THE PASSION OF PEDRO ALMODÓVAR

An academic offers a close reading of films by one of cinema’s greatest provocateurs.

During lockdown, Miller watched the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s later films, from The Flower of My Secret (1995) to Pain and Glory (2019), and realized “this was a filmmaker who was deliberately inviting viewers like us to think, and think hard, about a variety of traditional philosophical questions.” That insight led to this engaging book, a work that presents “a close analysis of seven more or less autobiographical movies” by Almodóvar and “aims to present an unusual sort of ‘self-portrait’ of the artist as he continues to grapple with the moral implications of the counterculture that he was a central part of in Madrid.” Miller offers cogent analyses of these works and notes their parallels to the director’s life. Films include Volver (2006), shot in Almodóvar’s hometown of La Mancha, which, in its depiction of “the resurrection of a mother presumed dead” and the other women in the pueblo, “enabled him to restore some memories of his childhood up to the age of eight”; Bad Education (2004), in which a transsexual returns to the Catholic school where a priest had abused him, a school “closely modeled on the one Almodóvar had attended for a decade”; and Broken Embraces (2009), about a director in his 60s, an “aging auteur, still trying blindly to find just what he is looking for in his films,” made as Almodóvar turned 60. The book will be best enjoyed by those who have already seen these films, as Miller gives away a lot of plot points. But he also offers many astute observations, such as Almodóvar’s frequent use of nested stories, and he cites the influence on Almodóvar of Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, and, most notably, American melodramas of the 1950s.

A smart work of cinema studies for fans and serious scholars.