Starring Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
Rating: *** ½ (three and a half stars)
This is the one that is most likely to win the Oscar for Best International Film. And why not! Argentinian maestro Pedro Almodovar’s self-confessional drama has all the ingredients needed to get global recognition. It is a tough austere uncompromising film whose honesty of vision will make you squirm, if not exasperate you with its proclivity to go straight to the heart of the matter in matters of the heart, without shortcuts.
Bluntness displaces poetry in Almodovar’s latest work, as we follow ailing semi-retired filmmaker Salvador Mallo, a scarcely concealed self-portrait of the director through his mellow memories of childhood in an Argentinian village with his mother (the gorgeous Penelope Cruz). No, she is not playing Banderas’ mother—thank the Good Lord for small mercies—but the child who plays the filmmaker (Asier Flores) establishes a tangibly real bond with his bombshell mom. These scenes are terrific in their subtle play of emotional and the erotic.
The one most disturbing and vivid image from Salvador’s childhood occurs when 8-year Salvador watches a man bathing naked. It is a moment when the child responds to his dormant sexuality without knowing what it is. The moment could have been a triumph of perversion. Instead, Almodovar makes it sublime and poetic. Later in a lengthy sequence Salvador meets his old lover after years of separation. The mellow magical merger of regret, retribution and nostalgia are beautifully controlled in this episode that ends with a torrid real kiss between Banderas and his co-star Leonardo Sbaraglia.
Sadly not all the episodes that constitute a carnival of colourful memories are as smoothly done. Intermittently the energy level of the reminiscences drops, thereby creating a sense unevenness in the storytelling. While the brilliant moments in the narration dazzle us with their virtuosity the dull episodes such as the director-hero’s uneasy reunion with an actor who he had a fall-out with during the making of a misfired classic, confer a stamp of sluggishness on the film.
Happily, it’s the brilliant episodes that stay with us. This is not only Almodovar’s most personal film, but it is also his quietest to date. We can’t miss the eloquent use of silences in a film whose beauty radiates outwards from a place of great turmoil.