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Madrid. Almodóvar originally took inspiration
for his plot from the Jean Cocteau play La Voix
Humaine, a monologue where a woman calls her
ex in a desperate search for answers and threatens
suicide when she learns that he has moved on.
But that’s only a starting point for Pepa’s story.
As she starts mothering the needy Candela and
gormless Carlos (Banderas, shy and retiring
behind his glasses, must have been told to channel
Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby), Pepa’s newly
widened perspective helps her to understand that
she doesn’t need Iván, after all; some older
patriarch is not the solution to all her problems.
There’s a temptation to read a political
subtext into that realisation, given that in 1988
Spain was barely a decade away from the
suffocating traditionalism of the fascist Franco
regime. Like Pepa, the country moved on from
old authoritarian rule and found a freer, more
expressive place in the 20th century. You could
even see the foiled assassination attempt that
ends the film as an echo of the attempted
restoration of Francoism in a 1981 coup, if
you’re keen on historical parallels. But
Almodóvar’s work is both wider and more
personal than a national parable. It’s personal
because it is Pepa’s own romantic and social
freedom that is at stake, a sense of growing
independence that the director drew from his
own life and heartbreaks. And it’s wider because
he captures the exuberance of the whole 1980s
era in his bright, poppy colours.
More proof that this is outward-looking
rather than Spanish-centric comes in Almodóvar’s
many film references. The whole farcical plot
recalls Howard Hawks and George Cukor but one
scene — wherein Pepa, outside Iván’s house, finds
herself spying on a beautiful young woman — is a
deliberate nod to Hitchcock’s ‘Miss Torso’ in Rear
Window, and the director often defaults to
thriller-like shots — shoes pacing back and forth,Top:María
Barranco
and Antonio
Banderas as
Candela and
Carlos.Left:
Carmen Maura’s
Pepa is hanging
on the telephone.THE YEAR HE WAS BORN
7 MOVIES HE MADE WITH CARMEN MAURA
for example — rather than traditionally comic
beats. Pepa and Iván’s work sees them separately
dubbing a love scene from the Nicholas Ray classic
Johnny Guitar, with Joan Crawford as a tough-nut
saloon owner and Sterling Hayden as her rather
ineffectual gunslinger ex. Like that film this is
a story about wasted love, regret and growing too
old for childish things. But ironically, even when
Pepa and Iván are playing a love scene, they’re in
place at different times and with different people.
Despite the melancholy and the occasional
flirtations with death, this remains a gleefully
hilarious film. Almodóvar’s jokes are daring: we
see Pepa acting in a TV ad where she plays a
serial killer’s mother, advertising the efficacy of
her washing powder in destroying the evidence of
his crimes. The whole thread about Candela’s
terrorist boyfriend is more-or-less played as
broad farce despite his plans to hijack a plane,
from the scene where she drags his belongings to
a landfill to the point where she panics at the
police and Pepa explains it away as a fashion-
induced breakdown. Even minor characters get
killer lines: look out for that mambo cab driver,
the dubbing studio’s receptionist or the religious
caretaker of Pepa’s apartment building.
All that lightness and fun helped the film
travel internationally, scoring Almodóvar his first
Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination and a Best
Screenplay and Best Actress award at the Venice
Film Festival. Unsurprisingly it picked up five
Goya awards at home in Spain, and established
Almodóvar as not just a young director of promise
but an established, powerful voice in Spanish
cinema. But if this is seen as merely an
‘important’ film as a result, a milestone in
European arthouse, that would be a disservice.
At heart, this is a joyful, defiant and brilliantly
entertaining comedy about getting over it
and moving on, and in that respect Pepa is
an example to us all. HELEN O’HARA1980
THE YEAR HIS
FIRST FILM,
PEPI, LUCI, BOM,
WAS RELEASEDALMODÓVAR BY
NUMBERS
ALL THE PEDRO INFO
YOU COULD EVER NEED↓
21 MOVIES AS DIRECTOR
85
the amount of
money, in millions
of dollars, made by
his biggest hit,
Volver (2006)OSCARS
WON
(Best Foreign
Language
Film, 2000,
for All About
My Mother,
and Best
Original
Screenplay,
2003, for
Talk To Her)