By Michael Koresky
The artist's instinctive response to autobiography can make it difficult to make a filmed personal life unnatural. Movies have a unique advantage in depicting memories and dreams, but a realistic depiction of a person's past life can lure all sorts of pitfalls—it's easy to concoct the real in a movie and then turn it into a fake—and film directors It is customary to place the creative process in the foreground of the film to create a distancing effect, which is more likely to draw the audience's attention to the film's structure than to the truth of the story than the meta-film. torture. "Authority" is a relatively recent concept, Fellini's deepest excavation of his own past life through the film "8½" (1963), which not only established his personal legend, but also Created a typical example of a film artist who was tortured by the soul. Fellini created a template for the representation of psychological structures: from this template many autobiographical films have been created since then - Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror , 1975), Bob Fosse's All that Jazz (1979), Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes, 1992) - All of these films follow the fragmentation of 8½, acknowledging the brain's inability to connect events in a linear structure in memory. The same goes for Joanna Hogg's excellent recent film, "The Souvenir," and even though the plot follows a clear chain of cause and effect, the director can't help but insert a lot to show her. The self-perceived footage, the narrative is frequently interrupted, thus creating a disturbing alienation effect. But in all of the above films, the filmmakers' review of their past lives is not limited to self-pity; it is a painful and positive review.
Pedro Almodóvar veers completely to the side of pain in his latest film, Pain and Glory, making it his most autobiographical work to date. The narrative structure of this film is a little simple, and the reason for this impression may be that Almodóvar, who is a director and writer, always prefers to start from a revelatory center point, and then to centrifugal The way he unfolds the narrative gradually, spiraling upward, he never sets a clear beginning and end in structure. The most typical is his several films in the 21st century, such as "Bad Education" (Bad Education, 2004) - which is closely related to "Pain and Glory" - "Broken Embrace" (Broken Embraces, 2009) and The Skin I Live In (2011), these films consistently deviate from linear narratives, as if surfing the stream of consciousness of memory. But when it came to Pain and Glory, Almodóvar changed course to be as clear as he could, that while it was a fictional film, most of what we saw on screen was drawn from his own. Life, even the furniture and wall paintings are based on his collection as the blueprint for art design, and some parts are directly moved from his apartment to the set. In this latest film, he seeks to purify himself by digging and combing his past life, and then completes the redemption of himself. It can be said that Almodovar's appeal to his autobiography has gone far beyond the 'scripted record' . His autobiography is more of a question and answer to who you are.
In the entire sequence of Almodóvar's works, no film has more profoundly expressed the qualities of a filmmaker on the screen than the protagonist of "Pain and Glory", the outstanding representative is Salvador Marlo (Salvador Mallo), played by Almodóvar's longtime muse, Antonio Banderas, Antonio brings out the sensitivity and forbearance of this middle-aged man with great nuance. Few in the history of film have the tone of the protagonist set on two words - "tired", Salvador is more like director Almodovar than actor Banderas in appearance and action, at least more like us The Almodovar, who has been familiar with many interviews and stages, always wears a colorful floral shirt, and the shirt never likes to be tucked into the waistband. This image is not the lively and sexy Banderas in our impression at all. Banderas achieved his acting breakthrough in the mid-1980s thanks to several memorable and shocking roles in Almodóvar's successful Matador and Law of Desire unleashes an irresistible sexual fascination in two films—especially the latter, where Antonio vividly illustrates how the actor, the subject and the projection of his desires, becomes the subject of the camera charm. But Antonio has long refused to define his own acting career in terms of his dazzling beauty, which means that he maintains a clear understanding of himself, just like Clark Gable (Clark Gable) trying to break through the image of the iconic actor shackles. Of course, this self-awareness doesn't interfere with his real chemistry with his co-stars on screen. In Pain and Glory, Antonio pays his sincerest tribute to the friend and filmmaker who catapulted him to the star stage, while also contributing the most fleshed-out role of his career: a well-known The film director of the Year of Destiny fell into the bottleneck period of creation, fell into an existential dilemma similar to Fellini once encountered, and basically lost the possibility of continuing to make movies before he got out of the predicament. Banderas' performance here is a complete observer: he has fully dived under Almodóvar's skin, but every glance of him, every twitch of the muscles on his face is an unprecedented development of his potential. .
In addition to occupation, age, hairstyle and clothing, El Salvador recreated Almodóvar in a deeper sense (literally): he, like Almodóvar, suffered from tinnitus, spinal displacement, migraines, Various disorders such as depression and anxiety. Almodovar was not satisfied with putting the diseases on a relatively imaginary background, or even just making a simple background description. He deliberately used a whole set of carefully crafted shots to individually examine these diseases shortly after the film's opening. Explained, the animated footage dissects the human body up and down, pinpointing and explaining in great detail what parts of the body El Salvador—and by extension Almodóvar himself—has endured for so long. The point of this set of shots is not to evoke pity for him, but to draw a clear topographical map of the ravines that lie deep in the artist's life, which can be both obstacles and inspirations for artistic creativity. the source of. His soul may still be intact, his spirit may be present, and his past life course may have been a source of abundant inspiration, but the work itself may be starting to become difficult because the body has begun to run counter to the will.
A point that runs through the film is that El Salvador has tried every means to remove or at least alleviate his pain. The first shot of him appears vertically suspended in the pool water, his entire body completely submerged, presumably in some sort of healing position; the next shot is along the scary line of his spine. Human surgical scars are rocked up little by little. Salvador seems to have disappeared into a void underwater, but the potentially claustrophobic image gave way almost instantly to an open, bright, airy image of a past tense full of possibilities. Switching from one pool to another: the act of submerging him seems to take him directly back to his childhood, where we see a young Salvador under his mother's wings - Penello Penélope Cruz’s mother is earthy and Sophia Loren—a group of women gather by the river to sing and do laundry. This sunny, idyllic scene is the first of many flashbacks to Almodóvar's childhood in the 1960s under Franco's rule. If Pain and Glory is a tapestry of intricate structures, his childhood is one of the warp threads. The tapestry’s warp and weft also include present-day Madrid, as well as the ever-recited glory days of the 1980s. By forcing himself to tell, and in telling, rediscovering his past life—his love story, his professional struggles and losses, his tensions with his mother—El Salvador begins to open up the way for a creative comeback. A world. In the end, we can find that the Almodovar film "Pain and Glory" we are watching is also the result of these efforts of El Salvador in the film.
The most satisfying thing about this autobiographical film is its unique queerness. The autobiographical subgenre has its own set of creative modes, whether it's the original 8½, The Jazz, or their spin-offs or imitations, such as Woody Allen's Stars Stardust Memories, Maury Yeston's Broadway adaptation of Fellini's 8½, Nine, not to mention the pathetic Rob Marshall film version ), without exception, establishes a complex set of relationships between a male protagonist and many female characters—wife, lover, muse—and the function of this relationship is to explore the artistic Although the history of growth is accompanied by certain criticisms, the film is more about respecting the inherent instinct of male artists in objectifying women. As a gay filmmaker, Almodovar naturally subverted this set of gender norms, whether it was El Salvador's past few lovers or his various sexual fetishes, which were replaced by men. We must never forget that this was a hard-won freedom, that is, a freedom to be able to express the very expression of freedom that propelled the early Almodóvar as the representative of the radical culture of the post-Fascist era in Spain. Through the sanctification of women and the eroticization of men, his films have been constructing a set of aesthetic moral standards against the direction of the national narrative for decades.
The film keeps flashing back to Salvador's childhood in Valencia, where his parents moved from Madrid in search of development, and this one ends up being the most poetic central part of the whole film: the little boy in their little rocky village For the first time, a certain worker's sexually attractive body sprouted for the first time. The handsome but illiterate young worker named Eduardo (César Vicente) is hired by Salvador's mother to paint their home, which is hidden underground, but their new home is actually more Like a cave, the only vent is a cage-like skylight. (The bunker-like abode is an expressionist-style building, not based on Almodóvar's real childhood experiences.) Eduardo traded his labor for lessons in literacy and writing, and Salvador was his little teacher. Eduardo was gifted at painting and once had the angelic little Salvador pose for his portraits. It’s an identity-shifting setting that’s both sly and endearing—Eduardo was the artist who painted El Salvador back then, but one day he’ll be El Salvador’s secret muse. This curious little boy was obviously fascinated by young men for a long time, and he shared his intimacy with Eduardo in a particularly childish manner, but it was not until one day that he suddenly saw Eduardo bathing in a bathtub for the first time. Hit like a thunderbolt by the man's beautiful body. At that moment he was suffering from Stendhal Syndrome, and looking at Eduardo's naked body, that classic Picasso-like bather, Salvador fainted with excitement. This moment will forever be etched in El Salvador's heart as a moment of identification with his homosexuality while establishing an aesthetic self-identity both emotionally and practically.
Although today's El Salvador has no physical strength and no desire to continue to create, he has a movie that was shot in the 1980s and has just been restored. When the Film Archive invited him to participate in the re-screening ceremony, he still faintly felt himself. A call to the glorious achievements of yesteryear. Undecided whether to participate in the event, El Salvador imagines that if the film's main character, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), can accompany him, he can do so because of the The dispute in the film has kept them apart for decades, and he can just take this opportunity to repair the relationship between the two. Salvador rushes to the door without notifying the other party, and he finds that Alberto is also old, with disheveled hair, dazzling jewels like a neurotic man, and a drug addict. Alberto is both the demon of El Salvador and the unsuspecting savior who gives El Salvador a taste of heroin, which can help relieve pain and then bring joy, because he himself has been using it as medicine. As the two men try to mend their shattered relationship, Alberto discovers on El Salvador's computer a completed but unproduced play script, coincidentally titled Addiction. The story background of the script is set in Madrid in the 1980s, which is already post-Franco Spain, democracy is beginning to go on the right track, and El Salvador's mad love with his old lover Federico (Federico) is placed in this background - The choice of this era is certainly not without reason, and it is also the era when Almodóvar's career began to flourish - the entire story of "Addiction" is told entirely through monologue. Alberto found Salvador's excavation of his own past life so unique and moving that he begged to be able to bring it to the stage as a partner. Salvador finally agreed, but on the condition that his name be withheld, and he endorsed Alberto as the actor while authorizing him as the byline playwright.
There is a ludicrous irony in Salvador's distancing himself from Addiction, which would be the central point of Pain and Glory, which in turn would be Almodóvar's most direct and unabashed 's autobiography. Of course, Almodovar also expresses the impossibility of Salvador's attempt to escape the past: none other than Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia) himself, at 30 Returning to Madrid for the first time after many years, I happened to pass by the theatre where Alberto played. Fascinated by the performance poster and synopsis of "Addiction", Federico just bought a ticket, but in the end he experienced an uneasy and wondrous journey, watching his own story unprepared. on stage. Driven by a sense of incapacity, Federico is obsessed with finding El Salvador—though he is now married to a woman and the father of two children—and the two men's short-lived dream relives the film. One of the sexiest chapters ever. Banderas and Sbaraglia exude a warm chemistry of old lovers, and it's rare to see their tentatively erotic kiss on screen, let alone watch Until two middle-aged men with gray beards and hair kissed. Although they couldn't really rebuild their love relationship, the reunion had a real impact on El Salvador, finally awakening him from the buzzing ecstasy, and he began to make up his mind to face the past, perhaps because of his Finally understand that the past life has not completely disappeared without a trace.
Federico's encounter with Addiction isn't the only coincidence in Pain and Glory's way of advancing the narrative. At the end of the film, Salvador is invited to an art exhibition featuring anonymous or unsigned works. A drawing on the leaflet seems to beckon El Salvador, a familiar figure: a little boy, a little boy reading in a flowerpot, quietly posing with his posture. This is the portrait Eduardo painted of him, which was finally found at a flea market by a gallery owner after being lost for many years. The Salvadoran mother, who had long sensed an unusual ambiguity between her son and the older worker, was determined never to let her son see the painting. But now it hangs on the wall of the gallery and is displayed to the whole world. This is a testimony to his youth, a moment of self-identification of his sexual identity, a testimony to the budding of his art, and a testimony to him. Testimony of a tense inner life as a child - a moment of shame has been transformed into a beautiful gesture, a kind of pride after years of washing.
These few coincidences are not so much narrative expedients as they are meant to convey the idea that we are always guided by some external force on our circuitous paths of life. El Salvador had to find a way to bring his first desires to the screen—a personal act as well as a political one. It may be that fate has somehow helped Salvador make his decisions; but in any case, one thing is certain is that there is a stronger force preventing him from putting down the pen and the camera. May Almodovar say the same: Wherever the wind blows him, may it lead him to a new light.
Posted in the September-October 2019 issue of Film Review
Translated in Hangzhou on June 30, 2021
Original address: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/lost-and-found/
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