Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1781681775
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the last decade, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar has grown from critical darling of the
film circuit scene to mainstream success. Frequently comic, often deadly serious, always
visually glorious, his recent films range from the Academy Award–winning drama Talk to
Her to the 2011 horror film The Skin I Live In. Though they are ambitious and varied in style,
each is a distinctive innovation on the themes that have defined his work.
Desire Unlimited is the classic film-by-film assessment of Almodóvar’s oeuvre,
now updated to include his most recent work. Still the only study of its kind in English,
it vigorously confirms its original argument that beneath Almodóvar's genius for
comedy and visual pleasure lies a filmmaker whose work deserves to be taken with the
utmost seriousness.
From the Hardcover edition.
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scandalous (‘fuerte’) material was mitigated by the presence of an exceptional cast.13 From the liberal El País to the rightist ABC, critics agreed that the intelligence of the acting style made up for deficiencies in direction.14 In Diario 16, Francisco Marinero stressed the ‘seriousness’ of the actresses’ performance, claiming that they avoided caricature by matching the roles to their own unique styles (‘especialidades’). Acting styles were thus ‘read’ against the audience’s knowledge of
immediacy, spatial proximity [and the] confounding of desire’ (p. 13), feminine fantasy was ‘desexualized’ (p. 18), confined by ‘a dangerous intimacy with the image’. Woman’s desire in these films is thus a desire to desire, an inability to accede to that fetishizing distance which grants (heterosexual) men visual pleasure in narrative cinema. Doane takes care to distinguish between audience address and spectator positioning (p. 34): the responses of empirical women (and men) to actual films are
each addresses only the screen. But the content of the dialogue also serves as an ironic commentary on the main narrative. Hayden is begging Crawford to deceive him, to tell him that she loves him just as he loves her. In the ‘acoustic mirror’6 of the dubbing studio this old dream of symmetry can be achieved even at successive moments (Pepa and Iván are not physically present to each other). But it is a technological supplement that also nourishes a desire that proves to be insatiable: attenuated
Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic, New York 1988. 20. See review by Terrence Rafferty, New Yorker, 7 May 1990, pp. 90–1. 21. SM Gays, ‘Programme: July–December 1992’. 22. Pedro Almodóvar, ‘Madrid-Berlin’, El Mundo, 8 February 1990. 23. Joan Lorente Costa, ‘El transgresor Pedro Almodóvar, entre tenebres’, Avui, 14 February 1990; José Luis Guarner, ‘¡Atame!: después de la expectación llega la polémica’, La Vanguardia, 12 February 1990. 24. September
the woman accompanied by other women, a matriarchal society. The whole film is shot from the woman’s point of view: even when she’s mistaken or unfair to her husband, it’s her perspective. PJS: ‘Leo’ means ‘I read’ in Spanish and this is a very literary film, with the main character changing literary genres just as you change cinematic genres in your films. PA: All my films are literary in the sense that there is a lot of dialogue. But Rohmer’s cinema is literary and colloquial at the same