Almodovar’s love affair with Madrid in new exhibition

MADRID

The focus of a new exhibition in the Spanish capital is Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodovar’s decades-long love affair with Madrid, which appears to varying degrees in all of his feature films.

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“Madrid, Almodovar Girl,” which runs until October 20 at the Conde Duque Cultural Center, features 200 photos from his 23 films, as well as notebooks, film props and the first camera Almodovar bought, a portable Super-8.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Almodóvar’s beginning of his film career in Madrid in 1974 with the release of his first short film.

“The story of Pedro Almodovar and Madrid is a story of reciprocated love. Pedro Almodovar is Pedro Almodovar thanks to Madrid,” Pedro Sanchez, the exhibition’s commissioner and author of a book about the director’s ties to the city, told AFP.

“Almodóvar has given back to Madrid, to a great extent, what the city gave him by being his muse,” he said, adding that many foreigners come into contact with Spanish culture and Madrid for the first time through Almodóvar’s works.

A large table in the exhibition shows what percentage of the action in each of Almodovar’s films takes place in Madrid.

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It ranges from just six percent in the 2011 drama “The Skin I Live In,” about an amoral plastic surgeon seeking revenge on the young man who raped his daughter, to 100 percent in seven films.

Among them is his international breakthrough, the romantic black comedy “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” from 1988.

Cemeteries and bars

Almodovar moved to Madrid from a small village in Castile-La Mancha, an arid and rural region in central Spain, in 1967, during the last years of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, when he was just 17 years old.

“I never felt like a stranger here,” he said.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Almodóvar became a central figure in the Madrid cultural movement “La Movida”, in which artists broke the numerous taboos of the Roman Catholic dictatorship.

Sanchez said that like Madrid, Almodovar had a “cross-border, versatile, critical, open, funny, cosmopolitan and friendly personality”.

The exhibition shows a map of Madrid showing the 272 locations that appear in his films.

Spain’s most famous director tends to avoid famous landmarks and prefers working-class neighborhoods like Vallecas and places like hospitals, taxis, bars and cemeteries where people go about their daily lives.

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One of his most famous scenes was filmed in front of the façade of the building that houses the exhibition. It is the moment in the 1987 film The Law of Desire in which a street sweeper hoses down the character played by Carmen Maura, at her request, on a hot summer night in Madrid.

Adopted son

Almodovar is known for his use of strong colors and, according to Sanchez, described them as “a kind of revenge” for the gray years of the Franco dictatorship.

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For the 2019 film “Pain and Glory” about an ageing film director, he recreated his Madrid apartment and even used some of his armchairs.

When he visited the exhibition before its opening on June 12, Almodovar reportedly said: “This is my life.”

The 74-year-old won the Oscar for the screenplay for his 2002 film “Talk to Her,” about two men who form an unusual bond when their two girlfriends are in a coma.

He also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for the 1999 film All About My Mother, about a woman struggling with the sudden death of her teenage son.

The exhibition ends with a video of an excerpt from his speech when Madrid City Hall named him the city’s “adopted son” in 2018.

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“I came mainly to get out of the village, spend some time in the city and then move to Paris or London, but without realising it, I stayed,” he said.

“Now I can say that both I and my characters will live on here.”