When Pedro Almodóvar was a child in a Catholic boarding school, he was forced to sing for the Salesian monks, who were in charge. He sang so well, in fact, that priests recorded his songs and played them at the church entrance to attract worshippers. “And I remember,” Almodóvar once said in an interview, “we filled the church.”
For decades, Almodóvar has filled cinemas with his spectacular, often outrageous films, such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and All About My Mother (1999). If the image of a student singing for monks sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a scene in Almodóvar’s Bad Education, his 2004 film partly inspired by his abuse during schooling. This kind of reworking of experience lies at the crux of James Miller’s erudite study The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films. Behind so many of the director’s dazzling films and their outlandish-sounding plots, something from the past was burning away in the Spanish auteur’s brain.
Almodóvar’s biography already feels ready-made for larger-than-life fiction. Born to a mule driver and a town letter writer in a tiny village in La Mancha, Spain, he escaped to Madrid in 1967 at the age of 17. There, he joined an experimental-theater troupe and made short Super 8 films with titles like Sex Comes, Sex Goes (1977) and The Fall of Sodom (1979). After General Franco died, in 1975, La Movida—the wildly liberated Spanish counterculture—bloomed. Almodóvar fronted a glam-rock band, wrote raunchy pseudonymous columns as “Patty Diphusa,” and directed his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, a black comedy about a woman (played by Almodóvar regular Carmen Maura) taking elaborate revenge on the sadistic policeman who raped her.
Miller illustrates how Almodóvar’s life plays out on-screen (while helpfully reminding us of all the twists and turns of his page-turner plots). Volver (2006) paints a picture of his childhood in La Mancha, opening with the unforgettable sight of widows sweeping and cleaning tombstones in a graveyard. The Flower of My Secret (1995) expresses Almodóvar’s anxieties at a career turning point through the saga of a romance novelist yearning to write something else. And from the start, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap perversely captures the anything-goes vibe of La Movida in the wake of Franco’s violence, featuring scenes in the real-life Madrid nightclub El Bo and Almodóvar himself at one point playing the M.C. of a phallic beauty contest.
But where Miller takes flight is by bringing out the deep-dish philosophy within Almodóvar’s intricate, passionate stories. The New School professor—whose previous books include Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche and Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll—argues that Almodóvar’s on-screen fantasias dovetail with the pathfinding of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger in their existential and moral inquiries.
Miller views Almodóvar’s films as an “implicitly philosophical quest for self-knowledge”—which is certainly one way of looking at the love triangle of Law of Desire (1987), which centers around a porn director who is making a film about his transgender sister. This approach to Almodóvar’s amour fou offers thoughtful perspectives on self-realization and self-fashioning, and how love can at once fulfill and upend lives. Miller has a penchant for citations that might not sound out of place in an Almodóvar screenplay: “The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings” (Plato, Phaedrus).
Not that any of this philosophical analysis is a stretch when it comes to Almodóvar. His erudition is sometimes overlooked amid the visual and emotional wallop of his movies, and he’s an avowed fan of autofiction by the likes of Emmanuel Carrère. When I was editor of Film Comment, the director wrote an essay for us that was essentially a love letter to literature, in which he expressed his desire to write like the French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and confided that his reading could sometimes unlock how to shoot a scene.
An admirer of Tennessee Williams’s, Almodóvar once mused, “[Maybe] desire is a streetcar that goes nowhere. But that doesn’t matter, the important thing is to move.” The genius of Almodóvar is that his best films move us on a visceral level beyond all rational explanation, and we emerge, perhaps like the director himself, with a feeling of catharsis.
Nicolas Rapold is a New York–based writer and the former editor of Film Comment magazine
