In Part One we met our three protagonists: Proust, Sartre, and Almodóvar. Let's see where we left them...
Marcel Proust. Life wasted because we all seek the anesthetic of habit to ward off the paralysing fear of death. Moments of liberation through art and ultimate hope of salvation through his own creativity as a writer. Moments of ecstasy and a sense of self through the senses. Anesthetic, aesthetic, synaesthetic.
Jean Paul Sartre. Our experience of the universe always mediated by human senses and conceptualisations. The meaningless absurd universe is disconcerting, but ultimately it is us that give it meaning. Just existing is a creative act. We determine our own identity, create our own self and our life's meaning through our actions. And it is our responsibility to accept this freedom and act authentically, without falling back on the excuse of how society expects us to behave.
Almodóvar. In his own life, embraces freedom as he comes of age at the end of the dictatorship. Personal, political, sexual, religious, artistic freedom. Paralysing fear of death makes him question the validity of constantly striving to be authentic.
In his films. Likes to play with layers of fiction and reality. Sets up his films as a petri-dish to explore philosophical ideas. Is on a trajectory that can be plotted on a graph where over time the emotional impact of his films is heightened, and the intellectual games become less frequent. His attitude to romantic or sexual love is becoming less hedonistic and turning into a worry about self gratification, predatory relationships, abuse. This is replaced by a strengthening attitude towards family love. And through all these shifts across his career, the one constant is the human voice. One person telling their story to another.
This concern with authenticity in life and the destruction of death come to a head in the pair of films Todo sobre mi Madre and Volver. Both films are set up around a strong female character who has to rebuild her life after a tragedy.
In the contrast between the two films, we can see Almodóvar's trajectory away from intellectual games, towards more direct personal and emotional impact. Todo sobre mi Madre is a film full of references to other works of art. All about Eve and A Streetcar named Desire are explicit parallels for Manuela's life, entwined into the fabric of Almodóvar's film. They are elegant, clever, playful. But what is their role in a film about the devastating impact of the death of a son? These explicit intellectual references seem to detract from the emotional impact of the film. For Proust, works of art provide ecstatic moments of meaning. In this film, Almodóvar is using works of art to intellectualise, to keep the overwhelming fear of death at arm's length, as a form of existential anesthetic.
In Volver, Julieta and Dolor y Gloria, Almodóvar is on a deliberate trajectory to reduce the overt intellectual interplay. And by forcing himself to renounce many of his trademark set pieces, he enhances the emotional and personal impact.
In Volver, there are no overt parallels with other works of art. Optical illusions, reflections and superimposition of images are almost entirely avoided. Comically placed posters and adverts have almost gone. There are no flashbacks, even though the film constantly refers to dramatic moments that happened in the past. The typical Almodóvar Latin American song is hidden as a flamenco version of a Carlos Gardel tango. He even hides the conflict between blue and red in amongst purples and pinks and a particularly nasty pair of orange curtains. And an A Level student unfamiliar with Almodóvar's other films could be forgiven for thinking that it is simply a story.
The intellectual themes have not gone away, though. They are just subdued or hidden. Visconti's Bellissima is there throughout the film with its neorealist scenes of working class domestic life. In scenes where a mother in heels drags her daughter tottering through the street, a bus lit up on the inside, characters shouting messages from windows, seeking escape by a river, a mother and daughter embracing on a bench. In its story of a mother taking her daughter to an audition. In its obsession with cinema. In its use of members of the public instead of actors, or actors who are not actors playing themselves. And finally, at the end of Volver, Irene is watching a scene from Bellissima where a father tells a story to a child. The human voice (with subtitles).
At the end of Part One, I left you with a quote from Almodóvar and promised to show you how Volver resolves his existential(ist) angst.
Tengo la impresión, y espero que no sea un sentimiento pasajero, de que he conseguido encajar una pieza (cuyo desajuste, a lo largo de mi vida, me ha provocado mucho dolor y ansiedad, diría incluso que en los últimos años había deteriorado mi existencia, dramatizándola más de la cuenta). La pieza a la que me refiero es «la muerte»; no sólo la mía y la de mis seres queridos, sino la desaparición implacable de todo lo que está vivo.
In Volver, Almodóvar returns to the region of his earliest childhood: rural La Mancha. Having made his life and fame in Madrid, this is a Proustian return to childhood and family. His sisters were present for the filming, advising him on details and even cooking the flan that we see being turned out from its pot. He has said that he felt the presence of his mother in the making of the film, as a positive and lasting influence in his life after the shock of her death. So for Almodóvar, this film is personal.
The protagonist Raimunda has moved to Madrid. But has not found freedom and authenticity. Her life is "sin sentido" in two senses - meaningless and also without feeling. Proust's anesthetic of the humdrum that keeps desolation away. But the film becomes a painful yet powerful throwing off of the lack of meaning. It shows the protagonist (and Almodóvar according to the quote above) managing to fit the pieces together, making sense of what for many years had caused pain and anxiety.
Almodóvar orchestrates this transition through a beautiful series of scenes where all of his signature cinematographic traits come together to tell us what is happening. Starting with the familiar conflict between the blue of anesthetised inauthenticity and the saturated red of action and taking back control.
Raimunda's life in Madrid is characterised by the colour blue. A washed out cold blue. The blue light of the scene where we see her not having sex with her husband. The blues and whites of her interminable jobs in the restaurant kitchen, the laundry, the airport. A life of drudgery and emotional paralysis. Then Almodóvar's screen is split down the middle. Blue on the left. Red on the right. A huge bright saturated red foregrounded firehose in the red corner. And in the blue corner, Raimunda in a moment's pause from her cleaning job. Ringing her daughter who does not pick up.
And then the entire screen turns red. Inexplicably. Is it the side of the bus we are about to see? It is a powerful transition and change of mood that is going to change Raimunda's life.
The next thing we see is her daughter Paula, wearing red standing at a red bus stop. The bus arrives. Red on the outside, blue light on the inside. And as Raimunda steps out from the blue into the red, we see the advert on the side of the bus: "Volver a Sentir." Volver a Sentir. That's the promise of this scene. There's a crisis coming, but one which will precipitate the need for action and for Raimunda to rebuild her life.
And it's the message of the song, "Volver... Vivir... Sentir..." where Raimunda sings for her daughter, but simultaneously sings to her mother and for her mother. As all three generations, all three versions of Almodóvar can put their lives back together.
And there is another version too. Agustina. Agustina the neighbour who never left the village. The version of Raimunda who never left, the version of Almodóvar who never went to Madrid. Another sort of fantasma in this film of ghosts. Agustina, dressed in green, the colour of the biological cycle of life and death. Agustina who smokes joints, has her gravestone ready, and who ends the film on painkillers, anesthetised waiting to die. Agustina is Proust without art, Raimunda without her mother, and Almodóvar without film.
So what is the moral of the story? As usual with Almodóvar, it is about the telling of the story. The human voice. We don't see a flashback of Paco's death. We see Paula telling Raimunda. We don't see a flashback of the day of the fire. We see Irene telling Raimunda. All Raimunda and Irene needed to do was talk. For Proust it was art, for Sartre it was action (or writing if you were more of a writer than an action man, sorry, Sartre) and for Almodóvar it isn't fame or putting your daughter on the stage or even the cinema, it is relationships.
If Todo sobre mi Madre couldn't answer the question, "What is the point of life if we are all going to die?" then Volver answers it. Irene talks about purgatory. Almodóvar says, "Ya lo dijo Sartre mejor que yo. El más allá está en el más acá." - Sartre said it better than I could. The beyond is in the here and now. Heaven, hell, redemption, judgment. It's all right here in this life and what we make of it.
With the return to put things right, the reconciliation, Almodóvar has flipped the question from "What is the point if we are all going to die?" to the answer: "We only have one life. Don't mess it up."
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