Taking Direction: PARALLEL MOTHERSand NIGHTMARE ALLEY

One of the great pleasures of seeing a new film from a director who has done good, distinctive work over many decades is the comforting feeling of knowing we’re in familiar, reliable territory. Ah, one can think, here’s that recognizable style and those usual preoccupations, done up in their confident aesthetics and in their pleasurably recognizable rhythms. So here’s Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers. The latest film from the great Spanish filmmaker is another of his intricate narrative designs that plays out so easily one can still be surprised by its emotional impact despite recognizing its moves. It stars Penélope Cruz—whose expressive features graced a half-dozen of his films—and has other frequent collaborators in supporting roles. It’s set in plush Madrid apartments painted with deep reds and blues and greens, decorated with artful textures, vintage photographs, vinyl records, and jamón on the counter. It flows with the usual sumptuous string score from Alberto Iglesias. It concerns itself with: birth and death, mistaken identity, miscommunications, mothers, daughters, sex, family secrets, fallible men, and things long buried or repressed resurfacing. It is, in other words, an Almodóvar film. For all the familiarity of the surface appeal, it also has the beguiling narrative propulsion, pulled along by powerfully underplayed melodrama, with which his most effective films work best. Watching it, one wonders what will happen next, and how the characters will react, not in an edge-of-the-seat way so much as the deep well of feeling and humanity that comes from closely observed curiosity and earnest empathy.

Here, in delicately doubled parallel narratives that draw closer, separates and draw close again, Cruz plays a single middle-aged photographer whose affair with an anthropologist is the cause of an unexpected pregnancy. She decides, given her age and prospects, to have the child. He doesn’t want to be involved, which is fine by her. She ends up, nine months later, sharing the maternity ward with a teenager (Milena Smit) whose pregnancy is similarly shrouded in the unexpected and the unspoken. They agree to keep in touch. As Almodóvar follows these new mothers, the story develops with complications both normal—women recovering from birth, navigating new living arrangements, rebalancing a career (or adolescent desires to strike out) with their familial obligations—and dramatic. The plot ultimately hinges on a couple paternity tests, dark secrets, some held too long, and others not long enough, and, finally, one big devastating turn. There’s high drama here, or at least potentially. (Almodóvar even provides a running subplot of Cruz’s search for a mass grave in her small home village, where her grandmother long claimed her grandfather was buried during the Spanish Civil War. Talk about drama!) And yet the actors present these turns with such ease and naturalism, speaking in soothing soft tones and melodic warmth even as they might be evading or obscuring their true feelings. The movie sets its enormous emotions on a soft simmer, letting the full weight of its heaviest moments push down unexpectedly in the design.

Similarly, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a work recognizably his own, with a design that is its own reward. It might even be doubly familiar (or triply) to anyone who’s seen the 1947 Tyrone Power-starring adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel. It’s a noirish carnival con man picture, relishing the seedy inner workings of the freak show atmosphere. Del Toro usually works his affinity for misfits, monsters, and castoffs. See it expressed in the likes of Mimic, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and his Oscar-winning The Shape of Water—a real monster mash of a filmography, always asking, who’s the real freak here? In this new film, that kinship finds, in some ways, its most human expression amid the dusty tents and flickering flames of its disreputable environment. Here’s a film that looks unflinchingly at a geek in the old fashioned sense of the term, a desperate man biting the head off a live chicken for a paying audience, clenching his teeth to slowly separate vein from muscle until the neck snaps. The film wonders what kind of a life takes someone to that moment. To answer, Del Toro, with co-writer Kim Morgan, finds a winding road through eccentric characters and blustering schemes. It’s a big cast—Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, and Dave Strathairn, among others—of carny types, each given loving attention to the art of their grift and graft. It unfolds the ecosystem of the traveling show so patiently and in such detail I was reminded of Ricky Jay’s histories of magicians. The people in this movie are living on the margins, but there’s some kind of mad skill to what they do wrapped in the soft deception of audience appeal. They, like the film, and like a key image in the film, are a loaded pistol in a purse.

At the center is a charismatically recessive movie star performance from Bradley Cooper, one of those magnetic work of gestures and implication that’s compelling, and then only grows in power when he doesn’t speak. He simply exists, first as a lost man stumbling into this world, and then as a figure of increasing power within his person as he turns on the charm and shines up to move in fancier circles. That gets Cate Blanchett and, later, Richard Jenkins involved as high society becomes the scene of a newer, edgier, more personal con. No more swindling quarters out of gullible folk; it’s time to put on more elaborate faux-psychic charades for the high-rollers. The trick of the movie is how easily it moves between these early-20th-century spaces—the rural outskirts and the electric urban interiors, Dust Bowl chic and Art Deco glamor—with a consistency of tone and style. Here are damaged people damaging people, but their wounded souls are attracted and repulsed by the endeavor, and each other. The movie follows suit. It takes grand delight in the low pleasures of its population, and sinks ever deeper into the melancholic romance and eerie despair, both of which are all part of the game, too. It’s not dissimilar from an Edward Hopper painting in its look and feel some of the time—figures of loneliness in the vastness of (retro) modern life. If the movie sometime feels long, it’s because Del Toro can’t pull himself out of these scenes in these visual spaces with these complicated stock of characters; they’re too well-inhabited and handsomely dressed in sets expertly designed. I didn’t mind spending that time. These days, when movies can often feel so impersonal and bland, to groove on a distinct style and mood can be a tonic.

On Call: THE HUMAN VOICE

Every frame of The Human Voice can serve to remind the viewer that Pedro Almodóvar is a master filmmaker. That’s not to say that it’s a show-off style piece, but that it so perfectly, precisely and seemingly effortlessly whips up one of his trademark exercises in character and mood, with haunting elisions and casual complexity, a psychological realism nestled in a matter-of-fact theatricality. It has color — the most vivid reds and blues and greens this side of Technicolor, another Almodóvar constant — and melodrama, but it’s also contained and complicated by its necessarily constrained pandemic creativity. In other words, its an excuse to work with mostly one performer on almost entirely one set. Here, in a quick but sumptuous 30-minute film, loosely based on a Jean Cocteau play, Almodóvar finds a woman (Tilda Swinton) just past the verge of a breakup. Her lover has vanished, seemingly for good. He calls on the phone. She talks to him — a long, winding conversation of which we can only hear her part. It’s effectively a monologue. Almodóvar gives her all the space she needs to cycle through stages of romantic grief, and sets her against a literal sound stage. She swans through her sweaty emotional states in a handsomely adorned apartment and a fabulous wardrobe, but the camera pushes and pulls at the edges of reality as we see from certain angles that it’s a set, the windows opening up to an empty warehouse space, the ceiling missing, the better for a crane shot. The artifice of the moment only serves, however, to double down on the dizzying intimacy of the film. We’re suspended in this space with this character, as Almodóvar views her with the compassionate close-up detail for which he’s come to be known.

His camera’s interest in her, and the space of fashion and design, color and decoration, is both well-curated and filmed with a stunning clarity. I’m reminded that to see through his camera is to approach the feeling of seeing the world in all its beautiful detail that a great poem or dense Shakespearean prose or a perfect photograph can give you. Suddenly you feel more alive to the world, and everyone in it playing out their own deeply personal dramas. So it is that we’ve been invited into a space where Almodóvar, even though he’s working with less — run time, cast, plot, setting — gives us everything he has. It’s a fashion show, a coffee table spread, a brilliant actress showcase, a reason to sink into visually satisfying frames set to typically transporting Alberto Iglesias strings. And it’s of a piece with this period of Almodóvar’s filmmaking through and through. After his early films, riots of swirling plots and character, and an expansive maturing, in which those interests grew more haunted and interior even as they spiraled outward, he’s settled into a fabulously melancholy groove of late. His Alice Munro adaptation Julieta has lingered in my mind with a quiet power, and his Pain and Glory is an achingly restrained work of an aging artist tenuously confronting his past. This short is one more reason to appreciate this stage of his career — his ability to draw out evocative emotion with deceptively simple flourishes and unmistakably personal style. What a pleasure it is to see through his eyes.

Sky Highs: I'M SO EXCITED!

Call it Almodóvar’s Airplane! The giddy shot of fizzy lifting drink that is I’m So Excited! takes place almost exclusively on a maybe-doomed airliner. The landing gear is damaged and the jet is stuck in the air endlessly circling, hoping a runway will open up somewhere in Spain so they can attempt a crash landing before running out of fuel. Even the best-case scenario has a high degree of danger. After a decade of mostly great films that to some extent foregrounded the heaviness of their subject matters (Talk to Her, Bad Education, Volver, Broken Embraces) that culminated in 2011’s masterfully upsetting psychological horror film The Skin I Live In, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest is light as a feather. I’m so excited, indeed. Sure, he’s still working through many of his pet thematic preoccupations. The film features matters of sexual identity, infidelity, romantic entanglements, parent/child relationships, death sentences, and melodramatic coincidences. But here they’re mixed up in a cocktail of breezy farcical delight. It’s filled with vivacious bawdy energy, ticklingly ribald and utterly unashamed. 

The clueless business class passengers and their progressively more unprofessional flight attendants are the focus of the film’s bright silliness. (The economy class has fallen asleep after the crew decided it’d be better to surreptitiously slip sleeping pills into their drinks than actually tell them the truth about the mechanical difficulties.) In business class, a casual and increasingly open-minded atmosphere leads to candid spilling of secrets, melodramas, and lusty overtures. What else can they do? The in-flight entertainment is broken as well. The increasingly inebriated passengers include a telenovela actor (Guillermo Toldeo), an ex-model turned madam (Cecilia Roth), a banker (José Luis Torrijo), a psychic (Lola Dueña), a mysterious mustachioed Mexican (José María Yazpik), and a pair of newlyweds (Miguel Ángel Silvestre and Laya Marti). They all have secrets to spill and dramas to enact as they slowly learn the truth about their situation. The combination of close quarters, possible disaster, and free flowing alcohol certainly isn’t helping them stay calm.

For their part, the trio of flight attendants (Javier Cámara, Raúl Arévalo, and Carlos Areces) tries to keep this bunch of characters distracted and entertained. They keep the drinks (and stronger stuff) flowing and offer to lip sync a song or two. Some Pointer Sisters, perhaps? When they finally decide to bust a move to the titular pop hit, it’s one of the most exuberant scenes of the year. Mostly, though, they can’t help but be dragged into the gossipy, boozy atmosphere on board. When the madam claims to have provided services to the 600 most influential men in Spain, including the king, an attendant drolly quips that she’s “been royally screwed.” They’re a great comedic trio, sassing and snapping and hashing out private issues in public through fabulous banter and exquisitely passive aggressive behavior. One’s having an affair with the married pilot (Antonio de la Torre), one’s chugging down every drink he can sneak and eying the co-pilot (Hugo Silva), and the third is praying for their safety, while wondering if that groom is as straight as he seems. Everyone’s loosening up and leaving inhibitions behind, leaving plenty of room for light, campy comedy and winking melodramatic complications around every turn as the clashing personalities trapped together have no other option but to bounce off of each other.

Almodóvar’s one of the few filmmakers who can go big, colorful, and over-the-top without even seeming to notice. He’s not even breaking a sweat here, whipping up an overheated concoction that’s a total delight from beginning to end. The film’s wall to wall hilarity with classically snowballing screwball scenarios and candid vulgarity of the most endearing kind. It’s often dirty, either coyly or explicitly, but it’s so sweet it doesn’t rankle. (Even its structure is a great dirty joke; just think about the final images.) No matter how outlandish, there’s not a sour note in the whole film. The cast is a perfectly calibrated mix of chemistries, rattling off the ricochet dialogue and boiling over with emotion and desperation, fear and desire, as the plane continues its endless circling.

It’s the kind of film you can tell the filmmaker had a blast making, so comfortable, spirited, and nonjudgmental. He simply threw a great party of a film, working through his typical weighty themes in the lightest possible comedic way with the help of a great game cast (and a few great cameos, too). It’s an intoxicatingly entertaining experience, rich, airy, and hugely satisfying. The film’s a feel-good machine. The original Spanish title is Los amantes pasajeros, which in some ways speaks more literally to the plot, but in English the title pulls double duty as the feeling with which the film left me. I’m so excited!

Mind, Body, and Soul: THE SKIN I LIVE IN

The Skin I Live In, a great, nervy thriller from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, is a film that takes a gut-churning twist in the center with a perverse shock that makes perfect, horrifying thematic sense. It also makes the film incredibly difficult to discuss without spoiling the stark, delirious horror of the surprises. I'm going to attempt to steer clear of discussing it in detail. Instead I'll describe the set-up, talk about tone and theme, and hint at the extent of the gorgeous madness of it all as I try to pick my jaw up off the floor. This is melodrama that starts ever so slightly camp, and then scrapes away any sense of overheated frivolity to become an engrossing thriller that grows steadily more horrifying. It’s an ingenious twisty film of great disturbing depth.

The film begins with a half-imagined, but nonetheless potent, sense of something being very, very wrong and then sets out to deliriously prove that glimmer right tenfold. In a secluded house in the Spanish countryside lives a skilled plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas). We learn that he’s been a part of most of the successful face transplants in the world. He’s respected and talented, but also mysterious. In his home there is a lab where he works growing and testing synthetic skin. His housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) goes about her business, occasionally interacting with the gorgeous patient (Elena Anaya) locked in an upstairs bedroom. Surveillance cameras allow the surgeon and the housekeeper to keep tabs on her. The kitchen has a bank of monitors on a counter. The surgeon’s bedroom has a large TV on which he can view a larger-than-life real-time image of his captive, staring at her sleeping form at night, much as one would regard a beautiful painting.

What’s going on here? Who is this woman? She wears a skin-colored bodysuit. She doesn’t say much. She seems to be accepting of her fate. Is she locked in of her own accord? What is her relationship to these people who are limiting her mobility, restricting her actions, and yet feeding her well, providing her books, clothes, and art supplies. Perhaps she’s being paid to test the surgeon’s new synthetic skin. When he goes away to a medical conference, he presents data on his new breakthrough. When pressed by a colleague to say what, exactly, this skin is being tested on, he’s coy. It’s animal testing, he insists.  

While the surgeon is away, the secluded house receives an unwanted visitor. It’s the season of Carnival. That’s why the housekeeper’s fugitive son (Roberto Álamo) can walk somewhat freely through the streets. He’s dressed in a gaudy tiger costume and insists his mother let him into the house. Bad idea. The psychopathic son spies the imprisoned patient on the screen, ties up his mother to a kitchen chair and heads upstairs to sexually assault the captive. “You aren’t my son!” his mother shouts at him. “I just birthed you!”

When the surgeon arrives at the home and sees what is going on, he fights the intruder off. After all this, I still haven’t arrived at the most shocking developments the film contains. This is mere prologue. The stage is set for further shocks. In the aftermath of this startling violence, the film unravels, flashing back through time to trace the traumas and the terror underlying the current situations. And that’s when things get really complicated. The film has a complex flashback structure that elegantly floats through time, revealing the full extent of the story’s horrors with a clinical series of emotional slices.

We learn the surgeon is mourning the deaths of his wife and his daughter. They died years apart, in separate tragedies that are revealed over the course of the film. He’s been left consumed by mourning and revenge, a cauldron of emotion held in check and funneled into a medicinal drive to control. Could this have something to do with the young man (Jan Cornet) who has gone missing from his home in a nearby town?

The surgeon’s methodical approach to his revenge never wavers, growing eerier with stillness and patient silence. Banderas delivers such a tightly controlled and nuanced performance that mimics Almodóvar’s relatively restrained stylistic approach here. This is a masterfully outlandish film with wild moments adorned with the director’s typically colorful, gorgeous mise-en-scène. Yet there’s such restraint here, a gorgeous exterior of patience that belies the total chaos beneath.

This isn’t a film of traditional thrills and jump scares. It’s the kind of insinuating horror that slips up under the skin and expands, slowly enveloping you with dread from the inside out. It’s a psychological horror film on the subject of identity. Who are you when everything you are on the outside has been taken away? To merely say that the film is creepy and disturbing and the main character is an unscrupulous plastic surgeon is to wrongly imply that the film is some kind of grotesquerie that lingers on bodily harm. No, though the film is fairly explicit, the grotesqueness of the film is solely on the plot level, the thematic implications a red-blooded, twisty destabilizing force inflicted upon the characters that pulls under the audience as well. The horror of the surgeon is his quiet madness. The horror of the patient is – as we learn – her quiet resilience. Banderas and Anaya have magnificent stares, rich soulful eyes that burn holes in the screen and in this film carry the weight of greater traumas than we can even begin to imagine. At times, I found myself squirming in sympathy with the pain on screen.

The film is a intense, stylish, slinky horror film of turbulent sexuality, violence, death, and identity. There’s a fluidity to the plot and the characters (and the magnificent score from Alberto Iglesias) that matches the lush style and creates a stirringly distressing unity of purpose. Like the best of Almodóvar, the film deals in doubles, in lies, in sexual secrets, in familial traumas, but here it feels fresh all over again. It’s a case of an auteur finding striking new ways to work through his favorite themes. I was carried up into the film’s style and, almost before I knew it, I was horrified and moved in equal measure. The final scene of the film is a knockout, a moment that takes the destabilizing twists of the movie’s melodrama and horror to their most moving conclusion. Yes, I found myself thinking then and several other times throughout, not only does Almodóvar go there, but he earns it.

Quick Look: Broken Embraces (2009)

I adore the films of Pedro Almodóvar. Aside from making a handful of justifiable masterpieces and earning his spot as one of the major figures in world cinema, he’s a master of melodrama, able to whip up a frothy delight and make it sizzle with deep emotion and vibrant color. Why, then, was I so quickly bored by Broken Embraces? It has an intriguing plot about a blind screenwriter whose past secrets start bubbling up inconveniently into his present. We get all kinds of flashbacks and films-within-films and surveillance and deceit and sex and romance and unknown parentage and a car crash and an impeccably shot tumble down a flight of stairs. It’s filled with incredible colors and patterns; in one scene I found myself staring at a set of curtains, the hue and floral prints so intense and striking that it was boggling my mind. It has incredible performances from Lluís Homar (as the aforementioned blind screenwriter) and Penélope Cruz, the lovers, or would-be lovers, at the center of some of the potentially torrid mystery. I also enjoyed the presence of Tamar Novas and Blanca Portillo, as a son and his mother who help the blind man continue his work. There are a few great scenes and a handful of good ones, but the film quickly grew stale for me. For all its outward pleasures, the narrative felt slack, the story was just not as engaging as I expect from Almodóvar. As it moves back into its lengthy flashbacks and endless exposition, I found I didn’t particularly care how the story would unravel or how the mysteries would be solved. It’s a shiny bauble, but a hollow one. It looks great, but I was disappointed I could not engage more with the story. It simply doesn’t sizzle like it should.