After a long delay, I am finally back to report on the movies I've been watching recently.
From my favorite Almodovar series, I watched Todo Sobre Mi Madre(1999) which, to me, was even more fascinating than all the other movies I have been watching by him. This movie is about mothers (as I had correctly predicted even before knowing about this movie, Almodovar is focused on the exploration of this theme: how mothers are related to their offsprings and vice versa). The two mothers here become connected to eachother through their love for a man both used to know: the father of their children. Here, in contrast to Hable con Ella, twowomen become true friends through their relationship with one man. Again, the apparently absent link is always there, and eventually reappears at the final sequences of the movie.
One of these two women has lost her son right on his birthday night, and the child of other woman loses her mother right after her birth. The story, typically Almodovarian, is about loss, and a hope to regain what is destined to be lost. The subplot of Huma and Nina as lovers, Huma almost always disappointed with Nina, is also about loss and a possibility to regain: Huma goes through all the fluctuations expected in her relationship with Nina to finally find relevant peace without her. The references to other theatrical works (A Street Car Named Desire) and Huma as acting perfectly on the stage also is in contrast to Huma's inability to carry on her real-life role as a woman. She has a messed up relationship with Nina and in ways is unable to free herself. This movie, can be also viewed as a movie about liberation and catharsis. Either way, it is a great movie to watch.
I watched another Almodovar movie yesterday (now that I'm an Almodovar-addict I can't help it!), Hable con Ella (2002). Well... What can I say about this movie, unless that I fell in love with the concept of love depicted there: A desire for becoming one, eternally uniting with the beloved.
I'm sure a lot of nice reviews have been written about this movie, specially concerning the scene of classical/Freudian desire for returning to the womb, a primitive urge to get back to the origin of life, to a time before us getting born. That would fairly explain the notion of heterosexual love and the mechanism of falling in love, as classical psychology suggests it: a man would unconsciously feel attracted to a woman who is like his mother, and who is totally unlike his mother. Paradoxical, but true. The traditional saying that good sons make good husbands has a root in human psychology: we can love the opposite sex only when we have practiced it as a child in our intimate relationship with our opposite-sex parent. And, in Almodovar movies, mothers are every where, though like shadows, we just see them or hear them briefly, they always end up functioning beyond their traditional roles.
Also, I interpret Lydia's fear of snakes as a symbolic fear of sexuality (snake standing for phallus in both Freudian psychoanalysis and the psychosexual interpretations of the Book of Genesis), so in a sense, Lydia is Benigno's counterpoint: while Benigno is a woman-like man, Lydia is a man-like woman; Benigno can relate to his mother and ends up knowing women and falling in love with a woman. Lydia, on the other hand, tries to relate to her father, though not totally successfully, and ends up being a bullfighter. Since her relationship with her father does not turn out to be as perfect as Benigno's relationship with his mother, Lydia ends up not being able to love men in a consistent and stable way (look at her troubled relationship with the other guy).
The same way, Marco and Alicia are counterparts (and that's why there is a spark of hope at the final sequence for them to join each other): Marco can cry easily and Alicia is a dancer. Both are more into emotions than into words. In spite of the talkative Benigno, and Lydia who, at one particular scene, mentions to Marco that she needs to "talk" to him, Marco and Alicia do not talk a lot. They look at each other a lot and they communicate through their eyes, instead. All and all, I can say these four people have a lot to share.
Another perspective would be: Hable con Ella is about women, and the men who fall in love with them. It is also about men who connect to each other through women. Furthermore, it is about the mechanism of love and the contrast between the social and the personal.
I again enjoyed watching a good movie from Almodovar.
Excited by my new Netflix membership, I watched a Pedro Almodovar movie titled as La Flor de Mi Secreto(1995) yesterday, right on my laptop's monitor (you have an option to watch some of Netflix movies instantly on your own pc).
The first film I had watched by Almodovar was Volver (2006) which was a women's movie, in my opinion. A delicate plot, full of psychological hints and details, adorned by the beauty of the actress Penelope Cruz. A sweet story of life and death, decision and hesitation, mothers and daughters and daughters and mothers. At times Volver may bother you with details, but does never fail to impress you in its own way. It was a good movie, anyway.
La Flor de Mi Secreto is again about love and death, but death here, is metaphorical rather than physical (in the first sequence, when the actors are talking about a young guy's death and a they argue about donating his organs so that other people could live, physical death and the possibility of life after that foreshadows the theme of metaphorical death and the possibility of resurrection that happens to Leo).
It would be oversimplifying to say that Leo is a passionate, alcoholic, talented woman. She is all of those things plus something more. She is an idealist in its true sense, yearning for perfection in love, literature, humanity and life. A very fragile, embittered perfectionist, though: when she finds out the man she loves, her husband, has no feelings for her anymore, she dies emotionally (symbolically, she takes a lot of pills that put her into a state of unconsciousness -- a long sleep)When she wakes up and throws up, then baptizes herself in the bathtub, she is already on her way to start life again.
If we analyze Leo from a classical Freudian point of view, we can conclude that her dependence on alcohol, is a way to compensate for her dissatisfied oral passion (remember the scene she kneels down in front of Paco, touching him with her lips as she is wrapping him in a towel). She is told by her friend not to act like a "child" and talk to Paco like "adults", which brings an image of an infant Leo to me, in search of a soothing feeding breast (look how her relationship with her mother is portrayed, and how her mother takes care of her after she breaking up with Paco, i. e. Leo returns to a stage from which she has never outgrown).
In the final sequences of the movie Leo says she is determined not to drink alcohol anymore, and that she needs to learn to be alone. Angel (another alcohol-dependent personality who can be taken as Leo's animus, in Jungian terms) is there to share Leo's resurrection. They join together as "flesh" in the last sequence of the movie.
Another interesting point was that in this movie, it's been mentioned that some story that has been stolen from Leo has been set into a film script and a director is making a movie based on that. Now this story, as implied in this movie, turns out to be the plot of Volver which comes out almost a decade after this movie, so in a sense, Volver is based on a stolen plot: Almodovar has stolen the plot from one of his own characters, Leo! I liked that intertextul hint in the movie.
Watch the trailer here (pause the background music on the right margin before watching this):
