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NYT Syndicate
As a little girl growing up in Spain, Adriana Ugarte dreamed of starring in a Pedro Almod'f3var movie. Now, barely 25 years later, she has joined the rarefied ranks of actresses who have helped bring to life the women who teem in Almod'f3var's imagination.
In Julieta, loosely based on short stories by Alice Munro, Ugarte plays the younger version of the title character, whose life takes a dramatic turn after a tryst on a train. The film, Almod'f3var's 20th feature, is a return to drama and his"cinema of women," as he has called it.
When it comes to Almod'f3var and his female characters, Ugarte said recently,"It's a mystery, but he can feel how we feel and how we are."
In the course of nearly 40 years, Almod'f3var has drawn inspiration from wide-ranging sources ” Alfred Hitchcock, B-movies and Pina Bausch, to name only a few. But it's his fascination with women and his ability to conjure memorable female characters that remain constants.
Now, as New York's Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to Almod'f3var with a retrospective of his work that runs through December 17, and as Julieta arrives in American theatres on December 21, he and many of the most prominent actresses in his career have taken a closer look at the role of women in his life and films.
"I feel that I can tell a richer and more entertaining story with women," Almod'f3var said, his signature shock of thick white hair and mischievous eyes in full evidence during an interview at a Manhattan hotel. He spoke softly and quickly, in a mixture of Spanish and English.
"I will write male and female characters," he said,"but I do find, at least in Spanish culture, women to be more vivacious, more direct, more expressive, with a lot less of a sense of being fearful of making a fool of themselves."
La Frances Hui, associate curator in the film department at the museum, said:"Almod'f3var is someone who is very beloved by female actresses. He has an unusual ability to observe women with a real sense of empathy. He is able to highlight their emotions and their strengths, and he is often very funny. He shows women in a very different way than we usually see in cinema. The films that a director makes are a reflection of himself, and this is how he sees women."
Conversely, Almod'f3var often finds male characters limited."I think that, until very recently, men in Spanish culture were quite corseted," he said, with roles restricted to the Latin lover, the macho hero or the man of the house."It's taken quite a while to come to a point now where we can find different facets in male characters. Men are kind of the protagonist of epic stories, but really what I'm more interested in are stories that deal with the ordinary, with the everyday."
Julieta, which also stars Emma Su'e1rez as the older version of the title character, centres on one such everyday relationship, that of a mother and daughter. After movies like High Heels (1991) and All About My Mother (1999), maternity is a familiar theme for Almod'f3var. It is perhaps fitting that his 20th returns to it.
"I was lucky to meet his mother when she was alive, and it helped me to understand a lot the way he is and the fascination he has for women and how well he knows women," said Pen`lope Cruz, who has appeared in five of his movies."He was raised by his mother and her sisters and neighbours, with a lot of women together. It's a little bit of what you see in Volver (his 2006 film about a family of women and a matriarch who reappears as a ghost), and he was always watching and observing."
She likened it to her own childhood in her mother's hair salon, observing customers and stylists."It was so inspiring watching them interact, what they were saying, what they were not saying," she said."The fascination with the female universe, he's constantly paying homage to that."
Almod'f3var, too, was watching his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999, as he grew up in the La Mancha region of Spain, and he agreed that many of his characters were inspired by her."She had the capacity to fake things, fake things in order to solve problems," he said, explaining that, as opposed to the men in his family, the women"would resolve situations with the greatest naturalism, with the greatest ease, they would just fake that certain things were happening in order to protect us as children, and they did it with the greatest conviction."
He added,"Life is filled with these miniature plays, scenarios, where people are forced to act or fake, and women are naturally born actresses."
Women have helped him to grow cinematically too. Almod'f3var said it was Carmen Maura, one of his first muses, who pushed him to make the jump to 16-millimetre film from Super-8. Another actress, Rossy de Palma, who met Almod'f3var in Madrid in the early 1980s and became a lifelong collaborator, said that she and others in the Madrid art scene influenced and encouraged him.
"Initially Pedro was having fun, passionate, but he didn't have a strategy," de Palma said."It wasn't calculated. He became like a fountain, something we could not stop."
