Creativity – and its inherent eroticism – is posited as a wellspring to combat death and paralysis. Paradoxically, making films is the very thing he needs to do. Vivid animated graphics (by Juan Gatti) allow us literally to see inside the body of Mallo, illustrating his many ailments – from lumbar backache and sciatic nerve pain to depression and anxiety.Īlmodóvar’s depiction of his own pain feels intimate and confessional. On his belly he bears the shiny raised scar of an operation. An ailing protagonistīanderas’ body as a still life expresses the lone melancholy of a character in his twilight years. Liquidity is a motif in the film which, beyond its embryotic and erotic connotations, symbolises cinema’s flow of images across time (“the cinema of my youth smelled of piss, jasmine and the summer breeze”). What follows is the first of a series of flashbacks to Mallo’s childhood as the story moves fluidly between past and present. In the film’s opening scenes, we contemplate Antonio Banderas’s embattled and exquisitely ageing body as he stands in a swimming pool, at first submerged under water, eyes closed, as if in an amniotic sac. But where Almodóvar has, in the past, been accused of self-indulgence, here he shows an assured lightness of touch. The movie stars Antonio Banderas as the protagonist Salvador Mallo – a film director who represents Almodóvar himself.Īlmodóvar’s endlessly self-referential films, though they are able to stand alone, have always gained when viewed in the context of the artist’s life and body of work. Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is to represent Spain at the Oscars for the seventh time, with his 21st feature film Pain And Glory.

Pedro almodovar movies list