Pedro Almodovar and Regimented Valiance

"Life will bring you to your knees, drag you down farther than you think you can go." --Laia Costa

 

 

When I think of Antonio Banderas, what comes to mind is a particular displeasure when he was paired against Sylvester Stallone in Assassins.  Stallone would have many years yet before his top billing status would begin its draw down to selling his self help book to the audience snake line around Walnut Street, and the machismo Banderas exhibits in taking so much physical punishment was better served elsewhere. Like many box office draws, once he was removed from Franco’s pressure, Banderas had a number of duds: ghetto dance teacher, patriarch in an Inception rip off which, with a weary sigh, I admittedly should have ceased watching immediately.  I liked him a great deal as the gentleman cuckoo in Life Itself (2019), but this is the role of a mature grandee, and, of course, a digital injection into my repertoire, as I never intended to make filmography and celebrity into an arc of midlife hostility. It is only then I might allow myself to reflect on the intensity of his eyes, or pose a trivial pursuit question as to why Tarantino didn’t seek said one time street actor for his From Dusk to Dawn franchise. As I have learned from experience, Spanish cinema reveals in the sordid terrain of sleep. In some cases, as well, Latin American and Spanish culture are indecipherable, and until recently I really did believe that Banderas was Mexican, and fault myself only for treating it like an afterthought, because only a true movie star could bring the subtle horror and awe of Dr. Robert Ledgard to life. Whatever Almodovar’s posture is relative to authoritarianism, as a film director he is an artisan, a true connoisseur of control, rigorous control. The Skin I Live In (2011) is many things rolled into one. Any practicing writer could almost believe Thierry Jonquet wasn’t imbibed with Frankenstein at birth in his creation of Tarantula, since placed on my wish list, but the film stands by itself, manipulative, coy, cuing in the alert with an Alice Munro title going into the dumbwaiter, the neo-classical portraits wry and stark in the atrium, juxtaposed against Ledgard’s cutting edge research, and his willingness to expose to appreciative viewers why we’re all fearful of the medical scientist and his inner Mengele. Much of the driving force behind the back story and its contours can be credited to Marilia’s bitterness at having been subsumed as a birth mother for the sake of social cohesion, but what I latched onto, with celebration, is the lack of fear Almodovar has in weaponizing his vision against homosexuality’s libertine aspects, and where, pray tell, does this come from? I’ll tell you without a moment’s hesitation: at the end of day, liberals are still fascinated by the fascists who shook the world after the eclipse of the Edwardian reign. Franco still governed Spain when I was a young woman, these aren’t simply sleeping ghosts in the attic, or the anemic restlessness of one of my followers, a silly bastard who dubs himself EconC, uneasily raising his voice about new age faggot militancy. Art takes chances to embed itself in expertise, hopes to movie perspective; and although populism, which makes media powerful in all its aspects, has its own argument, at times its insufferably blasé.