Separated at Birth

Film: Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

There are a few people in film who I will watch in pretty much anything. Toni Collette and Patricia Clarkson come to mind. There are others I could name, probably a dozen or so, but all of them will always take a back seat to Penelope Cruz. I am fond of saying that I would watch her fold laundry, by which I mean that I think she is capable of making just about anything interesting. And so I was interested in seeing Parallel Mothers (or Madres Paralelas), Cruz’s nomination from the most recent Oscars.

Its actually not that hard to figure out where this is going. I figured out the main plot twist less than half an hour in. The big twist happens relatively soon in the movie, although I’m not going to spoil it here. It’s not that hard to guess, and for a filmmaker like Pedro Almodovar, I had higher hopes for where the story goes in that basic sense.

8 1/2 Part Two

Film: Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

There are times when I feel like I have about a dozen different ways to start one of these reviews but don’t know what to say beyond that. When talking about Pain and Glory (or Dolor y Gloria, if you prefer), do I start with the fact that Almodovar was always seemed like the male director most attuned to women is doing a film about a man? Do I bring up the librarian I used to work with who loved Almodovar enough that she called him “My Pedro”? Do I talk about the fact that I will happily watch anything with Penelope Cruz in it?

The place to really start with Pain and Glory is to say that it feels in a sense like Almodovar is doing a riff on 8 ½. While I assume that not everything here is autobiographical, the man we will be spending all of our time with, Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), is a gay film director. How much of Mallo’s other afflictions and problems are shared by Almodovar, I have no idea. He might well have a series of chronic pains and health problems. He might find himself unable to think of a new subject for a film (although the existence of this film belies that problem). I am relatively confident in suggesting that he doesn’t spend a great deal of his time smoking heroin.

Dos Films de Pedro

Film: Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown); Hable con Ella (Talk to Her)
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library (Breakdown) and personal collection (Talk) on laptop.

Cynthia, my librarian, loves Pedro Almodovar. We talk movies now and then, and whenever one of his movies comes up, the tone of her voice changes. I don’t think this is terribly uncommon. Almodovar is generally thought of as a director of women’s movies. I believe this is a misnomer. Certainly his films focus on women in general and he often has many memorable female characters. However, I’ve really enjoyed the films of his that I have seen. The fact that they focus on women makes no difference to me—I like that they focus on interesting characters and real stories.

Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is one of the most appropriately named films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s also a film that more than almost any other I have seen in recent memory depends on Dickensian coincidences that would embarrass most amateur writers. Oddly, it sort of works in this film because the coincidences pile up to such an insane degree that it quickly becomes ridiculous. Let’s see if we can make sense of things.

Doctor, Doctor, Gimme the News

Film: La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I love a good horror movie, but I’m the first to admit that medical stuff squicks me. It’s something I’ve certainly mentioned here in the past and will no doubt mention again. Surgical stuff bugs me far more than standard gore. I’m not 100% sure why this is the case, but it most certainly is. I can watch a guy get torn apart by zombies or cut in half by a creature from hell, but show me a scalpel and a surgical mask and I start to get nervous. So it was not without a certain amount of trepidation that I put La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In) into the spinner. I knew there would be things here that bothered me, but when I’m given a film to watch for The Demented Podcast, I watch.

I knew something of the film going in, and from the sound of it, it called up recollections of Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage, at least on the surface. I was right in that guess—the two films are similar in some ways, and the word is that Pedro Almodovar took some of his inspiration from the older film.

She is Risen!

Film: Volver
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

A few days ago, I tried to get a little ahead on my movie watching, so I plugged in Volver. I managed to get about 20 minutes in before I turned it off. I just couldn’t get into it. I tried again today, and I’m happy to say that my inability to watch this film the other night rests entirely on my shoulders, and is not the problem of the film. I enjoyed it far more than my initial foray would have had me guess.

This is not to say that the film is without its problems. It has a major one that’s difficult to talk about without spoiling the entire film. I’m going to try, but you can assume there will be a spoiler tag coming up in the near future. Anyway, regardless of the problems of this film, it has one major plus going for it: Penelope Cruz. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call her a favorite of mine; in addition to being very easy to look at, she’s also extremely talented, and Volver is plenty of evidence of that.

Raimunda (Cruz) returns to the village of her birth to take care of the gravestone of her parents, who died in a fire. She is with her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) and her sister Soledad (Lola Duenas). While in town, they visit their friend Augustine (Blanca Portillo) and their aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave). Tia Paula is old, becoming infirm, and not sure what decade she is living in any more. She seems to be hallucinating, claiming that Raimunda’s and Sole’s mother Irene (Carmen Maura) has returned from the dead and lives with her, helping around the house.

They return to Madrid, and the film takes a strange left turn. Raimunda’s husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre) claims that Paula is not his daughter and tries to molest her, and Paula reacts by killing him. Raimunda works to clean up the mess only to find that Tia Paula has died, and that she has been charged with selling off the restaurant of an old boss. While she disposes of Paco’s body by placing him in a freezer in the restaurant, Sole returns for Paula’s funeral and discovers that her mother’s spirit now appears to her and follows her to Madrid.

And, to add more fun to the mix, we learn that Augustine has cancer and is terminal. All she wants is to discover what has happened to her mother, who disappeared on the same day that Raimunda’s parents died in the fire. There’s enough here to figure out exactly what happened, but to talk about it, we need that spoiler tag I mentioned earlier.

*** DO NOT REVEAL THE SECRET ENDING! ***

Okay, so Raimunda’s mother isn’t dead. She was never dead. It turns out that Augustine’s mother was having an affair with Raimunda’s father. Worse, he also molested Raimunda, and young Paula is both her daughter and her sister (following Chinatown and followed by Precious). When she discovered this, Irene burned the house down, then vanished, and has appeared as a “spirit” ever since. All she really wants is to reconcile with her children, particularly Raimunda, who was so badly wronged.

As much as this was supposed to be a big reveal, though, I didn’t buy it for a second. As soon as Irene showed up, I knew who she was, and I knew she wasn’t dead. I didn’t put all of the pieces together, but I did figure out that she was alive from the first moment. She didn’t look like a phantom, for instance, and she had far too many physical characteristics. She was solid. She was capable of working for Soledad, for instance, and when she travelled to Madrid, she did so inside Sole’s trunk. In short, she didn’t act like a ghost at all.

It leaves me in a strange position. See, I rather liked this movie for the simple fact that I got that the spirit thing was an act. I don’t know how much it was supposed to work as something I didn’t get, because I wasn’t really fooled by it. The problem with that is that it immediately calls into question the essential intelligence of everyone in the film with the exception of Raimunda, who sees through the ruse immediately.

*** OKAY. WE’RE DONE HERE ***

The major problem with Volver is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. There’s a whole subplot, for instance, about the restaurant that Raimunda tries to sell for her former boss. A movie crew working in the area decides that evidently it’s the only restaurant in all of Madrid that they can eat at, so Raimunda opens it up specifically for them. Why? While this offered us a few plot points, and gave us a temporary place for the body of Paco, it felt in many ways like padding.

Regardless, it’s well acted and surprisingly entertaining. I do love me some Penelope Cruz, and Blanca Portillo is an absolute find, and is my favorite non-Penelope character in the film. It’s worth seeing for the depth of the relationships of the characters, but I can’t help but think I’d have liked it more if it could have decided what exactly it wanted to be and simply focused on that rather than trying for so much real life that didn’t intercept with the plot.

Why to watch Volver: Because it stars Penelope Cruz.
Why not to watch: It’s not sure what it wants to be.

The Kindness of Strangers

Films: Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother ), A Streetcar Named Desire
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player (My Mother); Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop (Streetcar).

There are “chick flicks” and then there are “chick flicks.” On the one hand, you have the kind of film my wife tends to favor—bland romantic comedies where it’s obvious in the first 15 minutes that the guy will end up with the girl no matter how many hoops they have to jump through. There’s not much at stake in these movies, and while some are better than others, they are, in general, fluffy feel-goods.

And then you have films like Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother), which is a prime example of a three-hankie film. Oh, you could go through a box of tissue on this one, folks. It’s nothing but gut punches from about 15-minutes in, and even the uplift at the end is sure to drag a tear out of many a stern heart.

Manuela (Cecilia Roth) is our main character. She works as the coordinator of organ transplants at a hospital and lives with her 17-year-old son. Her son Esteban (Eloy Azorin) wants to be a writer, and wants to learn more about his father, who he has never met. On his birthday, the two go to the theater to see “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) as Blanche. Esteban tries to get an autograph after the show, but fails, and while he stands in the rain watching Huma’s car drive off, he is struck by another car and killed. And thus, we are one hanky in. Manuela goes to Barcelona to find Esteban’s father.

As it turns out, the father has vanished, taking everything of his roommate’s. His roommate is Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transvestite prostitute. Manuela arrives just in time to save Agrado from a beating administered by a John (a Juan, perhaps?), and the two return to Agrado’s place. The next morning, Agrado introduces Manuela to Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a local nun who works with the local hookers and junkies, finding them honest work.

As it turns out, though, Sister Rosa is ill. In fact, she’s pregnant, which would seem to be something of a violation of her vows as a nun. As it turns out, the father is none other than the father of Manuela’s late son, and we also discover that he has given Sister Rosa AIDS. And here comes the second hanky, and there it goes.

In the midst of all of this, Manuela tracks down Huma to speak with her, but it seems that Huma has problems of her own. One of her co-stars is Nina (Candela Pena), who is also a junkie and evidently her lover. Manuela helps Huma track Nina down during a buy, and, essentially, this causes Huma to trust Manuela implicitly, and she hires her to act as the personal assistant for both her and Nina. Manuela, needing a job since she left Madrid, accepts, and soon begins doing things for Huma, and taking care of Sister Rosa when not at work.

Nina, constantly looking for a fix, causes no end of problems, including being too bombed one night to perform, so Manuela steps in, causing a great deal of friction, and forcing her to leave the job. She explains everything to Huma, as well as her own past with “A Streetcar Named Desire.” As it turns out, she used to perform in an amateur company, and met her husband (and Esteban’s father) during a production of the show, and of course, lost her son immediately following a performance of the same show. Huma accepts her resignation but stays friendly with her, and hires Agrado has a replacement.

Of course, eventually Rosa has the baby, dies in childbirth (third hanky!) and we also learn that Rosa’s father is suffering from Alzheimer’s (hope that first hanky is dry by now). Yes, there’s an uplifting ending, but not before at least one more pile of tragedy gets dumped on us in the person of Manuela’s former husband, now-AIDS-ridden transvestite prostitute, Lola (Toni Canto).

It would be a lie to say that I was unmoved by all of this, because, well, it would be impossible not to be moved by some of it. But the movie seems to exist as a platform for continual bad things to happen to everybody at a near-constant clip. Misery gets piled on sadness gets piled on the worst luck possible throughout the film, and every step forward has a corresponding three steps backwards in terms of how much the characters are dealing with at any time.

Of all of them, my favorite is Agrado. Manuela is certainly a tower of strength throughout, and Huma—just one letter off from “Human,” shows that her strength as an actress comes from the tragedy of her life no less than anyone else’s. Agrado just exists, though. She’s a whore and fairly content with that as her occupation, and when she retires from that life to become the assistant to Huma, she’s content with that as well. Perhaps everything rolls off Agrado because Agrado doesn’t get involved in any of it. Good for her.

This is not a film to watch lightly, or to watch just because it’s sitting around. It requires the right mood. As for me, I get enough kicks to the groinular region without signing up for watching someone else get dumped on by the problems of the world.

Originally, I was prepared to watch another of Almodovar’s films today, but there’s such a strong thread of A Streetcar Named Desire running through Todo Sobre Mi Madre that it seemed natural to head in this direction. Fortunately, the film was streaming, and so here we are. There are a number of connections between the two, but more the stage play than the film. In the stage play, for instance, there are a number of hints toward homosexuality—Blanche’s husband killed himself after being caught in a homosexual affair. Shades of Manuela’s husband, condemned to a death by AIDS from the same source.

The film version stars Vivian Leigh as Blanche DuBois, a faded and fading Southern belle fallen on hard times. The family fortune, what little there was to begin with is gone, and she arrives in New Orleans at the apartment of her sister, Stella (Kim Hunter). Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), is a brute and a thug, and takes both an immediate dislike to Blanche as well as having an immediate attraction to her.

This attraction is mutual, in no small part because the two are near opposites. Blanche, for all of her lost fortune, is the epitome of a Southern belle. She puts on constant airs, flirts shamelessly with whomever is around her, and attempts to look every inch the damsel in distress. Stanley, on the other hand, is a primitive. He demands what is his from the sale of the family property, even if he has to beat it out of Blanche, who he treats roughly. There’s a part of her that likes this rough treatment, though. It’s evident in her eyes.

The complication here, or at least the main one, is Blanche herself. It becomes evident that she is not so much taking a sabbatical from teaching as she has been released from her position by virtue of an affair with one of her 17-year-old students. This, combined with that suicidal, gay husband of hers has caused her to retreat into a world where the fantasy of her Southern belle-hood is just as powerful (if not more) than her reality.

The fact that Stanley is such a brute doesn’t help matters here. He’s abusive to Stella, both physically and emotionally, but like any good sub-dom couple, Stella is into it. After the poker game, during which Blanche encounters “Mitch” Mitchell (Karl Malden) for the first time, Stanley loses a big hand, and goes berserk, punching the pregnant Stella. She and Blanche retreat to the apartment upstairs. Stanley goes out on the street and yells for her—that classic moment of Brando in the torn t-shirt screaming “Stella!” at the top of his lungs. And Stella comes to his call, pure sex walking down those stairs despite her plainness. And the next morning, she revels in the night she had, talking of how Stanley’s brutishness thrills her.

Blanche sets her sights on Mitch as her way of getting out of the apartment of her sister and of the both hateful and irrepressibly sexy Stanley Kowalski. Her alcoholism doesn’t help her any, of course, although she does try to hide it. And in her own way, Blanche needs Stanley as much as she thinks she needs Mitch—a guy collecting for the paper becomes just another man in her life who needs to prove to her that she is still desirable. Ultimately, of course, it ends badly with Stanley giving in to the urges that have been evident from the moment he first set eyes on Blanche and the conclusion that suggests that Stella might forgive him even this.

A Streetcar Named Desire won a quartet of Oscars, including three for acting. Vivian Leigh, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden all walked away with gold statues. Brando was nominated but lost out to Bogart. While it’s hard to object to Bogart winning anything, this film has become the one that made Brando who he was. Ultimately, although he didn’t win anything for the role, it’s become impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part of Stanley Kowalski, and every version of this play since has referenced him. This film is Brando at both the beginning and the height of his power and raw sexuality. When you see him in later films, it can be difficult to remember what he once looked like.

As a final note, I know several people who are a sort of modern day Blanche DuBois—the feminine posturing, the feigned helplessness. I understand the sort of mindset that makes this an attractive characteristic. It’s not one I favor—helplessness doesn’t attract me in the least—but Vivian Leigh plays it for every ounce of what it’s worth.

Why to watch Todo Sobre Mi Madre: Powerful drama.
Why not to watch: You’ll run out of tissue and revert to your shirt sleeves.

Why to watch A Streetcar Named Desire: Brando’s coming out party.
Why not to watch: It’s arguably less happy than Todo Sobre Mi Madre.