Hollywood in Almodóvar’s Movies
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QRF 21(1) #12103
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 21:25–38, 2004 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 1050-9208 print/1543-5326 online DOI: 10.1080/10509200490262433
The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother
ERNESTO R. ACEVEDO-MUÑOZ
The critical and commercial success of All About My Mother (1999) in American theaters and at the Hollywood Oscars in 2000 has helped renew the critical interest in the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar in this country. The director’s gen(d)re-bending style has defined the identity of Spanish cinema since his debut film Pepi, Lucy, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) and especially outside of Spain after the interna- tional success of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987) (Smith, 101–102). As Marvin D’Lugo asserts “Almodóvar’s cinema represents . . . an unequivocal stylistic rupture with nearly every Spanish filmic tradition that precedes it” (48). Almodóvar’s films are irreverent, self-reflexive, excessive explorations of identity, sexuality, repres- sion and desire, sprinkled with rich generic allusions (melodrama, screwball comedy, thriller) and assorted media intersections (television commercials, billboard advertise- ments, popular songs, kitsch art). The melange of genre conventions (which peaked in the comedy/melodrama-musical/thriller High Heels, 1991) and the pastiche quality of Almodóvar’s mise-en-scène helps to define the director’s sense of narrative structure and visual style. Almodóvar’s films from Labyrinth of Passion (1982) to Kika (1993) and Live Flesh (1997) seem to be stories in search of a format, always about to spin out of control but finally held together by their own unstable generic and formal rules. The search itself for a satisfactory formal identity and the films’ dependency on intertextuality, camp appropriations of “Spanishness,” and generic instability are among their defining characteristics.
By shaping his films as ingenious celebrations of formal, generic, and sexual identity crises, Almodóvar addresses and explores Spain in the cultural and national transition period following the end of General Francisco Franco’s regime (1936–1975). In his book Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar (1999) Alejandro Yarza argues that Almodóvar’s films re-appropriate and recycle the cultural markers of Spain perpetuated (and perpetrated) by fascist iconog- raphy under Franco’s rule. In his films of the 1980s (Pepi, Lucy, Bom, Labyrinth of Passion, Dark Habits [1983], Matador [1986]) Almodóvar revised and reinvented the Francoist images of a nation of toreadors, flamenco dancers, and Catholicism revealing and deconstructing its ideological function of cultural homogenization. Films like Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) and ¡What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) present the theme of rebellion against paternal figures and patriarchal order, violating the image of
I am grateful to José del Pino and Ella Chichester for their helpful comments and suggestions during the writing of this article.
Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz is an assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He teaches film theory, Latin American cinema and literature, and courses on Buñuel, Almodóvar, and Kubrick. His book Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
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the overwhelming, powerful, all-knowing and yet benevolent Father figure for decades celebrated in Spanish cinema. Pedro Almodóvar’s films challenge that representation by introducing “unorthodox,” dysfunctional family units where fathers are absent, as in The Law of Desire (1986) and High Heels, or useless, as in ¡What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Kika.
These films propose new, alternative familial and social models that seem appropri- ate to the heterogeneous, changing, “transitional” Spain of the 1980s (Yarza, 117–122). As Marsha Kinder argues, Almodóvar makes traditionally marginal characters and plot situations central (drugs, transvestites, terrorists), unmasking the manufactured central- ized national identity seen in Francoist cinema while proposing a revision of Spain’s cultural identity in the recent past (429–432). Almodóvar’s films of the transition served an arguably therapeutic function at home, while revealing the new body of Spain to inter- national audiences, since they dominated Spanish film exports abroad from 1982 to1989 (Kinder, 433). In his films of this “transition” period, writes Yarza, Almodóvar “presents . . . signs of cultural anxiety derived from the national identity crisis resulting from Spain’s process of integration into Europe” (174, my translation). In other words, Almodóvar and other artists of the period were concerned with how to rescue those cultural signs from their association with the nation’s identity under the regime. After four decades of a dominant trend in national cinema focused on articulating a false sense of identity based on invented or abducted symbols of the national (for example, la españolada), Almod- óvar’s films reclaim those symbols and emphasize them as a masquerade that at once hides and defines the national. Marvin D’Lugo has argued that in Almodovar’s films of the 1980s the city of Madrid itself symbolizes the space of tolerance and “openness” of the transitional post-Francoist Spain. Almodóvar’s visual and narrative fabrication of the city (its people, landmarks, movement, neighborhoods, attitudes) serves not only to “construct a new past” but also to revise the meaning of social and political institutions (“the family, the Church, the police”) of the Franco regime (D’Lugo, 50).
There are recurring themes in Almodóvar’s films through which the question of “cultural anxiety” arises. Among them are the stories of transvestites and transsexual characters seen in many of his films (Yarza, 89–91, Smith, 85–88). In Labyrinth of Passion, Matador (1986), The Law of Desire (1986), Tie Me Up!, Tie Me Down!, High Heels, and Kika central and marginal characters show “transitional,” transvestite, transsexual and even “cyborg” characteristics (for example “Andrea Caracortada,” played by Victoria Abril in Kika) which emphasize the human body as one of the locales of negotiation, tension, and trauma, suggesting the body itself as a sign of the social contradictions of a country involved in a process of profound cultural transition. There is a correlation between the generic excesses and the challenging of conventional sexual and physical roles played by transvestites and transsexuals in Almodóvar’s films. Alejandro Yarza states that “the transvestite is the indicator of a crisis of the conventional sexual and cinematic taxonomic systems,” a “monster” that, along with Almodóvar’s generic cross-references, exemplifies the nation’s “cultural anxiety” (90, my translation).
In his more mature, recent films, The Flower of My Secret (1996), Live Flesh (1997) and All About My Mother, Almodóvar’s exploration of family and the national has been yet again revised into an equation where women and men constantly rearrange gender and/or familial roles, identity, and sexuality. Yet, in these three films there is some settling of the generic schizophrenia of earlier films into more definably melodramatic formats, a tendency partly visible already in High Heels. Generic “definition” has come with a volatile gender un-definition of key characters whose transitional identities are paradoxically symbolic of their stability and not of crisis. A character like the transgender “Agrado” in All About My Mother, played by Antonia San Juan, would probably be seen
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as “monstrous” and symbolic of traumatic identity crises in earlier Almodóvar films like The Law of Desire. But in All About My Mother, Agrado is clearly defined as a rational, “authentic” character who gradually gets rid of the traumas of her past. Thus arguably, Agrado’s negotiation of the identity crisis hitherto represented by the transgender or transvestite characters is symbolically neutralized in All About My Mother.
In All About My Mother the role of transgender and transitory bodies of fathers, mothers, and children becomes a sign of Almodovar’s effort to resolve some issues of national identity seen in his previous films. My analysis of the story, some stylistic motifs, the use of theatrical spaces and performance, and of the extended body/nation metaphor in All About My Mother suggests a move toward an understanding of identity as something ambiguous (sexually, culturally) and problematic, yet ultimately functional. Furthermore, I argue that the film’s narrative arch, the choices of locations and mobility, and the revised Oedipal trajectory (here a paternal search that leads to stability) propose a resolution to many of the nation’s issues seen in Almodovar’s and other Spanish films of the previous two decades.
The main protagonist in All About My Mother, played by Argentine actress Cecilia Roth (Pepi, Luci, Bom, Labyrinth of Passion), is significantly a nurse in charge of transplant coordination in a Madrid hospital. From the opening-credit sequence the film concentrates on human bodies and their condition, starting with close-ups of a serum bag, a heart monitor and other life-support machines. We are thus introduced to Manuela, as she witnesses a patient’s death and quickly goes to her office to arrange for a transplant of the man’s heart, liver, etc. These early shots emphasize the sequence of events from death to the arrangement of organ donation without much emotional involvement: for Manuela at this point this is strictly a professional task. This is further emphasized by Manuela’s agreement to take her son Esteban to the hospital the next day to watch her conducting a training seminar for hospital employees about how to deliver the news of death and ask for organ donations from the relatives of clinically dead patients. The scene is staged as seen in 1996 in Almodóvar’s The Flower of My Secret. Manuela playacts the part of the relative, speaking with the physicians about the organ donation. Esteban observes Manuela from a television monitor in the next room. She pretends ignorance about the donation request, but ultimately understands the need for the transplant for someone’s survival, even if it is not of her fictitious loved one. Meanwhile, Esteban, an aspiring author, writes in a notebook where he has begun to record “all about [his] mother,” inspired by the title of the film All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) which he had seen with Manuela the previous night.
The “staging” of Esteban’s seemingly capricious desire to see his mother “perform” suggests two relevant things for understanding the film’s position about the body and mise-en-scène. First, it underscores performance, as Manuela fakes her emotional reaction to the news of death and to the request for organ donation. It also brings up the question of mediation and mise-en-scène. The film resolves many of its conflicts and crises on or around the stage, either in theater dressing rooms, or in the presence of theatrical and cinematic intertexts, most prominently Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. Manuela’s first performance in the film (with her son Esteban as audience) also foretells a type of corporeal intertextuality: the human body itself becomes a site for exchanges and rearrangements in the process of being reconstituted.
Nevertheless, Manuela’s journey of reconstruction begins when she has to face reality and not theatricality. Esteban is killed by a car after attending a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire with her, and the story then returns to the hospital setting seen earlier. This time around, however, Manuela hears the request for her son’s organs in reality,
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and without the mediation of acting and television. The scene appears for the third time in an Almodóvar film. Yet, unlike its implied performative and theatrical quality in The Flower of My Secret (where the character was also named Manuela) and the beginning of All About My Mother, the reality of Manuela’s heartbreak here produces a believably moving melodramatic moment. In part, by removing the often present (and usually comic) media intersections seen in his films (television commercials, news broadcasts, magazine clippings, etc.) Almodóvar suggests an immediate and unmediated access to the character’s feelings in All About My Mother. Sitting down in medium close-up with a friend (in contrast to the extreme close-up of her face seen before on the TV screen and reminiscent of television soap-opera mise-en-scène), Manuela screams and cries even before hearing the final news. In the previous version she had waited for the scene to run its course and had reacted as scripted. But here her unmediated reaction delivers a moment of authenticity, suggesting the frivolity of mediating elements. The sequence cuts to a shot of the hospital form where Manuela signs, donating her son’s heart. We learn from their identical last names (Manuela and Esteban Colemán Echevarría) that he is unrecognized by his father. Here the identical names become a restatement of Almodóvar’s previous references to absent (or useless) fatherly figures as seen in Labyrinth of Passion, The Law of Desire (1986), High Heels, Matador and ¡What Have I Done to Deserve This? Instead of a rejection of “the name of the father” as in earlier films, Manuela and Esteban’s trajectory in this film point towards reconciliation with the father, something hitherto unseen in Almodóvar’s films since the satirical incestuous relationship ironically explored in Labyrinth of Passion.
Before tracing the paternal bloodline however, the story follows Esteban’s heart in a montage sequence that goes from the ICU to the operating room in Madrid; from the donor’s record (focusing on the word “heart”) to the recipient getting ready to leave for his transplant; from the airport to the operating table itself. The sequence ends with the recipient leaving the provincial hospital in La Coruña, breathing new life as his relatives celebrate his eighteen year-old heart. In an unusual change for Almodóvar, the “heart” of the story along with the heart of Esteban move away from Madrid, the city so prominently and symbolically featured in all his films. The move is especially significant because it underlines an uncharacteristic displacement of the action, here dramatically and violently taken away from the central plains of Madrid. Manuela first goes to the Galician city of La Coruña, on the northwestern coast of the country, only to briefly see the man who now bears her son’s heart. She then goes to Barcelona on the northeastern coast, determined to find her former husband, honoring Esteban’s request minutes before dying to be told “all about [his] father.” Manuela is prevented by Esteban’s sudden death from fulfilling his desire, expressed on his journal, of completing the “missing” part from his life, from knowing and perhaps reconciling with his father.
The significance of Manuela’s travels cannot be underestimated. Galicia, where Esteban’s heart goes, is a largely agricultural region, known to have been historically somewhat isolated from the “rest” of Spain by mountains and Celt heritage, with less Moorish influence than much of the rest of the country. In contrast, Barcelona has been considered, until recently, Spain’s most modern, culturally dynamic and politically progressive city, with a past of anti-Francoist efforts during the Civil War of 1936–1939. By placing Esteban Jr.’s heart in La Coruña and Esteban Sr. in Barcelona, Almodóvar not only displaces Madrid (considered “the center of the universe” in Labyrinth of Passion) as a synecdoche of all things Spanish, but also acknowledges a sense of inclusion of “other things Spanish” by reconciling this bi-coastal dyad. Galicia and Cataluña are steps in Manuela’s process of healing in her search for and effort to “reorganize” the body of Spain. The juxtaposition of these three locales in All About My Mother signals
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the harmonization of previously dislocated and seemingly ill-fitting parts of a single body. The film stresses this concept even further with the character of Agrado. She adds a fourth dramatically diverse Spanish region to the equation (actress Antonia San Juan is from La Palma, Canary Islands), and also a body literally composed of disparate parts, as we will see shortly. Finally Manuela’s relocation to Barcelona in search of the father by train stresses the power of connections instead of separation; the railroad lines suggesting the interconnected veins inside a body going from “heart” to “brain” to every organ and member. Furthermore, Almodóvar subverts classic train imagery seen in films from John Ford (The Iron Horse, 1924) and Buster Keaton (The General, 1926) to Alfred Hitchcock (North By Northwest, 1959) and Luis Buñuel (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977). While still emphasizing bodily metaphors, Almodóvar denies the customary phallic symbolism associated with this mode of transport in films, and directly opposes the “monstrous” characterization of the approaching train seen in Victor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive (Kinder, 130). In All About My Mother, the train is seen horizontally bisecting the screen rather than in the aggressive, slightly diagonal, “erect” fashion of other films. Before the anticipated arrival in Barcelona the camera is presumably placed in front of the train as it rides inside a tunnel. The camera tracks through the darkness of the tunnel, revealing the light of the exit slowly stretching ahead as we approach it. The shot is suggestive of the birth canal seen from the inside, and not of the customary action of penetration witnessed from outside and suggestive of the primal scene celebrated in films like Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (L. Williams, 190–191; Brill, 20–21). Thus, instead of the classically traumatic vision of penetration much exploited in Freudian analysis and criticism, in All About My Mother the search for the father is anticipated by an allusion to maternity and birth. The unsuspecting father waits at the other end of this birth canal.
The introduction of Barcelona in the film, as we exit the “birth canal,” comes in an aerial establishing shot of the city (incongruous in light of Manuela’s arrival by train) in the early evening, cinema’s magical hour. The city emerges from behind the hills looking at once welcoming and harmless. The most prominent city landmark that we are shown as Manuela rides around in a taxi is significantly the city’s best known: the towers and façade of the Temple of the Sacred Family (Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia). Manuela looks out the window of the back seat of her taxi; as the car briefly comes to a stop we see the temple’s façade in a slow tracking shot. The reverse shot shows the temple’s façade reflected on the car window through which we see Manuela. As she rolls down the window, her face replaces the image of the building. One of the most celebrated creations of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí, (1852–1926), the Sacred Family is an important choice for Almodóvar in this film. Its title as a temple of “expiation” suggests the action of reconciliation (as the Catholic sacrament of “penance” has been known after the Vatican II council of the 1960s). Moreover, according to the Christian doctrine, Jesus offered his own body as sacrifice for humankind’s sins. Meanwhile, the allusion to the sacred family of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus underscores Manuela’s search for Esteban, Sr. as a similar act of reconcilement for her fragmented family. Gaudí’s modernist creations, this temple itself, and other city landmarks like the Casa Vicens and the Parc and Palau Güell also metaphorically emphasize the topic of reconciliation. In Gaudí’s dramatic combinations dissimilar shapes, spaces, and mismatching materials are often labored into harmony in an effort to give the buildings a natural, organic feeling. The sequence of Manuela’s arrival in Barcelona, from “birth” to “sacred family” to reconciliation, arguably announces the narrative’s direction toward a more harmonious, unaffected view of the family and the nation.
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Manuela’s transgender friend, Agrado, first appears immediately following the Sacred Family stop, which happens to be on the way to Barcelona’s prostitute market, “el campo.” The scene is reminiscent of the opening of Almodóvar’s Labyrinth of Passion, in which the main characters, Sexi (also Cecilia Roth) and Riza (Imanol Arias) roam Madrid’s largest flea market, “el Rastro” in search of men. The memorable sequence is composed of shots of Sexi’s and Riza’s faces in close-up, their gazes inconspicuously directed towards men’s crotches and behinds. In All About My Mother, Manuela is driven around in a carrousel of johns window-shopping, while prostitutes and transvestites (everyone’s “real” gender and identity kept a mystery) aggressively offer themselves, emphasizing their surgically altered bodies. Manuela’s search for Esteban Sr. (or “Lola” as he is henceforth known in the film), among the half-naked, counterfeit bodies, and not among the johns, suggests that the father is one of these “transitional” characters. Manuela does not locate Esteban’s father, but finds instead her old friend Agrado, a transgender prostitute herself. Agrado’s speech pattern and accent clearly place her origin in the Canary Islands. Manuela saves Agrado from a violent john who’s attacking her, her face first shown badly bruised and bloody.
From this chance encounter on, Agrado’s body, also surgically altered as she gleefully celebrates later on in the film, becomes the locus of reconstruction and restoration, of the search for stability. Their first sequence together reintroduces the theme of healing when they go to an all-night pharmacy (where Agrado in a marked accent greets the attendant in Catalan) to purchase “gauze, rubbing alcohol, iodine, suturing tape,” and then go to Agrado’s apartment where Manuela cures her friend’s wounds. In this scene, Agrado sits in a chair while Manuela stands in front of her and applies the medications. While Manuela works on Agrado’s bruised face, her friend finally offers some leads as to the whereabouts of Lola/Esteban. It emerges that some months ago, Agrado had picked up Lola whom she found in terrible shape due to a drug overdose. Agrado relates to Manuela her last meeting with the elusive “father,” Lola: “one morning after returning from ‘el campo,’ she had robbed my house: watches, jewelry, ’70s magazines where I draw inspiration, three hundred thousand pesetas.” The symbolic action of healing is here associated with the pillages of “the father.” Furthermore, Agrado’s reference to the 1970s “for inspiration” (also suggested by her apartment’s vivid décor, wallpaper, lamps, and furniture) emphasizes the camp value and re-appropriation of recent Spanish history so important for filmmakers since the cultural transition (as discussed by D’Lugo, Smith, Yarza, Kinder, etc.). With dialogue and mise-en-scène, Almodóvar revisits the theme of the absent and harmful father figure, temporally displaced back to the last decade of Franco’s regime, and in doing so resumes the task of restoring the nation’s body. The body has been initially fragmented and traumatized with Esteban Jr.’s death, and later put in motion with his organ donations and the geographical displacements of Manuela (from Madrid, to La Coruña, to Barcelona). The addition of Agrado reinforces these themes. She adds yet a fourth region of Spain to the equation (the Canary Islands), this one further distanced by not “belonging” to the peninsula. The choice may also suggest inclusion of Spain’s transnational and diasporic elements, since the Islands are not only among the few remaining national territories outside of Europe, but were also a common stopping place for Spanish ships during the conquest and settling of its American colonies. Agrado thus suggests a more inclusive picture of the “body of Spain.” Furthermore, Agrado’s discourse about her body may also be representative of the process of reconciliation and of the settling of identity issues, since other critics have argued that transvestism and transsexuality have been seen as a sign of the nation’s “anxiety” in Almodóvar’s films (Yarza, 90; Smith, 87–88).
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The problems of identity presented in All About My Mother, are not suggestive of actual “settled” identity but of the understanding and coming to terms with one’s own “authenticity” even if that which is authentic is paradoxically marked by reinvention. As Agrado remarks in response to Manuela’s compliments of her knock-off Chanel suit, “the only things I have that are real is my feelings, and the liters of silicone.” When Manuela and Agrado decide to find legitimate work, they go to Sister Rosa, a beautiful young Catholic novice (Penélope Cruz, cast effectively against type) who works as a counselor in a support center for drug addicts, prostitutes and other “marginal” characters. As always, Agrado speaks her mind, this time about the competition in “el campo.” She points out the differences between whores (women), “drags” (men in women’s garb) and herself, a “pre-op” transgender. Tellingly, Agrado’s problem with the “drags” is not cross-dressing, but the deceptive nature of their identity. She calls them “mamarrachas,” (grotesque, ridiculous): “the drags” she says, “have mistaken transvestism with the circus; no, not the circus, but with mime . . . I can’t stand them. . . .” The transvestite character in Almodóvar’s films, as suggested earlier, has often been seen as “monstrous,” as indicative of the traumatic identity of both the characters and the film’s own generic definition (Yarza, 90). But as Agrado’s sentence suggests the transvestite’s problem lies not in the violation of classic systems of gender identification, but in that it is based in deception. By contrast, Agrado offers her transsexual character as “authentic” because her “feelings” are real, disparaging the “transvestite” action of deception. Different than the transsexual character of Tina (Carmen Maura) in The Law of Desire, who Paul Julian Smith declares is nostalgic “for a singular and unfissured identity” (87) Agrado does not show signs of insecurity, does not hold onto her previous sexuality as a part of her current self. She is firmly certain of her authenticity. In The Law of Desire Tina serves as an agent of “the acknowledgement of history as a communal project” (Smith, 88), mediating her brother Pablo’s process of coming to terms with his own self and personal history after an amnesiac episode. For Pablo and Tina, this involves a final, definitive rupture with the memory of their abusive, incestuous father (Kinder, 247). In All About My Mother, by contrast, Agrado helps in the process of restoring relationships with the father since she is a connecting figure in Manuela’s effort to find Lola and reconcile him/her with their son Esteban.
The process of paternal reconciliation in All About My Mother is seen through Sister Rosa’s family (or families). We learn that Rosa’s relationship with her immediate family is not very cordial. Rosa visits her mother with Manuela, and the brief scene is reminiscent of the treatment of family scenarios in earlier Almodóvar’s films, such as Matador. Rosa’s mother (referred to as Doña Rosa and played by Rosa María Sardá) is a cold woman, estranged from her daughter by the latter’s choice of profession, and by Rosa’s desire to leave for a mission to El Salvador. Rosa’s mother calls the daughter’s desire to leave “parricide” suggesting that the pain of separation will cause her father harm. She begs for Rosa to return home to help take care of her father, whose memory is impaired by senility or some unnamed mental disease. Doña Rosa’s concerns however, are not only with the daughter’s estrangement, but with the threat of being exposed as a fraud. In another inquiry into the question of identity and authenticity, it turns out that Doña Rosa is an art forger, specializing in falsifying paintings by Chagal. The choice characterizes Doña Rosa as someone who customarily passes something false for authentic, but who must herself be anonymous, undetected. The question of troubled identity is then here projected onto otherwise traditionally “adjusted” characters, the senile father, and the deceptive mother. Sister Rosa’s estrangement from her parents stems from both disease and deception, and from the mother’s own identity crisis as an art forger.
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In this case, the father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) does not recognize his daughter and forfeits paternal responsibilities. Yet, he is at once harmless in his oblivion (in sharp contrast with fathers, present or not, in ¡What Have I Done to Deserve This?, and The Law of Desire), and immune from any feeling of pain or loss provoked by the daughter’s absence. His abandonment is involuntary, unlike aforementioned paternal figures in Almodóvar’s films. This familial division is governed not by the trauma of previous relations, but by more natural causes. Rosa loves her father, as we quickly learn, but is incapable of relating with him. But while Rosa is unable to reconnect with her father and unwilling to negotiate with her estranged mother, she does not want the same thing to happen to her unborn child.
Impregnated by Lola/Esteban during one of his drug crises, Rosa has been having problems with her pregnancy. Instead of going to her mother, she seeks Manuela’s pro- tection. Coincidentally, Rosa’s plea to Manuela and her revelation that her child belongs to the same “lost father” as Esteban, Jr., coincides with the move to Barcelona of Huma Rojo’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. This is the same production Manuela and her son saw the night he died. The narrative here seems to reconnect with itself. It suggests the inevitability of the confrontation (or reconciliation) with the elusive father, Lola, since Manuela left Madrid in search for him after Esteban’s death. Structurally and thematically it stresses the circularity of the narrative, a common trait of melodrama. Manuela soon revisits the performance, finding in the familiar play some solace for the seat now empty beside her. Symbolically, it suggests the understanding of the theatrical space as authentic since Manuela seems to genuinely relive the pain of her son’s death as she watches the play again. As with other suffering female characters like Tina and Becky in Almodóvar’s The Law of Desire and High Heels respectively, Manuela seems ready to confront her pain and her loss by an evolution into the theatrical space and performance. But unlike the characters in previous films, Manuela is still removed from the stage, a member of the audience, vicariously living her pain through Williams’ fictional characters.
It is off the stage, however, where the real drama takes place. After the performance, Manuela sneaks backstage to look for Huma, who is linked to her son’s death. The scene takes place in the star’s dressing room, recalling the earlier citation from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. In an interview with Annette Insdorf that accompanies the film’s DVD release, Almodóvar himself states that the dressing room is where “reality occurs” in this film (as in Mankiewicz’s), as opposed to the theater stage itself. Huma and Manuela become friends, as Huma repeats a famous line from Williams’ play “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” The dialogue, mise- en-scène and intertextuality in this scene are significant as the setting for a revelation (Manuela learns that Nina, Huma’s co-star and lover is a drug addict and needs help). The dialogue from A Streetcar Named Desire, the dressing room set alluding to All About Eve, posters of classic films with Elizabeth Taylor and other divas on the walls, photographs of Bette Davis, and Huma herself dressed-up and made-up in various roles, all point toward theatricality, performance, and intertextuality. Nonetheless, the moment is one of disclosure, of confession. What is suggested here, as in the scene where Manuela learns of Esteban’s death, is that the theatrical/media intersections in this film do not really “mediate,” because as Agrado would put it, “the feelings are real.” There is no real separation between Huma (which coincidentally is not her real name) and her theatrical personas. The same actress, Marisa Paredes, who plays a singer and actress in Almodóvar’s High Heels, confesses in that film that the only thing she really knows how to do “is perform.” It is in her different roles, in her poses and performances that Huma is “real.” Meanwhile, when not performing Huma is arguably still a masquerade; her false name, her orange-red dyed hair, excessive make-up and plagiarized lines of dialogue
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announcing an identity crisis. The use of theatrical situations as the locus of “authentic” disclosures in All About My Mother is reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s discussion in Cinema 2: The Time Image of the theatrical space in films. For Deleuze, film characters in the theater, especially when not performing (rehearsing, for example), touch upon a deeper state of authenticity. In certain para-theatrical situations, writes Deleuze, “the characters spring to life again . . . and discover pure attitudes as independent of the theatrical role as they are of a real action, although echoing both of them” (194). In All About My Mother, there is a similar use of the theater and “para-theatrical” or theater- related spaces (such as Huma’s dressing room) that leads to moments of revelation and unmasking of true feelings.
The confusion of theater with the authentic is also brought up in Manuela’s substitu- tion of Nina in the role of Stella (whom Manuela had played in her youth) in the Sunday matinee of A Streetcar Named Desire. Prepared for the part, because she “can lie very well,” Manuela’s Eve Harrington-style substitution of Nina (who is home, sick) proves a grand success on stage. We see the end of scene eight, in which Stanley Kowalski gives Blanche a bus ticket home and asks her to leave the house. In the middle of the ensuing argument over her sister, the pregnant Stella goes into labor. In Tennessee Williams’ description of the scene, Stanley rants about their “happiness” before Blanche’s arrival, while “Stella makes a slight movement. Her look goes suddenly inward, as if some inte- rior voice had called her name” (112). Manuela is on stage in the role of Stella, and yet, seems not to be acting but reconnecting with the “interior voice” of her shattered mater- nity. She is indeed having a “real” moment, reliving the pain of Esteban’s death, forever linked to the play, to performance, and to Huma. Manuela, although on the stage, is not a professional actress, and is expressing her real feelings. She grants the performance a transcendence that removes it from the inherent artificiality of the theater and from the burden of performance itself, of being an actor, a professional phony. The setting is artificial, the “feelings are real,” and the moment is melodramatic twice over, both in Williams’ text and in Almodóvar’s appropriation of it.
Later confronted by Nina and accused of being “Eve Harrington,” Manuela confesses to Huma and Nina her link to A Streetcar Named Desire. Of course, as Almodóvar has already established, the “real,” confessional moment occurs again in Huma’s dressing room. It is in this scene, as the two actresses listen to the “real” woman’s story, that Almodóvar seems to be suggesting a settling of intertextuality and generic crisis. On one hand, Streetcar has marked Manuela’s life, as she tells Huma and Nina. On the other hand, Esteban Jr.’s narrative of Manuela (the notebook entitled “All about my mother”) underscores the reference to Mankiewicz, itself a text about theatricality and usurped identities. One fictional text (Streetcar), and one confessional or “testimonial” (Esteban’s notebook), unleash and determine the structure and narrative of All About My Mother. Almodóvar seems to be attempting to settle these contrasting modes of “theatrical” fiction and testimonial narrative into something undivided, with less of the generic schizophrenia of earlier films like Labyrinth of Passion, Women on the Verge, High Heels and even Live Flesh. Thus, the theater question also addresses the issue of generic or formal identity, always present in Almodóvar’s films. In his interview with Annette Insdorf, Almodóvar calls this new generic identity “screwball melodrama,” combining the battle-of-the-sexes based comic tradition of Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy, and the melodrama of longing, motherhood, hysteria, and inner suffering of classical Hollywood (Almodóvar 2000). Appropriately, the “screwball” part serves only as the adjective that describes the noun proper which is melodrama. The film stresses themes like Oedipal trajectory, sacrifice, motherhood, circular narrative and inner emotions, subjects generally treated in classic film melodrama (Hayward, 206–207).
34 Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
In spite of the strong component of comedy, mainly present in Agrado’s childlike, unbridled honesty, the melodramatic elements that converge either on the stage, in the dressing room, or around Manuela’s life, are decisive for the generic settlement of the film. For example, it turns out that Sister Rosa, the pregnant nun, has contracted AIDS from the elusive Lola who is sick due to his history of intravenous drug use. Paradoxically, the celebrated body of actress Penélope Cruz is reclaimed by Almodóvar in this film and disrobed of its scopophilic and erotic function as seen in films like Bigas Luna’s Jamón, jamón (1992). In that film, Cruz plays an “ideal” woman, everyone’s object of desire, her sexuality and desirability exploited for the male characters’ and our own voyeuristic pleasure. In All About My Mother, Almodóvar relieves Cruz of that duty by casting her against type and putting her to play a pregnant nun with AIDS. In classic melodramatic fashion, the woman’s physical illness steps in to represent redemption, punishment, or healing as seen in films like Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) and Camille (George Cukor, 1936). In this case, as Rosa lies pregnant and seriously ill in Manuela’s apartment, her estranged mother pays a visit, at Manuela’s summons, and the mother and daughter reconcile. Manuela’s apartment is itself a celebration of disparate themes; the décor and mise-en-scène are cluttered with geometric patterns, right angles and straight lines happily coexisting with circular forms, curved lines, oval shapes, contrasting colored wall paper, and vases and furniture placed around the rooms. Almodóvar is no novice to the use of symptomatic mise-en-scène, and here with the help of designer Antxón Gómez, the setting emphasizes the action of reconciliation between the two characters. Even in the privacy of the bedroom where they speak, the two Rosas are surrounded by disparate designs, framed in asymmetrical composition; even their blonde/brunette hair colors are a mismatch. And yet, this is the closest they ever come in the film to a reconciliation, admitting their faults, effectively reaching an understanding and mending their relationship.
It may never be all that happy, since Rosa will eventually die in keeping with classic melodramatic conventions, but the gesture of reconciliation with the mother announces the final reconciliation with the “father,” a far more problematic figure in Spanish cinema after Franco. The scene is reminiscent of the ending of Almodóvar’s High Heels, when the dying mother, Becky (Marisa Paredes), and her estranged daughter, Rebecca (Victoria Abril), also make peace. In that film however, the two Rebeccas reconcile over the corpses of several real and metaphoric father figures, since Rebecca has murdered both her stepfather and her husband, who was also Becky’s lover. In search of her mother’s love, Rebecca kills two father figures that have been sexually involved with her mother. In Almodóvar’s films “family” usually means “mothers,” and as it happens in High Heels fathers often disrupt narrative coherence and family structures. As Marsha Kinder argues in her discussion of High Heels “mother love lies at the heart of all melodrama. . . . Therefore, the rebellious patricidal impulse must be redirected back toward the father, who remains merely a pawn or minor obstacle in the women’s game” (Kinder, 253). The two Rosas’ restatement of the two Rebeccas’ meeting invites a revision of the earlier film’s negotiation of the conflict with the father. In All About My Mother, Sister Rosa’s (and Manuela’s) desire is to reconcile with the father and to introduce their sons to him in spite of his previously destructive absence (from Esteban Jr.’s life) and presence (in Rosa’s child’s life). There is no “rebellious patricidal impulse” in All About My Mother, but a convincing effort to repair that troubled relationship of the past in favor of some redemption, of some rebuilding, of some reconstitution of the body of the nation through the reparation of the family.
It is quite significant, therefore, that Almodóvar juxtaposes Rosa’s melodramatic bedridden reconciliation with her mother with the comic relief of Agrado’s theatrical
Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother 35
performance, once again suggesting a correlation between theatricality and the reality of feelings. At the end of the women’s meeting, Manuela tells the story of her dead son to Doña Rosa. She exits the apartment leaving Manuela crying by the door and the scene cuts to the parallel space of the theater, to a tracking shot along the theater curtain. On the soundtrack we hear Agrado’s footsteps announcing her arrival on stage. The shot ends with a close up of Agrado in profile as she steps out from the curtain. The choice is doubly significant; Almodóvar characterizes the close-up as “an image whose narrative content is highly complex and specific . . . an X-ray of the character [that] precludes all duplicity” (Almodóvar 1996, 34). While the close-up is customarily used to gain access to a character’s subtleties and “real” value, the close-up in profile further emphasizes knowledge of his/her personality. As William Rothman states, the profile shot “announces that we have arrived at the limit of our access to the camera’s subject” (33). Agrado’s arrival on stage is thus a moment of revelation and unambiguous disclosure as for the character’s meaning and arguably, a formal suggestion of “knowledge” in film language. Equally suggestive is Agrado’s position on stage, in front of the closed curtain, removing herself from the performance space proper and facing the audience directly, which Deleuze argues is a “purer and more independent” state of authenticity (194). Agrado excuses Nina and Huma, who due to health reasons (they beat each other up in a fight), are unable to perform. Meanwhile the camera tracks through the center aisle of the theater toward her, her public visible in both sides of the symmetrical composition. As the camera approaches her, Agrado announces that the performance is suspended. Paradoxically, she offers in substitution “to tell the story of my life.” The mise-en-scène emphasizes the contradiction, negating the theatricality of the performance space and offering “reality” instead. Under the spotlight, but removed from the stage, the “performer” offers authenticity while the curtain remains shut. Significantly, Agrado’s “life story,” as she tells it, is one of assumed names, transformations, and alterations of the real body. In her own words:
They call me Agrado, because all my life I have only wanted to make life agreeable for others. Besides been agreeable, I am very authentic. Look at this body: all custom made. Eyes, 80 thousand (pesetas); nose two hundred . . . ; tits, two, because I am no monster, seventy each. Silicone: lips, forehead, cheekbones, hips , ass. . . . Laser hair removal (because women, like men, evolved from the monkeys) 60 thousand per session, depending on how hairy you are, because if you are “folkloric,” you’ll need more.
Agrado’s speech is occasionally juxtaposed with the audience’s enthusiastic reaction shots and crowned at the end with a satisfied round of applause. The public celebrates, laughs, and is mesmerized with Agrado’s confession, which ultimately does not reveal anything about the “story of [her] life.” “As I was saying,” she concludes, “It costs a lot to be authentic, Lady, and for these things one shouldn’t be stingy, because one is more authentic, the more you resemble that which you have dreamed of yourself.” After the speech, the camera shows a close-up of Agrado visibly moved by the public’s acceptance, by its celebration of her authenticity, even though not one of the performance’s promises have been fulfilled. She is not “a monster,” like similar characters in Almodóvar’s films, she is whole and legitimate. Her performance offers no actors, no play, no (theatrical) mise-en-scène; what the public gets is a recognition of an identity based on the instability of transition, of acceptance, of authenticity centered on reinvention, on “what you have dreamed of yourself.” The sequence ends with a long shot of the theater audience happily applauding, satisfied with the performance as it is.
36 Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
In contrast to other theatrical scenes in Almodóvar’s films, Agrado’s performance, perhaps because it isn’t, denotes neither crisis nor the making of counterfeit identities. The performance scene of Cocteau’s La Voix humane and Jacques Brel’s song “Ne me quitte pas” in The Law of Desire, in contrast is symbolic of the loss of the characters parents. Tina misses her abusive, incestuous father, and the girl, Ada, her ward has been abandoned by her mother. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pepa (Carmen Amura) collapses while in the recording studio dubbing Spanish dialogue for Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1953). The dialogue itself is a reflection of Pepa’s doomed relationship and her fainting is symptomatic of her desperation at being abandoned by her lover while pregnant. And in High Heels, the young Rebecca breaks down and is arrested for confessing to her husband’s murder on television, while her mother later collapses on stage singing Agustín Lara’s song “Think of Me” to her daughter. Similar examples of moments of “crisis” (physical, emotional) and deceit while performing occur in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, ¡What Have I Done . . .?, and twice more in High Heels. However, in All About My Mother, the theatrical space is re-appropriated by Manuela and Agrado as the locus of “authenticity” and relief, and not of performance or the “hysterical” symptoms of crisis. Agrado, removed from the purely theatrical space, effectively replaces the dysfunctional Kowalski-DuBois family of Williams’ fiction, in favor of the symbolic “story of [her] life.”
The conclusion of All About My Mother suggests Almodóvar’s evolution into a stage in which history is no longer deconstructed to neutralize trauma and rebellion, but in which a concerted effort at reconciliation with Spain’s past is dramatized. The third act begins with Rosa’s apparent reconciliation with her father while en route to the hospital to give birth to Lola’s son, Esteban III. Rosa requests the taxi driver stop at the Plaza de Medinaceli, where she encounters her oblivious father. Although he does not recognize her, she tenderly exclaims “adiós Papá” acknowledging the possibility that this is their last meeting. Rosa’s father is a man with no historic memory, as mentioned above, a fact that perhaps allows for the reconciliation to occur since the trauma of recent history does not interfere with the process. Their history is not revisionist but forgotten, ignored, maybe overcome. After reconciling with her father, Rosa dies giving birth to Esteban III. She has fallen to the HIV acquired from her sexual affair with Lola. At Rosa’s funeral, the elusive Lola finally appears, dressed in drag, “a monster,” “an epidemic” as Manuela and Agrado refer to him. At the funeral, Lola learns of his first-born’s death, the reason for Manuela’s move to Barcelona. But in spite of her initial reaction, Manuela allows Lola to make peace with his two sons. They meet at a café off the Plaza de Medinaceli, where Rosa had symbolically made peace with her own father. Holding Esteban III in his arms, Lola, with his enormous breasts and his made-up face apologizes to the child for leaving him “such a bad inheritance.” But Manuela informs him that the baby is not sick and has no reason to develop the disease. Manuela then shows Lola their son’s photograph and the notebook where he had begun to write “All about my mother.” The upper half of the composition is filled with the young Esteban’s eyes framed within the frame looking directly into the camera, which takes Lola’s point of view. The extreme close-up is another moment of recognition and revelation, Esteban II at once acknowledging, confronting, and symbolically reconciling with his father in spite of the latter’s “monstrosity,” absence, and sexual identity crisis. Lola reads Esteban’s journal in which the young man (born around 1982, in the cultural transitional phase) states his desire to meet his father “no matter who he is, nor how he is, or how he behaved” and to find and complete the “missing half” of his life. It is ultimately Esteban’s manuscript that resolves the paternal crisis, bringing the Oedipal trajectory to a closure, emphasizing his desire for reconciliation, his longing to know “all about his father,” as he had once requested from Manuela. After reading aloud
Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother 37
from the notebook, Lola metaphorically reconciles the two generations, suggesting the settlement of the paternal crisis often symbolic in Spanish cinema of the national trauma (Kinder, 197–198; Yarza, 111–113; Smith, 33–34). The conclusion is also circular, since the film begins with Esteban’s interest in knowing “all about his mother,” but ends in an encounter with the father. For Esteban II, what is important is reconciliation, to know and perhaps understand “all about his father.” In ¡What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Matador and The Law of Desire not only are fathers absent, abusive, or engaged in incestuous relationships with their children, but as seen in Almodóvar’s symptomatic use of mise-en-scène and the appropriation of symbols of Spain’s recent past (bullfighting culture, Catholicism, the Opus Dei), they are also symbolic of the nation’s trauma under Franco. The “rebellious patricidal impulse” of Almodóvar’s past is here clearly subverted in favor of reconciliation.
In the epilogue of All About My Mother, Manuela retraces the steps of her initial journey once again, having fled to Madrid with the baby, now returning to Barcelona. The image of the train returns, the same shot as in the beginning repeated from the inside of the tunnel. The second time around the shot suggests a rebirth, a new beginning. This circular closure repeats the motif of rebirth seen in Live Flesh. At the end of that film the protagonist, while en route to the hospital with his girlfriend in labor, observes the streets full of people out celebrating on a Christmas night. He warmly tells his unborn child to be patient and have no fears because, unlike 26 years ago when he was born, “luckily, in Spain it’s been a long time since we’ve been afraid.” José del Pino has argued that in Kika, The Flower of My Secret and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Almodóvar attempts a similar effort to heal some previously troubling signs of identity by helping the transitory present reconnect with the past through the protagonists’ visits to the country towns of their ancestors (del Pino, 168–169). The same is arguably true of All About My Mother, when the third Esteban retraces with his surrogate mother the trip back to his “fatherland.”
In her internal monologue at the end of All About My Mother, Manuela’s explains that Esteban III is cured, his body having “neutralized the (HIV) virus in record time.” Lola, Rosa, and Esteban II are all dead, but their respective offspring and sibling is a medical wonder. In spite of his troubled conception and “bad inheritance,” he is a symbol of the dramatic restoration and reconstruction that the extended bodily metaphor of the film suggests. Like Agrado’s body, which is “authentic” and real because it is what she desires, what she has “dreamed of herself,” Almodóvar offers a conclusion in All About My Mother that stabilizes the crises treated in his previous films. The film ultimately suggests the characters “transitional” or “artful” stages as their defining identities. In the very last scene, Huma leaves Manuela, Agrado, and Esteban II’s photograph in the dressing room to go on stage, but what we see, reminiscent of Agrado’s speech, is the closed theater curtain. Thus, both the melodramatic climax (Lola’s reconciliation with his sons), and the epilogue (the cured baby and Huma’s negated performance), offer symbolic “conclusions” to the generic, paternal, and identity crises that Almodóvar has explored in his films since 1980.
In the last twenty years, Spain has steadily moved toward more conservative politics, higher tolerance of its regional differences and cultural identities, an effective democratic political structure, and an important place in the economic community of the European Union. Equally, Almodóvar’s revisionist historical approach has changed from an attempt to reinvent the past to the acceptance of the present, as the end of Live Flesh already establishes. As the director himself prophesized in 1994, “when one makes a film, writes a book or paints a picture, one can correct reality, improve on it” (Almodóvar 1996, 136). In All About My Mother Almodóvar’s twenty-year search for an understanding of the nation’s identity crisis settles into the suggestion of ambiguity as Spain’s strongest
38 Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
sign of current stability. Through the juxtaposed motifs of the body and the nation, Almodóvar suggests several conclusions that unequivocally point to a happy ending.
In All About My Mother, there is a reconstruction of the national geographical space, which begins with Manuela’s journey from Madrid (the city synecdoche of the national reconstruction effort), to Barcelona, the liberal gateway to Europe. But the urban allegory is here extended to include also the province (Galicia), the overseas territories that Agrado contributes (the Canary Islands), and even the inclusive transnational dimension of the “new” Spain, seen in the two exiled characters, Lola and Manuela. The film draws a line of inclusion throughout the national territory. Moreover, Almodóvar emphasizes the reconstitution of the body in an allegory of settled identities, not only with Esteban III’s miraculous cure from HIV (through his parents’ symbolic sacrifice), but also with Agrado’s recognition and celebration of her surgically altered self as a testimony of “authenticity.” Finally, the theme of reconstruction and restoration is accentuated with the previously rejected option of reconciliation with the father. The film certainly celebrates motherly bonds between the assorted characters (Manuela and the two Estebans, Rosa, her mother and Manuela, Huma, Manuela and Agrado). But the strengthening of motherly relations is a step on the way to mending the much more problematic relations between children and their fathers (as we see with Rosa and her father, Lola and his sons, and even Manuela’s visit to the Sacred Family temple while searching for Lola). In earlier films, Almodóvar stresses the contrasts and divisions between village and city, Spain and Europe, parents and children, men, women, and transgender. In this more mature film, however, traumatic identity, performance, geographic displacement, disease, and death serve as the vehicles through which the characters (and the nation by extension) find love, stability, identity, health, and finally, redemption. At once a synopsis and a reevaluation of his past career, in All About My Mother Almodóvar is reaching that point where art imitates, corrects and, indeed, improves on reality.
Works Cited
Almodóvar, Pedro. Almodóvar on Almodóvar, Frédéric Strauss, ed., Yves Baignères, translator, London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
——. Interview with Annette Insdorf, January 10, 2000, Columbia TriStar DVD, 2000. Brill, Lesley. The Hitchcock Romance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1991. Del Pino, José M. “La tradición permanente: apuntes sobre casticismo y europeísmo en los fines
de siglo,” Nuevas perspectivas sobre el ’98. John P. Gabrielle, ed., Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1999: 161–170.
D’Lugo, Marvin. “Almodóvar’s City of Desire,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13.4 (1991): 47–65.
Hayward, Susan. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1993. Rothman, William. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Smith, Paul, J . Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar. London: Verso, 1999. Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1992. Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. 1947. New York: Signet, 1972. Yarza, Alejandro. Un caníbal en Madrid: la sensibilidad camp y el reciclaje de la historia en el
cine de Pedro Almodóvar. Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 1999.