Pedro Almodóvar earned his first Oscar nomination in 1988, as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the final five for that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film (now Best International Film). He won the same award eleven years later, for Todo Sobre Mi Madre, my introduction to his work, and was most recently nominated for the strong, introspective Pain and Glory, which earned a Best Actor nomination for Antonio Banderas two years ago.
Almodóvar’s most recent work, the outstanding Parallel Mothers, finds the director similarly pensive, but this time he’s looking outward, with a two-layered story about truth and reconciliation in Almodóvar’s native Spain, a country that is still grappling with the legacy of a dictatorship that ended nearly a half-century ago. Parallel Mothers starts with a story about a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War, then pivots abruptly into the two mothers of the title, both of whom give birth in the same hospital but find themselves intertwined by the events that come afterwards, before we return to the story of the grave in a sweeping conclusion. The middle story itself packs an emotional wallop, but it is also a grand metaphor for the challenges Spain – or really any country – faces in confronting the truth of its past.
Penelope Cruz, who got the film’s one Academy Award nomination this year (for Best Actress), plays the photographer Janis Martinez, who happens to be taking pictures of a forensic anthropologist named Arturo. The fascists killed her great-grandfather in the 1930s, forcing him first to dig the mass grave in which he’d be buried, and then tore him from his family a night later. Janis asks Arturo if he could help exhume and identify the bodies, with help from the government’s truth commission. They also sleep together, from which Janis gets pregnant, a development she welcomes, as she’s 40 and has always wanted children. She shares a room at the hospital with the teenaged Ana, who is unhappy at her condition, and they become friends for the moment, although they lose touch once they resume their lives outside the hospital. When they reconnect, Janis learns that Ana’s baby died of SIDS, and she asks Ana to move in and be her au pair, but she has an ulterior motive as well.
The Janis/Ana story itself contains multitudes; both characters are complex, with detailed backstories, reasons why they are who they are, yet no connection to each other beyond the coincidence of their simultaneous arrivals at the hospital. Janis knows a truth that she can’t bear to share with anyone, including Ana and Arturo, but without the truth – and even a chance for reconciliation – nobody can move forward with their lives. When that truth comes out, it sets off a bomb in their lives, threatening everything Janis has wanted, but that’s followed by a period of forgiveness and understanding that wouldn’t be possible without the truth, no matter how brutal. Only after that can we return to the story of the mass grave, as Arturo takes a team to the village where Janis’ great-grandfather died, and where her family still lives, and begins the process of searching for and disinterring the remains.
There’s enough metaphor and symbolism here to fill someone’s senior thesis. The parallels between the Janis/Ana story and Spain’s own uncomfortable grappling with the impacts of the Civil War and the fascist Franco’s tyrannical, forty-year reign give Parallel Mothers its narrative framework, but Almódovar has populated the film with smaller details that give depth to the story of the two women while also sharpening the connection between the nested stories. As for symbolism, there’s food everywhere here, such as when Janis teaches Ana to make a tortilla Española, a classic Spanish dish of thinly sliced potatoes poached in olive oil and finished with eggs to bind it. It’s a national dish (a big deal in a country with divers regional cuisines), and its history goes back at least 200 years; passing this knowledge from one generation to the next, as Janis does to Ana, may stand in for the idea of passing along all knowledge, presaging a later scene where the two argue in Janis’s kitchen, and the older women lectures Ana over her ignorance of her country’s history. (I don’t know if there’s any symbolism to this part, but I certainly noticed the gigantic wheel of Manchego sitting on Janis’s counter, under class, and you are fooling yourself if you think I’m not trying to figure out how to get my wife to sign off on that in our house.) The color red appears everywhere in the film, from Janis’s handbag to her phone case to various decorative objects in her home, which is an Almodóvar trademark; here it could stand in for the blood spilled in Spain’s 20th century, unmentioned and yet pervasive even if no one wishes to discuss it. There are substantial hairstyle changes, little language quirks, so many choices in the script that seem deliberate given what Almodóvar was trying to do with the concentric narratives.
This is one of my favorite films of 2021, although I wouldn’t put it at the very top. The film’s finale is moving, although it comes upon the viewer rather quickly; the script probably could have gone longer, both to resolve the Janis/Ana storyline and provide more time in the rural village where the exhumation takes place. There’s also a smaller twist in the relationship between the two women that seemed to come from nowhere, almost as a convenience, and it doesn’t contribute meaningfully enough to the plot for me to buy into it. Cruz is so good in this, with Milena Smit also superb as Ana, that combined with the literary, layered script, I still found myself lost in its depths long after I left the theater.
I’m not sure why Spain selected The Good Boss, which stars Javier Bardem (Cruz’s husband), over this as its submission to the Academy Awards this year, although the one-film-per-country thing has already outlived any usefulness it may have had, but the one nomination it got, for Cruz, is well deserved – she’s certainly better than Nicole Kidman, who may win. (Cruz also became just the fifth woman nominated twice for Best Actress for films in languages other than English, and the first to do so for two Spanish-language roles.) I have read, but have no way to verify, that the Spanish film group that chooses its submissions dislikes Almodóvar, having passed over his Volver and Bad Education, but the joke is on them, as The Good Boss made the shortlist but not the final five nominees for Best International Film.
→ By
Parallel Mothers.
→ By
Monos.
Multiple readers recommended Monos, the Colombian submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (which didn’t make the nine-film shortlist), when I talked about the best films I saw in 2019. Now available on Hulu as part of that service’s deal with Neon, this modern twist on a Lord of the Flies setting is disturbing and grim, casting a dark light on indoctrination and how cults and similar movements take control of malleable young minds.
The”monos” (“monkeys”) of the film are a dozen or so teenage guerrillas fighting the government in an unnamed South American country, although the similarities to the decades-long FARC insurrection in Colombia are obvious. They’re holding an American woman, known only as Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), hostage, and take most of their direction over short-wave radio, visited only twice in the film by The Messenger (Wilson Salazar, himself a former FARC child soldier), who drills them and gives them further orders. When left to their own devices, however, the monos act like teenagers, showing poor judgment, fighting among themselves, pairing off in couples, and doing a rather poor job of monitoring their one prisoner, while it becomes clear most of the kids have no idea why they’re fighting or even taking orders from unseen authorities.
Nearly all of the actors in Monos were making their screen debuts in the film; only Nicholson and Moisés Arias, who plays Bigfoot, had previous credits. You’d never guess by the performances, however, as the actors are entirely credible, perhaps because the script asks them to act like teenagers and because the shoot was so tough on all of the participants. Each has a distinct character and a nickname that sort of fits them, and despite the film’s brisk pace most of them have enough to do to make it clear who at least the key ones are, especially once their discipline begins to break down early in the film and multiple things go wrong.
The heart of the story is the kids, although Nicholson has more screen time than any individual fighter does because so much of the story revolves around their inability to handle any of the tasks they’ve been assigned, including guarding her. None of the child soldiers has a single line in the film that indicates any allegiance to or understanding of the cause for which they’re fighting – the audience never hears it from anyone, in fact. We just know they’re fighting the government, but not which one, or why, or what any of their goals might be. Their participation in this ragtag troop is the end in itself, and with none of them mentioning parents or other family at any point, you might assume they’re either orphans or kids who ran away from something at home, and have tried to replace that with their affiliation with this terrorist group. That leads to an inevitable conflict when interpersonal relationships interfere with their allegiance to the movement, and when obeying the orders from The Messenger and his superiors might mean betraying one’s friends, possibly even to the point of handing one of them a death sentence.
There’s also a political subtext here that I assume resonates more strongly if you know the history of armed insurrections in South America, especially Colombia (FARC, ELN) or even Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA), which endured long, violent conflicts with guerrilla movements on the right and left. I’m not conversant enough with those histories to think I would understand all references within Monos, but at least know that FARC took many hostages during their 43-year terror campaign and conscripted children into their ranks, so I assumed we were watching a proxy for that group. Regardless of the real-world inspiration, this script shows the pointlessness of these guerrilla movements and the futility of the deaths they caused and lives they ruined by stripping the struggle of its ostensible goals, most of which would mean little or nothing to the children handed automatic weapons and a hostage to protect.
Monos is strongest when it focuses on the interactions between the child soldiers, though, getting into themes of homophobia and alienation as well as the sort of squabbling that readers of William Golding’s novel would recognize. They’re still just kids and they act like it, especially when they’re left to their own devices and handed responsibilities no teenager should have. When one of the soldiers realizes they’re no longer on board with the group’s mission or decisions, they try to leave, and then it’s clear that this hasn’t all been some elaborate game. It is that choice, to show what happens when we hand children and their underdeveloped brains adult responsibilities, that gives Monos meaning.
→ By
Pain and Glory.
Antonio Banderas landed one of the five nominations for Best Actor this year for his role as Salvador in Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), the latest film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother). It’s a command performance from Banderas, who gets his first Oscar nomination at age 59, one that would get my vote (if I had one) in his category for the range and depth he shows in bringing this complex, sad character to life in a story that meanders like the memories it’s trying to depict. (You can rent it on amazon and iTunes.)
Salvador Mallo is a once-famous Spanish director who is now in professional and physical decline, wracked by joint and back pain and hobbled by various other ailments (some of which may not be real), all of which leaves him feeling like he’s unable to work, and if he can’t make movies, he doesn’t see any point to living. He’s thrust into the past when a local cinema restores and airs his film of 30 years earlier, Sabor (Flavor), whose star, Alberto, played the lead character so differently than Salvador intended that the two haven’t spoken since. The two meet again, tentatively, and Alberto shares some heroin with Salvador, who tries it on a whim but becomes hooked, and while he gets high we see more flashbacks to his childhood with his mother (Penélope Cruz, who doesn’t seem to age) in a cave house in rural Spain. While there, Salvador meets Eduardo, an illiterate but kind local laborer, whom he teaches to read, write, and do basic math; and fights with his mother, who wants to send him to a seminary to continue his education so he doesn’t end up ‘like his father.’
The two tracks, in the present day and in the world of Salvador’s memories, both move forward in linear fashion, but the latter jumps around enough to resemble the way our memories actually work. Almodóvar then combines the two timelines when Alberto discovers an unpublished treatment Salvador wrote called “Addiction,” that tells the true story of Salvador’s affair with a man who was also addicted to heroin, an affair that ended because he couldn’t kick the habit; Salvador confesses he doesn’t even know if his former lover is still alive. When Alberto convinces Salvador to let him stage the play, you can probably guess what happens, and how that kind of closure helps Salvador finally take some small steps to help himself, and to let his incredibly devoted friend and assistant Zulema help him.
Most of the summaries I’ve seen of Pain and Glory have focused on Salvador’s infirmities, describing it as a meditation on aging and mortality. While those themes are clearly present, the movie, and Banderas’ performance, are both far more hopeful than you’d expect from such a description, while also trying to explore how our past experiences and our memories of them can shape our lives for years or decades afterwards. Salvador flashes back to various scenes because of how much they’ve influenced his later life, especially in how his relationship with his mother, right up to her death, has affected and haunted him well into adulthood. Confronting those memories is a crucial step in his recovery not just from his temporary addiction but from the depression that has taken over his entire life, threatening his career and possibly more.
Salvador is not exactly Almodóvar, but there is a lot of the director in the character, and Banderas does a marvelous job bringing that character to life with the kind of depth and rounded edges that he needs to have to engender enough empathy and interest from the audience. Some of the key points about Salvador, including his physical pain, come across in ways that feel organic without overwhelming the character or the story – he’s in pain, and that often leads to him choosing not to do things, but he is not inert on the screen because Banderas renders him in three dimensions, especially finding small ways to show that there’s some energy left in the old man even if his back or his legs aren’t willing. It could have been a monument to self-pity, but Banderas avoids that trap and instead gives one of the best performances of the year.
Almodóvar still makes some quirky choices that don’t entirely work; the sequence near the start of the film where Salvador runs through all of his maladies with the help of some animation feels incongruous and took me right out of the movie just as we were getting started. There was no way this was going to beat out Parasite for Best International Feature Film (for which both are nominated), but some of those small decisions are enough to keep it from coming close to the South Korean hit in my own estimation. Cruz is excellent in small doses as Salvador’s mother while he was still a child, but she could have used some more screen time to further develop both her character and her relationship with Salvador, and those scenes suffer a bit because Banderas isn’t there. His performance is so strong – he’s not going to win, as his character obviously isn’t crazy enough to beat out Joaquin Phoenix – that it elevates Pain and Glory from something maudlin into an elegiac lament that still gives its main character reasons to hope and to live, right up to the film’s glorious final shot.
→ By
A Fantastic Woman.
A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), Chile’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and one of the five nominees, is notable simply for its casting: A trans woman plays a trans woman who happens to be the film’s main character. Daniela Vega delivers a tour de force performance as Marina, the fantastic woman of the movie’s title, a woman whose life is suddenly turned upside down when her cis male lover dies suddenly, putting her in conflict with the man’s estranged family – most of whom refuse to accept her for what she is.
Marina is a nightclub singer who by all external appearances is a woman, but whose status as transgender appears to be known by everyone she encounters, even characters who should be complete strangers to her. She and Orlando, a somewhat older, genteel man, have an unremarkable, romantic relationship, where she has just moved in with him and he surprises her for her birthday with plans for an exotic vacation together. This all goes right to hell when he dies suddenly and his ex-wife and son enter the picture, complete with their bigotry, hatred, and threats of violence, all of which show how they don’t even see her as human, let alone as a woman. The movie documents her refusal to surrender to them, and society as a whole, even in the face of physical attacks and a system that dehumanizes her at every turn.
Vega is remarkable in a role that demands that she go through numerous events that I would imagine would trigger awful memories for any trans person (and perhaps any non-binary person, period). Because Orlando falls down the stairs while Marina goes to get the car keys to rush him to the hospital, the authorities assume that she was a prostitute who’d fought back when a client assaulted her, or that she even assaulted him for reasons unknown. There’s an early scene where a doctor and a police officer refer to her in the third person, as if she’s not even there, using male pronouns, even though – again – you wouldn’t think she was trans even after talking to her for a few minutes. (I found this a bit confusing; perhaps the doctor looked at her neck, but that wouldn’t occur to an ordinary person.) Later, Orlando’s son, who proves the most bigoted of all, asks if she’s had “the surgery” (I think Laverne Cox made it clear to everyone that it’s not an appropriate question) and asks the most dehumanizing question of all, “What are you?” Her answer – “I’m flesh and blood, just like you” – and his inability to respond to it spell out the constant fight that trans people face in a society full of people who, frankly, are just too damn obsessed with other people’s sex lives.
This is a star-making turn from Vega, although she dominates so much of the film that there’s little room for anyone else. (Why she wasn’t nominated for Best Actress is beyond me; she’d be a worthy winner, and deserved it over at least two of the nominees.) Gabo, Orlando’s brother, played by Luis Gnecco (star of 2016’s Neruda, Chile’s submission to the Oscars last year), is the most three-dimensional of the other characters, showing uncommon empathy for Marina and the mere willingness to use female pronouns for her. The script, co-written by director Sebastián Lelio and Gonzalo Maza, doesn’t dispense with these characters lightly, but their appearances in the film are a function of their relationship to and interactions with Marina. They’re real because the dialogue feels real, because the treatment she gets at the hands of almost every single person she meets is exactly what you would expect in a majority-Catholic country that only recognized gay marriages in 2017.
Transgender characters have had extremely poor representation in film; other than Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas Buyers Club, and The Danish Girl, all of which featured cis actors in trans roles, major films that have featured trans characters have largely done so for shock value or comic effect. A Fantastic Woman features a trans character, played by a trans woman, in a story that is about everyday life as a trans person in an intolerant society – but in a way that can be interpreted more broadly, too, to capture that feeling of being utterly alone, of feeling unsafe in your own skin, and of the need to find something that helps define you for yourself as opposed to the way that others define you.
I still have Loveless and The Insult to see of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, but Sony Classics has been so slow to roll Loveless, a Russian film that won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, that I may not catch it before the Oscars.
→ By
Neruda.
I admit to knowing less about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences settles on its five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film than I do about the other major awards, so when I say I don’t understand how Neruda wasn’t nominated for the honor while A Man Called Ove was, I mean that quite literally. Not only is Neruda a smarter and better film, but I find it hard to accept that a large number of movie industry people saw both and said, hey, the mawkish claptrap about the grumpy old man is the better choice. (Neruda is available to rent on amazon and iTunes.)
Neruda, Chile’s submission for the prize for 2016, was directed by Pablo Larrain, who also directed Jackie, which earned Natalie Portman a well-deserved Best Actress nomination. It’s a fictional story that stars the very real and very famous Chilean poet, Senator, and dissident Pablo Neruda’s flight from an anti-communist government in Chile in 1948, first in exile within his country and eventually in France. Through the movie, he’s pursued by the obsessed detective/inspector Oscar Peluchonneau, but Neruda has a strange plan in place, taunting the inspector with copies of books and handwritten notes while always remaining one step ahead of his predator.
As a chase film, Neruda stinks, so don’t rent this one looking for high adventure; there’s more comedy in the cops’ regular failures to find Neruda, even when he’s right under their noses. This is a far more philosophical work, one that is even structured like a poem, and that meditates openly on the nature of character and even on whether we are ‘real’ or merely the fictional products of someone else’s imagination.
Larrain has adopted a specific visual style here, where he cuts conversations up by settings, so that characters in the middle of a deep dialogue will suddenly shift positions, rooms, even ending up outside, but appear oblivious to the change in scenery. Part of this seemed to be an attempt to mimic the free verse of Neruda’s poetry, while it also seemed to underline the metafictional aspects of the story – that is, since these jumps are clearly not possible in reality, are we to suspect that other portions, even entire characters, are not real, but are merely projections of the creative genius of Neruda.
The title character is played by Luis Gnecco as a corpulent, arrogant libertine, as sure of his flight plan as he is of his literary talent, and not above the occasional champagne-soaked orgy. (There’s something inherently amusing about a man who is overweight and balding attracting women in twos and threes by virtue of his words.) He brings two voices to Neruda, one for regular dialogue, one for his poems and speeches, a gearshift for a character who, in reality, was certainly aware of his public profile and eager to play a role in his country’s history.
Oscar, played by Gael García Bernal, is the more demanding role, however, as the cop undergoes an existential crisis during an assignment that will make his career or end it in humiliation. He plays it with the veneer of the noir detective, dashing in suit and hat, betraying little emotion, always confident that the next raid will corner his prey, but little details in the performance and even his look – the unmade ties, the collar askew – show the doubt beneath the surface. In a story that truly has just two characters and focuses on the dance between them that keeps them apart until the final few scenes, García Bernals performance was literally essential, giving life to a film that could have descended into caricature or farce.
Neruda is in Spanish, and a little French, with English subtitles, which I only mention because I’m fairly sure I lost some of the benefits of understanding Neruda’s speeches and poems in the original language because I was also reading the English to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I can understand a little Spanish, but apparently the letter “s” is banned in Chile, so I found much of the dialogue hard to grasp. Perhaps I’ll need to see about a sabbatical in Santiago; I hear they have good food there.
The real Neruda’s flight was far less daring or courageous; he was smuggled from house to house for three years, didn’t appear in public, didn’t taunt his pursuers, and eventually fled to Argentina and then France on a friend’s passport. He also earned criticism within his lifetime for his refusal to condemn communist leaders who suppressed journalists and other writers, putting party over principle, so to speak. This film version, while flawed in his personal life and his general arrogance, is far more heroic than the actual Chilean was. It’s a forgivable offense because of what it brings us in the interplay between him and Oscar, who turns out to be the real star of the show.