And above all there were the demimondaine characters-drag queens, transsexuals, prostitutes, junkies-who were handy, vivid symbols of the transgressive themes the then-young Almodóvar, during the heady years of the post-Franco cultural explosion, was clearly eager to explore-and to flaunt. There was the hysterical pacing, which was only occasionally intentionally amusing ( Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the director’s 1988 breakout hit, was self-consciously constructed as a filmed stage farce).
Handsome gay men echoes tv#
And indeed, it’s hard not to think of the argument between Alicia and Leo as one that’s about Almodóvar himself-about his own evolution as an artist, a progress in which The Flower of My Secret seemed, as critics at the time and Almodóvar himself have commented, to mark a watershed moment.īefore then, when you talked about “an Almodóvar film,” it was pretty clear what you were talking about: an exaggerated aesthetic imbued with the lurid neon glare you associated more with certain genres of entertainment-radio and TV soap operas, film noir, pop lyrics-than with anything recognizably “real.” There was the flashily self-conscious penchant for hyperbolic (and sometimes, you couldn’t help feeling, ad hoc) plotting: murder, suicide, and hostage-taking were favorite mechanisms to keep the action going (in the 1987 gay stalker melodrama Law of Desire, you get all three), and-as with soap operas-hospitals and police stations were favorite settings. For this reason, exchanges in his films about the nature and merits of popular genres and their ability to represent reality are not to be taken casually. Pedro Almodóvar is a director who, over the course of a career that now spans a quarter-century, has famously loaded his films with references to mass entertainment, its producers and consumers his characters tend to be directors, talk show hosts, novelists, toreros (and, in Talk to Her, a torera), actresses, journalists, publishers, dancers, fans-people who are frequently shown in the act of watching dances, plays, television shows, movies, bullfights, concerts. When Alicia glumly asks why Leo’s writing has changed, Leo shrugs. Reality should be banned!īut it’s clear that to Leo, the gritty reality of her lower-class characters is far worthier of artistic representation than the rose-hued, gossamer fantasy world of her earlier work. Look at the result! With so much reality, the country’s ready to explode. Reality! We all have enough reality in our homes! Reality is for newspapers and TV.
When Leo, defending the artistry of The Cold Storage Room, gently protests that “reality is like that,” Alicia launches into an outburst about “reality”:
And so that no one finds out, she hides the body in the cold storage room of a neighbor’s restaurant…! And, of course, happy endings.” The plot of the new novel smacks less of Barbara Cartland than of Patricia Highsmith as a sputtering Alicia puts it, it’s aboutĪ mother who discovers her daughter has killed her father, who had tried to rape her. As Alicia points out to a weary Leo, the new novel, a violent tale of murder and incest whose female protagonist “works emptying shit out of hospital bedpans, who’s got a junkie mother-in-law and faggot son who’s into black men,” not only is appallingly inappropriate to the publishing house’s “True Love” series, but violates the terms of Leo’s contract, which stipulates “an absence of social conscience…. This wry pun is meant by Leo to explain the manuscript she’s just submitted, to which the editor, Alicia, has reacted not at all well.
Handsome gay men echoes series#
Leo is an author of a series of very popular novelas rosa, romance novels (literally, “pink novels”), but her life of late has been so tortured-her handsome army officer husband is leaving her, very likely for another woman her impossible mother is driving her and her put-upon sister nuts-that, as she tells her bemused editor, whatever she writes comes out not pink, but black. In the 1995 Almodóvar film The Flower of My Secret-a work that stands at the chronological midpoint between the director’s earliest movies, with their DayGlo emotions and Benzedrine-driven plots, and the technically smoother and emotionally subtler films of the past few years-a successful middle-aged writer called Leocadia (Leo) Macìas is caught, as Almodóvar’s characters so often are, between the exhausting emotional demands imposed by a complicated life and the equally exhausting demands imposed by what you might as well call Art.