Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar

In the years between the wildly Aristophanic and primitive Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) and the slick and chaotic Kika (1993), Almodóvar rose to national and international celebrity status with ten feature films. Understanding the satirical antics of the early work—in Pepi, Laberinto de Pasiones (1982), Entre tinieblas (1983) and ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984)—as well as the stylized decor and cinematic artistry evident in Matador (1986), Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) and other mature works, requires the type of film criticism achieved by Paul Julian Smith in this eagerly-awaited book. Smith mixes close attention to form and technique with a fluent handling of theory and substantive reference to 1960s and post-Franco political and economic realities and constraints in Spanish society. At the same time that he situates Almodóvar in various Spanish and international contexts, Smith closely observes the making of desire and teasingly traces and recreates its many paths by cross-cutting, as he puts it, through Almodóvar’s “cinema of saturation, in which vivid colour and costume compete for attention with outrageous narratives and dialogue,” making it “vital to examine the context of images or plot points and not to freeze them in censorious isolation” (3). Desire is thus encountered, as it were, bound in its common contractual and representational shapes, from which it is released into the sort of unlimited company and liability advertised in the book’s title with a mixture of irony and gaiety.

The author has taken full advantage of the script and video materials facilitated to him by Agustín Almodóvar and El Deseo S.A. to take the reader behind the scene of the films’ genesis and production (including filmography and plot synopses). Each of the nine films examined by chapter is seen from four different angles of vision and under subheadings and epigraphs suggesting “takes” or “scenes” in the making. Indeed, the reader feels involved in something still alive and happening. For instance, the opening “Truth in Travesty” section of the Introduction begins, script-like, by narrating two mise-en-scène story bits (“La visita” and “El anuncio”) taken from texts deposited by Almodóvar in the Biblioteca Nacional in 1975 for copyright purposes. Smith sees portrayed in these relatos two “distinct but related aspects of Almodóvar’s creative enterprise,” two expressions of mediated desire held constant in his film work: “a love of comic confrontation,” never detached from “serious concerns,” and “a love of female fantasy, which is always situated in a precise social location” (2). These are two vehicles of passion represented by two heroines bound to womanhood, though from different sides, since one of them, the avenging woman in “La visita,” turns out to be both he and she, as viewers of La ley del deseo—in whose plot the story was eventually placed—would know.

Later on, in his extraordinarily rich handling of ¡Atame! in terms of masochism (as revised by Gilles Deleuze and by critics like Gaylyn Studlar and Carol Clover), Smith sees the much-attacked-as-sexist film taking place “under the sign of the archaic mother,” a sign also potently evident in the mythic ironies of Matador and Tacones lejanos, though more plainly in the sadist—or “Sadian”—mode of aggression which according to Smith is not in play in the masochist’s scenarios between Marina (Victoria Abril) and Ricki (Antonio Banderas). It is worth recalling how the binding of desire to the mother and to other female intensities of lust, nurturing, and rage became a dominant theme in psychoanalytic theories following upon the debates triggered by Lacan’s 1972–73 Encore seminar. Smith’s perspectives on Almodóvar’s cinema suggest a return to Encore perhaps already latent in Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña, a return binding sex-love in men to female perverseness in males, regardless of their sexual...