From her debut as a pulpy teenage temptress in Jamon Jamon (where she met future husband Javier Bardem), Penelope Cruz has delivered eye-popping performances of increasing dramatic control and excellence. The only Spanish actress to be rewarded with an Oscar – for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona – as well as being given a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she has worked consistently between Spanish and English-language cinema, becoming a muse for auteur Pedro Almodovar and lately lending her sparkle to Ferrari but also bringing poignancy to the wonderful 70s-set melodrama L’Immensita. She won at Cannes for Volver and at Venice for Parallel Mothers. She has been nominated for 14 Goyas and won for The Girl of Your Dreams, Volver and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Her qualities of emotional intelligence, a strikingly starry presence and a lively commitment to roles whether high comedy or intense psychological drama make her an international star whose every performance is an event. Happy 50th Birthday Penelope Cruz!
Very soon, this place will be full of murderesses, drug addicts, prostitutes, just like before. Cabaret singer Yolanda (Cristina Sanchez Pascual) brings heroin to her lover who drops dead of an overdose. To escape from the police who arrive looking for her at the club where she works, the singer looks for refuge in a local convent where the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano), a fan of Yolanda, rapturously greets her. The mission of the order, called the Humiliated Redeemers (Redentoras humilladas), is to offer shelter and redemption to fallen women. The convent once was a bustling haven for prostitutes, drug addicts and murderers, but it is now in disrepair. The order is facing serious financial hardships as their prime financial supporter, the vain and greedy Marchioness aka La Marquesa (Mary Carrillo), has decided to discontinue the convent’s annuity under the pretence of economising. The convent had taken in their wayward daughter Virginia who became a nun and ran off to Africa where she was eaten by cannibals. Six religious members of the community live at the convent: the mother Superior, four other nuns and the chaplain. To reinforce their vows of humility, the Mother Superior has given the other nuns repulsive new names: Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas) and Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave). With few opportunities for spiritual ministry, the nuns have begun to indulge in their own idiosyncratic pursuits in order to pass the time. The nurturing Sister Damned compulsively cleans the convent and coddles all the animals under her care, including an overgrown pet tiger that she treats like a son, playing the bongos for him. Ascetic Sister Manure is consumed by thoughts of penitence and corporal self-sacrifice and cooks between LSD hallucinations. She murdered somebody and because the mother superior lied under oath to save her from jail she is devoted to her. The over-curious Sister Sewer Rat gardens and secretly under the pen name ‘Concha Torres’ writes lurid novels about the wayward souls who visit the convent. She smuggles the novels out of the convent through her sister’s regular visits. The unassuming Sister Snake, with the help of the priest (Manuel Zarzo) tailors seasonal fashion collections for dressing the statues of the Virgin Mary. Her piety is a cover for her romantic love for the chain-smoking chaplain. The mother Superior is a heavy drug user and a Lesbian, whose charitable work is a means of meeting needy young women of whom she says, From admiring them so much I have become one of them. At the convent, Yolanda mingles with the nuns and the Mother Superior soon falls passionately in love with her. Together, they consume coke and heroin until Yolanda decides both should come off the drugs. Withdrawal from the drug for Yolanda is like a painful catharsis but for the Mother Superior it confirms her very sinful nature. Yolanda keeps the Mother Superior at arm’s length and strikes a friendship with Sister Rat. The Mother Superior has to face both Yolanda’s rejection and the threats of closure … One of the bases of our community is self-mortification and humiliation. That’s why we have such bizarre-sounding names. Overdosing, Lesbian nuns, hard drugs, erotic novels. Not the best known of Pedro Almodovar’s films or even among his own favourites, principally because as critic Jose Arroyo points out, it was made more or less on commission, the first commercially produced among his body of work made by a multimillionaire for his actress girlfriend – this film’s leading lady. Notwithstanding that, this boasts a familiar cast that includes Eva Siva and Cecilia Roth in the ensemble with Maura making one of her five appearances for the director. Aren’t you a nun?/No, I’m a whore. The main storytelling issue is the passivity of the protagonist, something that led the writer/director to give the nuns more to do which is where the real fun happens. Nothing to do with the later Whoopi Goldberg movie Sister Act although there’s a certain broad familiarity, perhaps if this had gone the whole hog and been turned into a musical Almodovar might have achieved something closer to his ambitions. The uneven structure resulting from the unbalanced construction isn’t entirely satisfying and it leads to a bittersweet conclusion that feels rather abrupt. Never mind, we’ll never get over seeing these singularly human nuns with their loves and lusts and extremely bad habits! Eating this is like taking communion. Jesus appeared to me while I was making it. He offered me his wounds to suck, like a swallow
Aka Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Women aren’t dangerous if you know how to handle them. Television actress Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura) is depressed because her boyfriend fellow actor Iván (Fernando Guillen) has left her. They dub foreign films, notably Johnny Guitar starring Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden and she has missed their morning recording because she took a sleeping pill. Iván’s sweet-talking voice is the same one he uses in his work. About to leave on a trip, he has asked Pepa to pack his things in a suitcase he will pick up later. Pepa returns home to her apartment to find her answering machine filled with frantic messages from her friend Candela (Maria Barranco) a model. She rips out the phone and throws it out the window onto the balcony of her penthouse where dozens of her animal friends live including a pair of ducks. Candela arrives but before she can explain her situation Carlos (Antonio Banderas) Iván’s son with his wife Lucía (Julieta Serrano) arrives with his snobbish fiancée Marisa (Rossy de Palma). They are apartment-hunting and have been sent by an agency to tour the apartment. Carlos and Pepa figure out each other’s relationship to Iván – they had already met at the phone booth outside Carlos’ home the previous evening. Pepa wants to know where Iván is, but Carlos does not know. Candela tries to kill herself by jumping off the balcony. A bored Marisa decides to drink gazpacho from the fridge, unaware that it has been spiked with sleeping pills. Candela explains that she had an affair with an Arab who later visited her with some friends. Unbeknownst to her, they are a Shi’ite terrorist cell. When the terrorists leave, Candela flees to Pepa’s place; she fears that the police are after her. Pepa goes to see a lawyer whom Carlos has recommended. The lawyer, Paulina Morales (Kiti Manver) behaves strangely and has tickets to travel to Stockholm. Candela tells Carlos that the terrorists plan to hijack a flight to Stockholm that evening and divert it to Beirut to demand the release of an incarcerated friend. Carlos fixes the phone, calls the police, hangs up before (he believes) they can trace the call and kisses Candela. Pepa returns; Lucía calls and says that she is coming over to confront her about Iván. Carlos says that Lucía has recently been released from a mental hospital. Pepa, tired of Iván, throws his suitcase out (barely missing him); he leaves Pepa a message. Pepa returns to her apartment and hears Carlos playing the Lola Beltran song Soy Infeliz. She throws the record out the window, and it hits Paulina. Pepa hears Iván’s message, rips out the phone and throws the answering machine out of the window. Lucía arrives with the telephone repairman and the police, who traced Carlos’ call. Candela panics, but Carlos serves the spiked gazpacho. The policemen and repairman are knocked out, and Carlos and Candela fall asleep on the sofa; Lucía aims a policeman’s gun at Pepa, who figures out that Iván is going to Stockholm with Paulina and their flight is the one the terrorists are planning to hijack … Weird things happen all of a sudden. Enfant terrible Pedro Almodovar’s international breakthrough, this was a smash hit from its initial release in Spain and became the biggest grossing foreign film in the US since Fellini’s 8 1/2 – which is just one of the many ironies proliferating in this story because it’s the first homage in a meta referential narrative centering on film, recording, dubbing and projection. Ludicrous coincidences, general hysteria, a suitcase that keeps changing hands, repeatedly pulling the phone and answering machine out of the wall, using prescription meds to control every situation, a mambo taxi stocked to the gills with every magazine, music genre and toiletry known to humanity that shows up every time Pepa needs a lift, all life is here in the most confident expression yet of Almodovar’s art. For once Maura is suited and booted in great tailoring in a setting that’s colour coded to the max with red the ultimate flashpoint for this sincerely crazy tribute to melodrama, with Joan Crawford providing the film within a film. I thought this sort of thing only happened in films! A vivid, nutty melodramatic farce, this is simply unforgettable. Released 25th March 1988, that means it’s time to wish Women a very happy birthday! What an insane story!
Aka ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!At first it was fun, but I am too young to be tied down. A Spanish cleaning lady with a chaotic life and a pill addiction, Gloria (Carmen Maura) lives in a Madrid apartment with her cranky husband, Antonio (Angel de Andres-Lopez) ; their two trouble-prone sons, gay Miguel (Miguel Angel Herranz) and drug dealer Toni (Juan Martinez); and Gloria’s ruthless lunatic mother-in-law Abuela (Chus Lampreave) who is addicted to both bottled water and fairy cakes. With little emotional support, apart from call girl neighbour Cristal (Veronica Forque) who likes Gloria to keep her company during bonking sessions, Gloria finds herself at wit’s end and finds out that Antonio has a secret passion on the decadent German singer Ingrid Muller (Katia Moritz) for whom he had worked as driver in Germany. Writer Lucas Villalba (Gonzal Suarez) who’s doing the memoirs of a random dictator tries to convince Antonio to forge letters from Hitler and travels to Germany to meet the singer to invite her to participate in the scheme. She’s in the middle of a suicide attempt and he persuades there’s money in the scheme. Gloria is pushed over the edge when an argument with her husband leads her to hitting him over the head with a hambone causing his accidental death. As Gloria deals with the morbid matter, other eccentric characters including an evil ginger child, a lizard called Dinero and a gay paedophile dentist who Gloria allows adopt Miguel, enter the picture, only adding to the craziness and police inspector Polo (Luis Hostalot) starts to investigate Antonio’s death … Tonight’s client would like a whip. If I don’t take him one, he might leave. One of the unexpected eruptions of the Eighties was rebirth of the Spanish cinema, almost entirely courtesy of writer/director Pedro Almodóvar’s crazy comedies and Gloria is one of his great creations, a female hero like no other. Women today just won’t stay home! The collaboration of actress and director was such a balm to a country on the verge following Franco’s reign and their crazy vehicles somehow contained the truth of female experience as well as knowing high comedy: love, servitude, lies, housework, melodrama, marriage, motherhood, money, murder (out of Roald Dahl), sex, drugs, prostitution and perversion, the whole gamut. What I wanted was some commonplace scene of elegant, sophisticated sadism, like in French films. This mad farce with its charismatic protagonist and nutty plot is one of the most purely enjoyable and fun satires ever made, a work of seemingly joyous abandon. Maura is never less than magnificent: she is the performer who Almodóvar once said is the actress who has best absorbed and communicated my idea of the female. Maura has said of him, What I liked about his characters was that they were full of vitality, positive, practical, surreal – at least the ones he gave me. They’re characters where the woman is in charge. Such sheerly witty feminism – has it ever been bettered? Tell me who are the romantics and who are the realists?
Aka Dolor y gloria. I don’t recognise you, Salvador. Film director Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is ageing and in decline, suffering from illness and writer’s block. He recalls episodes in his life that led him to his present situation – lonely, sick – when the Cinematheque runs a film Sabor he made 32 years earlier with actor Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia) and they haven’t spoken since due to the performer’s drug use. But now Salva is in pain and following the reunion with Alberto prompted by his old friend Zulema (Cecilia Roth) will take anything he can including heroin to ease his pain from multiple disabling illnesses. He recalls his mother Jacinta (Penelope Cruz) working hard to put food on the table; moving into a primitive cave house; his days as a chorister whose voice was so beautiful he skipped class to rehearse and got through school knowing nothing, learning geography on his travels as a successful filmmaker. Now he is forced to confront all the crises in his life and his mother is dying … Writing is like drawing, but with letters. Pedro Almodovar’s late-life reflectiveness permeates a story that must have roots in his own experience. His protege Banderas gives a magnificent performance as the director pausing in between heroin hits and choking from an unspecified ailment to consider his path. The stylish visuals that often overwhelm Almodovar’s dramas are used just enough to textually express the core of the film’s theme – love, and the lack of it. Life is just a series of moments and they are recounted here with clear intent, plundering the past in order to reclaim the present. A triumph. Love is not enough to save the person you love
Aka Todos lo saben. It’s for our daughter. Laura (Penélope Cruz) and her two children travel from Argentina to her home town outside Madrid to attend her younger sister’s wedding, an old-style village party. The joyful family reunion soon turns tragic when her impulsive teenage daughter Irene (Carla Campra) gets kidnapped that night and a ransom is demanded without police involvement in order to guarantee the girl’s safety. Laura’s brother-in-law Fernando (Eduard Fernández) who is married to Laura’s older sister Anna (Elvira Minguez) and whose daughter Rocio (Sara Sálamo) has split from her husband, asks retired police officer Jorge (José Ángel Egido) for advice and he tells Laura she should suspect family members. Laura’s husband Alejandro (Ricardo Darín) arrives from Argentina: not only is he not wealthy, he is bankrupt and unemployed, a recovering alcoholic who invokes God all the time. Her former lover Paco (Javier Bardem) who acquired some of her family’s land where he grows vines assists Laura and then she make a request of him which has the ultimate effect of revealing a dark web of hidden secrets that could have triggered the kidnapping in the first place … Why is she telling you now? Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi’s drama winds inexorably tighter until it has the viewer in a vise, quite unexpectedly, in a melodrama driven by suspicion. It starts as a conventional family gathering, devolves into a crime scenario and finally pivots on a revelation that supposedly nobody knew. It is that scintilla of knowledge, a closely guarded secret, which has brought about a reckoning. Real-life husband and wife stars Bardem and Cruz are as committed as you’d expect in an observational narrative which has a different kind of focus from the standard thriller setup – it’s shaped from ongoing family issues, unexpressed bitterness about money and who knows what kinds of resentments that have developed over the years. Only Paco, the outsider, whose roots are deep in the family circle, has the finances to secure Irene’s release but it will destroy him if he gives it up. This is a story that refuses the usual genre stylings and focuses on the familial – scrabbling for money in an impoverished if scenic setting, pushing people to make admissions they’d rather not, ending in a kind of fug of denial despite the crushingly obvious: all families are built on secrets and lies and it takes just one expertly aimed splinter at the heart to rip them apart and yet people persist in acting as though nothing has happened. There is a sense of paralysis here that makes this frighteningly true to life. Everybody knows
I told you he was a spirit. If you’re his friend, you can talk to him whenever you want. Just close your eyes and call him… It’s me, Ana… It’s me Ana… Life in a remote Spanish village in the 1940s is calm and uneventful. Two little sisters see a censored cut of Frankenstein in a travelling cinema, and seven-year old Ana (Ana Torrent) starts wandering the countryside in search of this kind creature after Isabel (Isabel Telleria) tells her the movies are all fake …. Written by director Victor Erice with Angel Fernandez-Santos and Francisco J. Querejeta, this is the classic of Spanish cinema. However it’s very difficult to see why. It’s an allegorical political story set in a non-descript era (actually meant to be the 1940s but who can tell? And how?! The hairstyles are atypical for starters). So this is a coded version of life after General Franco. After a wiltingly slow beginning, Ana locates a soldier in a deserted farmhouse near her home which the girls share with their parents – scholar father (Fernando Fernan Gomez) whose narrative ramblings about a glass beehive are supposed to signify political turmoil (presumably) and her lonely and permanently sleepy letter-writing mother (Teresa Gimpera). Ana mistakes the soldier for the type emblemised by Frankenstein’s monster. When she goes missing after misunderstanding the notion of ‘spirit’ she inspires a search while Isabel learns the error of misleading her younger sister. Frankly I don’t get this at all: it clearly had huge significance in Seventies Spain but the references are beyond me. Very little happens. And it feels dreadfully paced. And since so much rests on the shoulders of the child because at its heart it is a story of childhood and innocence and fantasy it doesn’t help that I didn’t like her or the way she was directed. You could never mistake this very dark little girl for the daughter of the very blond actors playing her parents. The aural link between the girls’ father and Frankenstein’s monster was misguided at best and confuses things. It doesn’t work at the basic level of narrative. I waited a long time to see this. Oh well.
The abject maternal has long been a strong component of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar’s oeuvre and in this striking adaptation of three Alice Munro stories from Runaway he plunders the deep emotional issues that carry through the generations. On a Madrid street widowed Julieta (Emma Suarez) runs into Beatriz (Michelle Jenner) who used to be her daughter’s best friend. Bea tells her she met Antia in Switzerland where she’s married with three children. Julieta enters a spiral of despair – she hasn’t seen Antia since she went on a spiritual retreat 12 years earlier and she now abandons lover Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti) on the eve of their departure for Portugal. She returns to the apartment she lived in with Antia when the girl was an adolescent and hopes to hear from her, the birthday postcards having long ceased. We are transported back to the 1980s when on a snowy train journey to a school in Andalucia Julieta (now played by Adriana Ugarte) resisted the advances of an older man who then committed suicide and she had a one-night stand with Xoan (Daniel Grao). She turns up at his house months later and his housekeeper Marian (the heroically odd Rossy de Palma) tells her his wife has died and he’s spending the night with Ava (Inma Cuesta). Julieta and Xoan resume their sexual relationship and she tells Ava she’s pregnant and is advised to tell Xoan. And so she settles into a seaside lifestyle with him as he fishes and she returns with her young child to visit her parents’ home where her mother is bedridden and her father is carrying on with the help. Years go by and she wants to return to teaching Greek literature, which has its echoes in the storytelling here. The housekeeper hates her and keeps her informed of Xoan’s onoing trysts with Ava; her daughter is away at camp; she and Xoan fight and he goes out fishing on a stormy day and doesn’t return alive. This triggers the relationship between Antia and Bea at summer camp which evolves into Lesbianism albeit we only hear about this development latterly, when Bea tells Julieta that once it become an inferno she couldn’t take it any more and Antia departed for the spiritual retreat where she became something of a fanatic. Julieta’s guilt over the old man’s death, her husband’s suicidal fishing trip and her daughter’s disappearance and estrangement lead her to stop caring for herself – and Lorenzo returns as she allows hope to triumph over miserable experience. There are moments here that recall Old Hollywood and not merely because of the Gothic tributes, the secrets and deceptions and illicit sexual liaisons. The colour coding, with the wonderfully expressive use of red, reminds one that Almodovar continues to be a masterful filmmaker even when not utterly committed to the material; and if it’s not as passionate as some of his earlier female dramas, it’s held together by an overwhelming depiction of guilt and grief and the sheer unfathomability of relationships, familial and otherwise. Suarez and Ugarte are extremely convincing playing the different phases of Julieta’s experiences – how odd it might have been in its original proposed version, with Meryl Streep in the leading role, at both 25 and 50, and filming in English. I might still prefer his early funny ones but a little Almodovar is better than none at all.
A movie about breast cancer? Hardly a seasonal choice. Ever. I had to watch this because it’s made by Spanish auteur Julio Medem, one of my favourite filmmakers in the Nineties (The Red Squirrel, Lovers of the Arctic Circle) and he went off my radar, at least, in the interim. Penelope Cruz is the wife of a philandering university professor who’s spending the summer vacation with another student. She’s left at home with their young son, a talented footballer. She gets a bad bill of health from her gynaecologist and then attends a match where a Real Madrid scout (Louis Tosar) falls over upon receiving the news that his daughter has been knocked down and killed and his wife is in a coma. She takes him to the hospital where her son joins them and while he deals with the inevitable funerals and she with her cancer diagnosis and mastectomy, they end up making a life together. The gynaecologist (a talented singer) is supposed to be adopting a daughter from Siberia and this figure in a photograph on his desk becomes the centre of Cruz’s fantasies as she creates a coping mechanism in a film whose aesthetic belies the misery narrative by utilising a fantastic array of editing techniques to convey a state of mind: parallel cutting, flash backs, flash forwards, dreams, enhancing the surreal component of illness and the effects it might impinge on a person’s thoughts. Fascinating but uneasy viewing.
mondomovies 