Pedro Almodovar and his latest

Pedro Almodovar's metamorphosis

Of the many outrageous scenes that Pedro Almodovar created, the one that stands out is a shot of a collage showing the Virgin Mary and Snow White's evil stepmother pasted besides each other. It perfectly describes the women that have been the Spanish filmmaker's favorite subject in his movies.

The reason some veteran Hollywood actresses (e.g. Faye Dunaway) like to work with him is he always comes up with the most unforgettable characters, like a blonde-dyed taxi driver with a bar and drugstore at the back of his cab, a tabloid TV hostess who wants to capture crime scenes on the spot so she have a video camera strap to her head or a stiff lawyer secretly working by night as a sensual, transvestite club performer.

His career can be divided into four phases. His early works are characterized as crude, as it contains small doses of Sade-esque pleasure, twisted morality and scatology. Like Woody Allen, he works with the same thespians, and it's during the first phase that fans would be introduced to Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas, both of whom are his favorite actors.

The second half of the 80s saw his flamboyance through the use of colors, and his constant theme is passion is what keeps the world go round. It's during this period that the international film community start noticing him, the most notable of which is a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Almodovar can be sexually brazen that he stuns viewers at times. He never misses the chance to poke at his Motherland (in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, an artist bitches to a news reporter that Spaniards are either envious or intolerable). His movie is incomplete if there's no mamma's boy in the cast, which is the role that Banderas often played. Yet he amazes everyone with his originality, and has characters or lines that would make you grin.

Everything that he's best at, and is infamous for as well, is found in Kika (1993). The title refers to a clueless makeup artist whose idea of happiness is a horizontal tryst with a guy. She is surrounded by oddballs, some of which are too eccentric to be believable. Nonetheless, it marks a fine acting moment for Victoria Abril and Veronica Forque (in the title role). It's also in this movie where viewers will see what is perhaps the longest rape scene. It may be shocking, but it's very hilarious.

Almodovar suddenly mellowed in his next works. Abandoning shock treatments but not his fondness for the female species, he became unabashed in his sentimentality, and his endings are both bittersweet and optimistic. Flower of my Secret has traces of Billy Wilder's 1960 Oscar-winning work, The Apartment. Live Flesh emphasizes on destiny and redemption. However, it's in All About my Mother where the Spaniard achieved his zenith as writer and director.

The film is about a middle-aged nurse who reacquaint with old friends as means of seeking solace from the tragic death of her teenage son. Almodovar is at his most serious and most touching, and the film is his homage to women, both onscreen and off. Those who have been following his career were both surprised and stirred, so is it a surprise, then, that he was honored all over the globe?

The movie could've been a perfect time for him to retire, as it sealed his legacy, but Almodovar is too young to leave the scene. So imagine how many heads would turned when they found out that his latest is Talk to Her (Hable con ella). It's a groundbreaking work of sort, as it's the first time that there are no women in his central characters.

The movie takes off with a chance encounter between Marco Zuloaga and Benigno. The former is a sentimental writer struggling to get over a past relationship, while the latter is a nurse living a sheltered existence. The two are fixtures at an unspecified hospital where they attend to two comatose patients. Marco is keeping an eye on Lydia, a tough matador who is emotionally fragile whenever she steps out of the torero's clothes, while Benigno takes care of Alicia, a promising ballet dancer who is shackled by her father and her instructress Katerina Bilova (played by Geraldine Chaplin).

In Almodovar's world, meetings happen for a reason. In the case of Talk to Her, Benigno would turn out to be Marco's key to happiness. The young nurse would show the middle-aged writer how to understand a woman by trying to get under her skin - the Spanish filmmaker shows it figuratively and literally (don't miss this scene). Ironically, Benigno has never any serious relationship, and he based his insights from his associations with his mother.

Just when many thought that Almodovar has put down all his aces in the table, he comes out with another masterpiece, resulting to another Golden Globe trophy for Best Foreign Film and Academy Award nominations for direction and screenplay.

Talk to Her illustrates what devotion can do, and how impossible it is to remain callous if it's bestowed in tremendous amounts. Furthermore, in Hispanic culture where being macho is a norm, Almodovar shows that publicly shedding tears can be manly too. As Bilova remarked in a jaded manner, not everything in life is simple. You'll get hurt and disappointed along the way but all ends well. It's like Shakespeare's comic play, which may explain why the movie started and ended inside a theater where a stage play is going on.

Talk to Her marks another new leaf in Almodovar's directorial career. It's not certain if his latest is a sign that he shifts his focus to men, but there's one thing film buffs can count on: the Spaniard will deliver the goods.

(First published in Daily Tribune on March 1, 2003)