successful foray in to serious, full throttle film drama.

It's also interesting that both these films are the least known ones on the "Viva Pedro" docket.

Almodovar's life-long struggle with his comic muse vs. his tragic muse also make for interesting comparisons in the films that form "Viva Pedro."

Of all the nine Pedros I saw last week, the one that disappointed me the most on re-seeing it was, of all things, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. This 1988 comedy was the break-out film for Almodovar, bringing him an international audience he never had before. I looked forward to seeing it again, but it was the only one of these films that I found lacking. Its comic engine runs out of steam about three-fifths of the way through. I remember delighting in it a long time ago, in the 80s, but today its comedy seemed formulaic and flat compared with the much more original and successful uses he puts his great sense of humor to in his maturity. Like in Volver.

Or like in the character of the transsexual Agrado in All About My Mother. Or the surprising humor of the male nurse Benigno in Talk to Her, as he prattles on endlessly to his beautiful comatose female patient, whom he is madly in love with. These two Academy Award winning films are hands down Almodovar's greatest. They are both masterpieces, but there's MORE!

In the delightful, autumnal Flower of My Secret (1995) the elegant, Garbo-esque Marisa Paredes plays a successful female novelist named Leocadia, who writes romance novels, under the name of Amanda Gris. Just how completely Almodovar enriches and stuns us with the subtlety of his humor is evinced in a throw-away remark, Leocadia makes when she describes the plot of a screenplay she has written as "a piece of trash I threw away in the garbage, it was so awful." The script gets stolen from the junkage by the junkie son of her agent and turned into a big hit Hollywood movie! One realizes with a delightful shock that this thrown-away scenario turns out to be the plot he so brilliantly uses ten years later in Volver!

Live Flesh (1997) has Javier Bardem as a wounded cop in a wheel-chair for most the film. His extremely active and sensual paraplegic strangely foreshadows the tragic quadriplegic in Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside a few years later.

And the gay brain-teaser Bad Education (2004) still suffers from an overly cerebral, complicated plot, as Almodovar confronts the demons of his Catholic childhood. It has a splendid central performance by Gael Garcia Bernal, in and out of his clothes, and in and out of drag, as a young actor, Ignacio, trying to chase down the parish priest who molested him and his brother. Javier Camera, so moving as the obsessive male nurse in Talk to Her is hilarious as Bernal's tranny side-kick.

But Bad Education is easily Almodovar's most difficult film to comprehend. The complicated double and triple- twist Pirandellian plots only become decipherable on the second and third viewings. It's as if the filmmaker, tackling the most serious of all his serious themes, the Catholic Church and child molestation, keeps the subject at intellectual arm's length. Bad Education is certainly arresting, provocative, shocking, and terrifically acted, but it leaves one coldly outside the story in a way that the other films in "Viva Pedro" do not.

And in Bad Education as in Law of Desire his two completely gay films, the central character is a Spanish screenwriter/director, who is clearly a stand-in for Almodovar himself. Except that both times, Pablo Quintero (played by Eusebio Poncela in Desire) and Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez in Bad) are both fair, buff, thin, high-cheek-boned actors. Underlining, I guess, that these fictional auteurs are indeed fictional characters, and are not to be confused with the real Almodovar himself, who physically is none of the above.

But of course, we make the connection anyway. It's also interesting that these two actors, Poncela and Martinez playing similar roles nearly two decades apart, seem to be exact look-alikes. It's another trick of the eye in Almodovar's seemingly endless hall of mirrors. And the out gay men always have the most fabulous, multi-colored shirts!

The "Viva Pedro" films are almost all, by turns, utterly irresistible, fascinating, hilarious, enthralling and unforgettable. The rich blood reds, the fantastic performances he gets from every one of his actors, and especially his superb actresses, the splendid thrill of the great character- driven scripts, his utter lack of compromise to any one else standards, especially Hollywood's, the abundant and rare parts for women, the unabashedly homosexual themes, make "Viva Pedro" an unique fiesta, of color, magic, sex and delight.

Here is the schedule of films and their dates in NYC:

At the Lincoln Plaza:

Aug. 11-24 WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

Aug. 25-31 ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER

Sept. 1-7 TALK TO HER

Sept. 8-14 THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET

Sept. 15-21 LIVE FLESH

Sept. 22-28 LAW OF DESIRE

Sept. 29-Oct. 5 MATADOR

Oct. 6-12 BAD EDUCATION

Nov 3rd - VOLVER opens for it's theatrical run

After they run there for a week (or two) at the Lincoln Plaza, they will move down to the Quad (less Volver, of course)

It's bliss. Sheer cinematic bliss. Go! Enjoy! Do what I did! See every single one! You won't be disappointed.

Like the man himself, the "Vivo Pedro" festival is extraordinary cinematic experience

Part I - The Man from La Mancha - "Viva Pedro!"

- Stephen Holt

August 15, 2006

Stephen Holt is a veteran NY-based journalist. The Stephen Holt Show continues to run weekly in NY.

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