A Bad Boy Comes of Age

The cast of characters in Pedro Almodovar’s new film, “All About My Mother,” recalls the internationally famed director’s more bizarre films: They include a transvestite hooker, a pregnant nun with HIV and a pair of lesbian actresses. But that’s only part of the story.

It is also about a woman who loses her son in an accident and tracks down his long-lost father, who has since changed his sex. And rather than being quirky and outrageous like his earlier films, “All About My Mother” is heartfelt and moving; many critics at this year’s Cannes Film Festival felt it deserved the Palme d’Or. As it was, Almodovar was named the festival’s best director.

In its convoluted story, “All About My Mother” covers many of Almodovar’s recurring themes and motifs: literature, death, writing, actresses, gender, mother-son relationships, movies and, above all, women. Every major character in “Mother” is a woman, or a man who wants to be one. In this, his 13th film, Almodovar acknowledges a debt he owes to the women who raised him and shaped his life.

“The film deals specifically with women who help each other,” he says. “This natural female solidarity resolves the lives of many characters.”

Scheduled to open in Los Angeles on Wednesday, after winning rave reviews at film festivals in New York, Los Angeles and around the world, “All About My Mother” reflects a more mature side of Almodovar that has emerged in the last few years.

“With these recent films I see a difference in the style of narration,” he says. “But they’re still me.”

Almodovar, it seems, has grown up--as hard as that might be to accept. After all, the reputation of Almodovar, Spain’s leading writer-director, rests on a series of gleefully shocking films such as “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” and “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” Flamboyant, frivolous, sexually subversive, chic and stylized, they dealt in outsize passions while featuring bright, delirious colors and kitsch decor.

And that’s before one even considers the plots. There was the porn actress held hostage, bound and beaten, who falls for her deranged kidnapper (“Tie Me Up!”); a convent where the mother superior is a lesbian drug addict (“Dark Habits”); a love triangle between two gay men and a transsexual (“Law of Desire”). Almodovar, then, had a gift for calculated outrage, one that dovetailed perfectly with the joyful spirit of the Spanish people, liberated from 36 years of fascist rule under Gen. Franco, who died in 1975.

Thumbing his nose at right-wing repression and Catholic doctrine, Almodovar became a gay celebrity in a land that had coined the word “macho.” However outrageous he was, Spain loved him. The bad boy as national icon.

Off screen, Almodovar was at the epicenter of Madrid’s notoriously wild night life. No pop culture figure since Andy Warhol had such a notable entourage, and he partied the ‘80s away with stunning transsexuals, a gaggle of his favorite actresses (“las chicas Almodovar,” as they were known) and, inevitably, a handful of men dressed as nuns.

Madrid is more sedate these days, a fact Almodovar acknowledges. “The city’s been getting quieter for the last 10 years,” he says with a shrug, blaming politicians chasing votes by imposing late-night noise restrictions. “For over a decade after Franco died, there was a special quality to the time. But not now.”

He sighs wistfully. “And I certainly don’t go out as much as I used to.” A rueful smile. “It’s not nice to talk about this, but I think in my case it’s maturity.”

He is 47 now, and that maturity is showing. Photos from his night life heyday show him with a dazzling grin, a halo of dark curly hair, and clothes in gaudy hues. Now he is a serious, chunky middle-aged man with tousled hair, dressed in sober earth tones. At his production company El Deseo (it means “desire”), on the ground floor of an apartment block in a quiet side street near Madrid’s bull ring, Almodovar talks thoughtfully, half in English and half in Spanish, with Michel Ruben, one of his executives, translating.

“I’m saturated with myself,” he says. “I’ve started to reject everything in my films that used to be called Almodovar-esque. I don’t use those colors anymore, or those kinds of furniture. Maybe it’s because that vulgarity was typical of the ‘80s and I’ve had enough of it.”

His recent films betray a pensive mood, ditching excess, melodrama and hysteria in favor of moderate, fine-grained storytelling. “The Flower of My Secret” (1995) is about a female romance novelist with a failing marriage, driven to write about grim topics; last year’s masterful “Live Flesh” is a complex thriller and an upbeat meditation on life in post-Franco Spain.

“I’ve become drawn to stories about sobriety, austerity, loneliness, things that can happen in a small house,” he says.

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His life began in a small village in La Mancha, Don Quixote’s red-earthed plain south of Madrid. His father was a bookkeeper, while his mother (who died in September) ran the family; when Pedro was 10, she arranged for him to teach local illiterates to read, thus bringing in extra cash.

As he tells it, women in this macho society resolved all problems and fixed everything, while letting the men believe they were in charge. “The women faked, lied and, in that way, allowed life to flow and develop without men finding out and obstructing it,” he says.

He is haunted by an early memory: a group of women huddled out on a patio, presumably making big decisions. “I was curious to know what they were discussing, but I never did,” he says. “That could be an origin of my fiction. Women are sincere and cheeky, almost obscene, when they talk between themselves. They’re everything except hermetic and closed. So you could get many details for a story if you just kept your ears open.”

His narrative gifts flourished. From age 10, he started going to movies with his sisters and his brother Agustin (who now produces all his films at El Deseo). “I would retell the stories of movies to my sisters and change details. Even though they’d seen the films with me, they liked the version I told them better,” Almodovar recalls.

He then went to a religious school (where he claims he was molested by priests) and began writing fiction and poetry. Hitting Madrid at 16, he became a clerk with the state phone company for 10 years. He watched films avidly and formed a glam-rock band with punk musician Fanny MacNamara, often taking the stage clad in fishnet stockings. In the right place at the right time, he was a leading light in “la movida,” a rebellious punk-inspired Madrid movement.

He partied relentlessly and began shooting Super 8 short films. Only in 1984, after making three features, did he finally dare to quit his job and became a full-time writer-director. His innate self-discipline was evident.

“I’d be out with him till 6 a.m.,” says former associate Rafael Moleon, “but you could be sure he’d be out of bed to start writing at 9. He never wasted time.”

Almodovar’s fame spread in Spain, then throughout Europe. He was the springboard for the Hollywood career of Antonio Banderas (who starred in “Tie Me Up!” and four other Almodovar films). With his knack for writing great female roles, he also unearthed a string of dazzlingly talented actresses: Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes and Argentine Cecilia Roth, star of “All About My Mother.”

In 1987, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” was nominated for a foreign-language film Oscar, thus beginning a courtship with Hollywood that endures to this day, with Almodovar a coy partner. A number of leading film actress in America wanted to work with him; Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Sally Field all expressed serious interest. Studios swamped him with scripts, including “Sister Act II,” “The First Wives Club,” “The Truman Show” and, more recently, “Runaway Bride.” But it all came to nothing.

“[The studios] never sent me a script I really liked,” he says. “They decided I was a specialist in drugs, nuns and transvestites. And it’s true. But not in the way they think.”

He has never shot a film in English or outside Spain, though he is edging toward it. On his desk is the script of Pete Dexter’s 1995 novel “The Paperboy,” which may be his next film. (Dexter’s book is set in rural Florida in the ‘60s and involves a newspaper reporter’s efforts on behalf of a death-row inmate.)

“The way I shoot makes it hard to go anywhere else,” he says. “I intervene actively in all the processes of my films. It’s easier to be the boss because in Spain we don’t have such a developed industry. I can go and edit any time of day or night. I can rehearse for months with actors, and they’re completely available to me. And I have final cut, of course. I can’t imagine making a film without it.”

He is also wary of Hollywood’s star system and the inflated budgets of studio films: “I don’t need to work with big stars like Tom Cruise, say, or Michael Douglas. I have to work not only outside the studios, but outside the big names. Because big names to me imply limitations.”

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Why would he even want to work in Hollywood? In Spain, his preeminence is beyond doubt, and with the clout to make any film he wants, he probably wields more artistic freedom than any other European director. Yet Almodovar seems weary of being a big fish in a small pond.

“I don’t relate much,” he says of his colleagues in the Spanish film industry. “Envy, a Spanish trait, is strong among other directors. I feel a bit stigmatized, not just because of my success, but because I’m the sole owner of my career.”

There are those who think Almodovar has become sour and isolated, yet his tetchiness should not obscure the fact that he is in his professional prime. Once an amusing, distinctive filmmaker, he has now become a deeper, more focused one, especially in his ability to write complex roles for women. Significantly, “All About My Mother” pays direct homage to luminous actresses such as Bette Davis and Gena Rowlands.

“I don’t think it’s so extraordinary that a male director can think and write deeply about women,” he says. “But I know I’m an exception. Hollywood films are becoming more infantile, aimed at adolescents. For that kind of audience, women in films represent adulthood. They can only be the dumb love interest of the hero who needs him to save her, or who’s there so he doesn’t appear to be gay.”

He bemoans the lack of any physical relationships between men and women in Hollywood action movies, citing “The Mummy” and “The Matrix” as examples. “These movies were made for children, and that limits the presence of women in them, and any sensuality,” he notes. “It’s clear films aren’t being made with real female characters.”

He speculates over the career prospects of actresses such as Michelle Pfeiffer, Glenn Close and Sharon Stone as they grow older. “It’s a pity. Hollywood is losing an incredible treasure of talent. When Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford were 40, they developed incredible careers, making women’s pictures, big melodramas with good directors. That’s impossible now.”