In his more reckless younger days, he used to laugh about terrorism. Perhaps Almodovar's amoralism was a casualty of the al-Qaeda bombings in Madrid in 2004. Once, he would have jeered at such equivocations, but his new mood is more timid. I do try to solve the problems of my characters, but I work with different morals. Justice is possible, though no thanks to cops or judges. She respects his body, which is some kind of expiation. 'Penelope Cruz conceals the crime, but she treats her husband's corpse with great tenderness. 'It is dangerous to use that line in ordinary life.'īut if the edicts of ordinariness are to be respected, how come a man in Volver can be skewered with a kitchen knife by his stepdaughter and surreptitiously buried without exciting the interest of the law? Are crimes of passion exempt from punishment? Do women, as the murderess in Matador claims, have a biological licence to kill? Almodovar babbled at length in reply, while the translator covered pages in his notebook. 'They are discussing the orgasm,' said Almodovar. The heroine tells her male partner that only men have scruples about murder or consider it a crime: it is a female prerogative, like giving birth. In Matador, two lovers who are also killers kill each other while making love. I asked what had happened to the charnel-house humour of the early films, which treat death as an existential joke or a necrophiliac pleasure. He glared, as grim as the reaper he was confronting. So I decided to do a film about the culture of death, to see if I'd made progress. 'My only way of coping with it was through sex. 'I never understood death before,' he told me. In the superstitions of what he calls 'deep Spain', the departed don't go far and are liable to exhume themselves in times of need. The film demonstrates, as Almodovar remarked, that 'the dead don't die'. Volver begins in a rural cemetery, where women clean, polish and bedeck with flowers the tombs they will eventually occupy. 'I am maturing,' said the translator on his behalf. Where, I asked myself as the stilted exchange got under way, was the zany, unguarded comedian who made the films which are populated with adorable grotesques of his own devising? As if in reply to my silent question, Almodovar primped his shock of grey hair with his fingers. Though he speaks fluent English, he chose to entrust his communiques to a hunched translator, who scribbled dictation and then made his own fudged paraphrase. Statues don't converse with you and Almodovar addressed me indirectly. Plumply enthroned behind a desk in the office of his production company, he might have been posing for a statue of himself in that eponymous park.
But when we met in Madrid to discuss Volver, the only flamboyant thing about him was his tropical shirt. He was once the embodiment of Madrid's flaming youth. It behaves, I think, bucolically, placidly.Īlmodovar's emotional life has been monopolised by his mother, a dotty harridan who died later in 1995 his new film, Volver, which means 'The Return', is about a dead mother who bounces back to life as a meddling ghost. He responded to the municipal tribute by wondering 'how a good park behaves'. He accepted the honour, he said, because it was 'a homage to mothers' who took their children to play in the park.
In 1995, he suddenly announced: 'I'm a park.' His hometown in La Mancha, forgiving the runaway, had named a patch of grass after him. Despite his affronts to respectability and his mockery of religion, the success of films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown turned Almodovar into a national treasure. The permissive city, to which the young Almodovar fled from his family home in La Mancha, was the place where he cast off provincial inhibitions: in Pepi, Luci, Bom, his first film, he treated himself to a role as the judge in an erection contest and performed the task with lip-licking relish. The films Almodovar made in the 1980s captured the ribald vitality of Madrid after the death of Franco. Recently, however, he became a park and seems determined to lead a quieter, more pensive life. Pedro Almodovar is a man who used to be synonymous with a city - raucous, frenetic, brazenly lively.