Director's Cut: 50 Major Film-makers of the Modern Era

By M K Raghavendra

A critical introduction to the best of international film-makers in the last 50 years..  This is an acutely perceptive collection of essays defining the work of fifty film-makers of the modern era. The shape of cinema is today unrecognizable from that in the 1950s but film criticism has perhaps not kept pace with changes after 1960, when cinema became modern. The collection addresses this deficit by examining the most important directors since 1960. It includes the film-makers of the French New Wave and New German Cinema, extends its attention to earlier 'modernists' like Luis Bunuel and Robert Bresson and speculates on the significance of masters like Andrei Tarkovsky and popular film-makers like Steven Spielberg. It also encompasses a whole range of more recent cinema from Abbas Kiarostami to Bela Tarr. As befits the enormous variety in the range of cinema covered, each of the essays is strikingly different in its emphasis although they are all lucidly and engagingly written. Also included are definitive assessments of five key Indian film directors -Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan and Raj Kapoor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9789351160403

M K Raghavendra

M.K. Raghavendra has authored six volumes of film criticism including three academic works on Bollywood and one on Kannada cinema. He has also authored two books of popular criticism from HarperCollins.

Book preview

ADOOR GOPALAKRISHNAN

Drifting into Modernity

Adoor Gopalakrishnan was born in 1941 in Adoor, Kerala, into a family of patrons of Kathakali theatre. He debuted as stage actor at the age of eight and later produced over twenty plays, many of which he wrote. He resigned from a government job and then graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 1965. His films have won National Film Awards and Kerala State Film Awards several times and also international film awards. He won the prestigious British Film Institute Award for Elipathayam. Adoor received the Padma Shri in 1984 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. The nation honoured him for his valuable contribution to Indian cinema by awarding him the highest cinema award of India, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2004.

***

‘Indian cinema’ is a phrase that lost currency after it became evident that there were different cinemas in India. While ‘Bollywood’ – or mainstream cinema in Hindi – addresses Indians in a popular ‘national’ idiom and is still to gain artistic respectability internationally, there are regional language cinemas which are either in the popular local idiom or intended as creative explorations in formats more acceptable on international platforms. The two states to have dominated regional art cinema in India are Bengal in the east and Kerala in the south. While Bengali cinema is better known – largely due to Satyajit Ray – Malayalam cinema from Kerala has often been more idiosyncratically creative. The two Malayali film-makers represented in this book, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and G. Aravindan, are therefore more difficult to characterize than the two from Bengal – Ray and Ritwik Ghatak.

Kerala is in many ways an exception within India. While it is notionally less urbanized than the rest of the country, there is an urban–rural continuum which is very different from the other states in which cities are clearly demarcated from rural areas. Where the rest of India has a literacy rate of less than 50 per cent, Kerala boasts of 100 per cent literacy and its other social developmental indicators – like infant mortality – are also exceptional within India.

Where Indian modernity has been mediated by the West through the metropolitan cities, modernity in Kerala appears to have emerged independently because of its own kind of gradual urbanization. If this leads us to conjecture that the forces of tradition – that still rule in much of the rest of India – are considerably weakened in Kerala, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s films perhaps provide the strongest evidence because they are ‘modern’ in sensibility.

Four out of Adoor’s first six films deal with individuals who can be called ‘drifters’, people without a clear sense of purpose. But, at first glance, only his second film, Kodiyettam (1977), seems to answer to the description because its protagonist Sankarankutty (Bharath Gopi), who is employed as a cleaner on a truck, is wayward and unattached. When he is married, he displays greater attachment to the truck than to his wife. When a passing truck splashes his wedding attire with mud, instead of being upset, he gasps admiringly at the truck’s speed. Kodiyettam is ‘modern’ at least in the sense that where India’s art film-makers (like Ritwik Ghatak in Ajantrik, 1958) tend to see technology as regressive, Adoor’s protagonist celebrates ‘motive power’. Where the taxi driver in Ghatak’s film loves his battered car to the exclusion of all other things and is lonely, Sankarankutty is popular, gregarious and eventually returns to his wife without having to feel guilt. There is a sense of the ‘new’ being reconcilable with the traditional.

Adoor’s next film, Elipathayam (1981), revolves around a central character, but it is less sympathetic to him. If the protagonist of Kodiyettam is rootless, here he is rooted in sands that are shifting. Elipathayam can be compared to Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (1958) because it is also about landed aristocracy in decline. Ray’s zamindar is a man living in the past. He indulges in self-deception, squanders his fortune on pride – to get the better of a social upstart – but he has grace and even his follies are tragic. Unni, in Elipathayam, is also the last surviving male member of a landed family but he is lazily ineffectual instead of proud. He is so pusillanimous that even a puddle on the path he is taking one morning is enough to make him change his day’s plans. It is obvious that Adoor has little sympathy for him and, unlike Ray’s zamindar, he is essentially comic.

It was Adoor’s next film – in which he takes a wry look at the ‘holy cow’ of the Communist Party – that made him very controversial. Mukhamukham (1984) relates the curious story of Sreedharan, a radical of the 1950s who disappears one night when he is accused in a political murder to return after a decade, a man grown sluggish and silent. The first part of the film deals with Sreedharan as the professional revolutionary – organizing industrial strikes, expounding on class struggle and left with no private life except a relationship with Savithri, daughter of the tea-stall owner, and a secret urge to drink. This part of the film strings together, as a kind of collage, memories, documents, reminiscences and photographs. The main function of this part is to illustrate how Sreedharan, in the forenoon of his active life, influenced people around himself, especially young Sudhakaran, the tea-stall worker whom Adoor uses as a unifying presence across the two halves of the film. The reminiscences and memories give substance to different aspects of Sreedharan, reinforcing a perspective that is constructed bit by bit. This first part ends with the discovery of a body on a rubber plantation following a strike. Sreedharan is blamed for the killing and is forced to go underground for an indefinite period, leaving behind a legend and Savithri, now his wife and pregnant.

The second half of the film deals with Sreedharan’s return in his new avatar and the effect it has on the people around him. One night, more than a decade after his disappearance, Sreedharan appears once again. The man who returns is, however, not the one who disappeared because he has now grown unsure and slothful. His former associates and allies find it impossible to reconcile Sreedharan the legend with Sreedharan the man and are dismayed at the condition in which they find him. Their uneasiness continues until Sreedharan is found mysteriously murdered one day. The meaning of the dead Sreedharan is more easily subverted than that of the living one and the former revolutionary regains the status of a legend.

Mukhamukham created a controversy bordering on scandal when it was first released because it was read as a denigration of the communist movement in Kerala. Although the criticisms made against it were neither particularly new nor intelligent, the hostility was so pointed that Adoor was forced to justify himself on several platforms by clarifying that ‘Sreedharan was only a communist and not communism’.

Though so much has been written about Mukhamukham, one key aspect that is glossed over is the significance of Sreedharan’s slumber. Most critics have equated sleep with lethargy or decay and have missed its importance in the narrative. There is more than one sequence in the film in which people watch the slumbering Sreedharan. If Sreedharan had returned to his former milieu as a physical or a mental wreck he would still remain a subject of their world and his misery might have made him the object of compassion or pity. Instead, Sreedharan in slumber has his dignity restored to him. His former allies cannot justly regard him as dangerous because, if all activity is to be considered inherently political, Sreedharan demonstrates his political innocuousness by remaining triumphantly inactive.

Anantaram (1987) is perhaps Adoor’s most audacious film but it is sadly overlooked in Indian cinema today. The film, about a young man named Ajayan (Ashokan), plays out in two parts, with the protagonist telling his own story in two different ways. Ajayan is an orphan abandoned by his mother at the time of his birth and brought up by the doctor in charge of the hospital. In the first telling, Ajayan asserts that he is gifted and that this marks him out from others. He therefore has no friend except his foster brother (played by Mammooty). When Ajayan is in college he develops a fascination for his foster brother’s wife, Suma. When Suma does not acknowledge his feeling, he is tormented by guilt and retreats into a private hell and this part ends in a suggestion of suicide – curious onlookers peering into his hostel room.

The second part of Anantaram gives a different and more whimsical rendering of the same story. This time, there is no indication that Ajayan is gifted and a chronology is avoided. There is also a girl named Nalini, a replica of Suma, who returns his love. The improbability of their first encounter suggests that she is conceived as a justification for his infatuation with Suma. But there are other elements that take the film beyond this ‘self-justifying fantasy’ and make it surreal. One of them pertains to the three servants who run the house when the doctor is away: Nair, the cook who consumes everything he makes; Mathew, the driver of an immobile family car; and a ‘compounder’ who spends his hours asleep in the dispensary. One morning, Ajayan catches Nair eating the eggs he is meant to cook and Nair, by way of explanation, says that the eggs were laid by Mathew who has taken the shape of a hen and is now sitting on a beam in the kitchen. The hen obligingly drops an egg, which Nair catches in mid-flight. Ajayan disbelieves the story until he discovers Mathew absent from under the immobile car.

It is this peripheral detail in the second story that makes Anantaram more complex than it might have been. Much of the information about Nalini may have been made up by Ajayan in his second telling but it transcends his need for self-justification. There is perhaps an element of the artist in Ajayan because of Nalini’s tendency to run away from him – as creations ‘run away’ from their creators in fiction. If, in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the protagonist is infatuated with the woman as played by an amateur actress, Ajayan’s infatuation may be with his own unlikely creation, constructed with associations pulled out of the odds and ends of his fragmented memory and given the corporeal shape of the woman closest at hand.

Mathilukal (1990) is based on a quasi-autobiographical novella by the celebrated writer Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, and after this film one senses a gradual decline in Adoor’s work. Mathilukal deals with the prison experiences of Basheer when he is quartered in a section next to the one meant for women. As chance will have it, Basheer has an intense liaison with a woman prisoner named Narayani across the wall, although he never sees her. Mathilukal is a complex film because it goes beyond being an unlikely love story. Basheer (Mammooty) is acutely conscious that he is a literary star and his stature is acknowledged by the others. Mammooty being one of the biggest Malayali stars of his day also contributes to this discourse. Narayani, on the other hand, has not heard of Basheer at all and this means that he loses his aura with her, becoming a fellow prisoner instead of ‘Basheer’.

If, in the course of his first six films, Adoor Gopalakrishnan set a new standard for high modernism in Indian cinema, he seems to have lost interest in the project thereafter. It is ‘high modernism’ because it represents a conscious break with the social realist mode of filmmaking which still dominates Indian art cinema. One probable reason for the marked decline in Adoor’s work after Mathilukal is G. Aravindan’s death. The two were film-making rivals and, in some sense, an artistic peer is the best audience that a film-maker can wish for. There is also another difficulty faced by art film-makers in India which is that, their films not being commercially self-sustaining, they depend on government patronage and state recognition. Since the technical qualities of Indian art cinema (including those of Adoor) are still to reach international standards, original talents may find it difficult to get enough attention abroad. Depending on government patronage also means producing films on matters considered important by the state: gender issues, communal harmony, social justice, human rights, etc. Original film-making talents in India find themselves handicapped in these circumstances and Adoor’s later films perhaps bear testimony to this.

WOODY ALLEN

Radio Days

Woody Allen was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in 1935. His family was Jewish and his grandparents were immigrants who spoke Yiddish and German. He broke into show business at the age of fifteen when he started writing jokes for a local paper, receiving $200 a week and writing an estimated 2000 jokes a day. He later moved on to write jokes for talk shows, but felt that his material was being wasted. His agents persuaded him to start doing stand-up comedy and telling his own jokes. Woody debuted as a ‘director’ in What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, a Japanese spy film that he dubbed over with his own comic dialogue. His real directorial debut came in the mockumentary Take the Money and Run. He has written, directed and, more often than not, starred in a film each year ever since, while simultaneously writing more than a dozen plays and several books of humour.

***

Woody Allen began his career in entertainment as a stand-up comic. After performing from his own material at cafés, Allen moved to cinema, eventually creating a screen persona for himself which he used to great advantage. In the process he also grew as an auteur and in many of his best films his persona and directorial vision are balanced. The principal Woody Allen character is nerdy and bespectacled – regardless of the context in which he is placed. Allen the director is prone to invoking high culture and uses his enormous acquaintance with literature and cinema to caricature it in his early films and to lampoon intellectual pretensions later on.

Sleeper (1973) is a futuristic film which parodies both H.G. Wells and George Orwell, and Bananas (1969) is a take on the CIA and the Latin-American revolution. His early films are largely parodies which depend on the audience’s knowledge of key cinematic moments – the stone lion sitting up and roaring from Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) or the dance of death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) are both used to hilarious effect in Love and Death (1975). The most ingenious of these early films is perhaps Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972). This film, which takes its title from a best-selling sex manual (by David R. Reuben, MD), is in the form of several skits constructed around questions raised by Dr Reuben like ‘Do Aphrodisiacs Work?’ and ‘What Happens during Ejaculation?’ In the first of them, Woody Allen plays a court jester who gives an aphrodisiac to the queen and is eventually beheaded. In the second, Allen uses the technical metaphor employed by Reuben in his manual to show a ‘control room’ (the brain during orgasm) where sperms wait anxiously for the crucial moment. Allen plays a particularly nervous sperm. One of the funniest segments – entitled ‘What Is Sodomy?’ – is about a doctor (played by Gene Wilder) who falls in love with a sheep and leaves his wife and children because of his great passion.

Woody Allen’s ‘breakthrough’ film is generally considered to be Annie Hall (1977), a subdued account of a failed romance in which he cast, opposite himself, long-time associate and friend, Diane Keaton. What Allen does in Annie Hall is to try and make the Woody Allen character flesh and blood, and turn him into a real person in a real world who is neurotic and full of prejudices. In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer is a successful comedian and Annie an aspiring singer. The two are introduced to each other and, after a long relationship, they split when Annie leaves New York to move to L.A. and live with another man. In the process, each of them learns many things about the other including their families’ pasts and their relationships.

Alvy despises intellectual pretension of any kind. In the funniest sequence of the film, a loud man in a movie line talks incessantly about Federico Fellini and then about the media and the Canadian philosopher Marshall Mcluhan. This is until Alvy has had enough and summons Mcluhan who confirms that the man (who teaches at Columbia University) is wrong about everything. ‘I wish everything could be resolved this way,’ Alvy then tells us. In a party sequence later on, Alvy is introduced to two men, one of whom has the ‘chair’ in philosophy at Cornell while the other has one at Harvard or some other Ivy League university. ‘Two more chairs and we’d have a whole dining set,’ Alvy Singer declares.

Comic actors in cinema are at a disadvantage when they try naturalism because their personas have the constancy of cartoon characters. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati remain the same, film after film, because they have no ‘interiors’. These comedians therefore circumvent the handicap by centring each film on their physical selves, not dwelling unduly on relationships – which might need to develop – and making the women in their films mere props. Compensation is provided by the story in which the protagonist goes through a series of adventures from which he emerges intact.

Woody Allen tries to break the mould by providing his protagonist with a ‘psychology’ but goes wrong. His neuroses are like a cartoon character’s (for example, like Charlie Brown’s from the comic strip Peanuts) quirks but he perhaps mistakes them for interiority. Since Allen’s comic persona needs to be stable for him to take advantage of it in his films, Alvy Singer cannot have the capacity to transform. Allen is a gifted writer of wisecracks and he fills his screenplay with them as a way of defining his protagonist, but without writing helpful dialogue which might move the relationship between Alvy and Annie. This may explain why the connection between the two in Annie Hall is far from convincing.

Woody Allen conceives his film entirely as a talk (a radio play) and there is very little cinema in Annie Hall. One of the aspects that distinguishes ‘interiority’ in cinema from that in literature is that the camera, exploring only surfaces, has no ability to get into someone’s head. Other means such as expressive body language – or even metaphor – need to be explored to suggest ‘interiority’. In Annie Hall, ‘thoughts’ are dealt with as in comic books and actually spoken on the soundtrack. Allen also gives Alvy the wittiest lines, leaving the others at a disadvantage, and the film is without much functional conversation. Allen, the narcissistic entertainer, comes into perpetual conflict with Allen, the director.

In Manhattan (1979), which is also a ‘radio play’ about man–woman relationships, successful TV writer Isaac (Woody Allen) is involved with two women – a journalist Mary (Diane Keaton), who is initially in a relationship with Isaac’s married friend Yale, and seventeen-yearold Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway). Although it is not followed up, also present as an amusing motif is Isaac’s anxiety about his ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) leaving him ‘for another woman’, and writing her autobiography with segments devoted to her ex-husband and his sexual quirks.

In Manhattan, again, Woody Allen takes pleasure in lampooning the New York intellectual and much of the film is given to pompous discussions in which Isaac vents his ire at the breed. The trouble with the intellectual discussions in Allen’s film is that none of them can be taken seriously and one cannot believe that all intellectual activity centred on issues like art and philosophy are necessarily vacuous. Rather than sympathize with Allen’s viewpoint, therefore, one begins to suspect his capacity for serious thought on the issues he invokes. Isaac, like Alvy in Annie Hall, is incredibly attractive to women and there is enough to suggest that Woody Allen pictures himself as a cerebral James Bond. As in Annie Hall, this is emphasized by the dialogue which constantly draws attention to the protagonist’s sexual prowess. At one point in the film, Isaac is introduced to Jeremiah, Mary’s ex-husband (played by Wallace Shawn). Isaac has heard that Jeremiah is ‘devastating’ but all he sees is a bald person even shorter than he is. When he vents his irritation at someone for this being considered ‘devastating’, one wonders if Allen can be unaware of the irony in all this. Manhattan is, however, saved by Mariel Hemmingway and the last segment in which she and Isaac have a reunion is genuinely touching. Although we are not certain about what Tracy sees in Isaac, we are still touched by her constancy.

This assertion may meet with some resistance, but Woody Allen’s presence works to the detriment of many of his more serious films although he becomes more endearing when he improves as a director, as in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and also when he assigns himself smaller roles. He comes into his own as a teller of stories (rather than an ‘auteur’) with films like The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Bullets over Broadway (1994) which are hugely entertaining. Zelig (1983) – a pseudo-documentary about a chameleon-like person who hobnobbed with the likes of Hitler – is Woody Allen at his most inventive.

About halfway through Allen’s highly productive career one also begins to identify two different kinds of films – those serious efforts in which he explores moral issues and relationships, and the lighter ones. While Interiors (1978), Woody Allen’s humourless foray into Bergmania, is often considered an embarrassing failure, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is regarded as one of his more mature works, though it is still problematic.

Crimes and Misdemeanors comes up trumps in every way except in its fundamental conception. Although wordy, it is brilliantly filmed by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, wonderfully acted by Martin Landau, Anjelica Huston and Allen himself, and the dialogue – with fewer one-liners – is always pertinent. However, the two stories that run parallel in the film don’t come together except in a cursory way at the end. Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is a successful and happily married ophthalmologist who has been having an affair with a neurotic younger woman named Dolores Paley (Angelica Huston). Dolores now wants Judah to leave his wife and threatens to ruin him with disclosure. In order to protect himself, his career and his family, Judah uses his brother Jack’s dubious connections to have Dolores murdered. In the second story, Clifford Stern (Woody Allen) is an unsuccessful documentary film-maker who detests his pompous brother-in-law Lester, a successful TV director (played by Alan Alda). Clifford’s marriage is on the rocks and he falls in love with Halley Reed (Mia Farrow), who is deeply sympathetic but rejects him, marrying Lester instead. At the conclusion, the crushed Clifford and Judah, who has freed himself of Dolores Paley and his guilt, come face to face and Judah tells his own story as a hypothetical film plot: what he did, the torment he underwent before he could overcome his ethical dilemmas.

On the surface, Crimes and Misdemeanors is a dark commentary about the absence of justice in the real world. The only moral arbiter is one’s own conscience, the film seems to assert, and the same notion is pursued in two of his later films – Matchpoint (2005) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007). But this, it can be argued, is to deny the existence of a moral universe. In most noir stories dealing with murder (for example, The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946), the murderers are not undone by their sense of guilt but by their mistrust of each other – or by some other external agency. There is no ‘perfect crime’ because the unexpected always intervenes, the moral universe asserting itself against all odds. Since they have gravely harmed other people, there needs to be retribution and not merely remorse. In Woody Allen’s film there are factors that might even ‘mitigate’ Judah’s act – not only is Dolores completely unreasonable but he is also truly happy in his marriage. Considering that the happy family is a sacred concept in American cinema, one wonders if Dolores Paley is not being covertly ‘sentenced to death’ for threatening its safety.

Woody Allen’s cinema is different from that of other directors of comic films in that he appears to depend more on ‘ideas’. Despite his deliberate lampooning of intellectual pretension, it is as an intellectually inclined artist that he is essentially identified. But there is enough evidence to suggest that Woody Allen does not think his way adequately through issues, and this compromises his vision as an auteur more than any other.

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR

Recasting Melodrama

Pedro Almodóvar was born in 1951 in a small town (Calzada de Calatrava) in the impoverished Spanish region of La Mancha, made famous by Don Quixote. He arrived in Madrid in 1968, and survived by selling used items in the flea-market called El Rastro. Almodóvar couldn’t study film-making because film-making schools were closed in the early 1970s by Franco’s government. Instead, he found a job in the Spanish phone company and saved his salary to buy a Super-8 camera. From 1972 to 1978, he devoted himself to making short films with the help of his friends. The ‘premieres’ of those early films were famous in the rapidly growing world of the Spanish counter-culture. Within a few years, Almodóvar became a star of ‘La Movida’, the pop cultural movement of late 1970s Madrid. His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), was made in 16mm and blown-up to 35mm for public release. In 1987, he and his brother Agustín Almodóvar established their own production company: El Deseo, S. A. Arguably the most popular of important film-makers to have emerged from Spain, Pedro Almodóvar forged a reputation as a sexual agent provocateur capable of eliciting both serious praise and strong revulsion. He is openly gay and he has incorporated elements of underground and gay culture into mainstream forms with great success.

***

Pedro Almodóvar began his career making films that were screened in Madrid’s night circuit, and one may get a sense of the kind of cinema he was making from the title of his first full-length film in Super-8 – F**k Me, F**k Me, F**k Me, Tim (1978), described as a ‘magazine-style’ melodrama. Almodóvar has been extremely prolific but his earlier films look more like irreverent asides strung together, the stories dominated by sex, perversion and crime, with religion and the church featuring as key components. An illustration of his early methods can be seen in Dark Habits (1983). In this film, Yolanda, a night-club singer on the run because the mob is after her for a shady drug deal, takes shelter in a convent. Here, there are nuns with whimsical names – Sister Manure, Sister Sewer Rat, Sister Damned and Sister Snake. The reason is that since the obligations of each nun are towards souls that are most in need of saving, it would be inconsiderate to give oneself any other kind of name. This also provides the nuns an opportunity to hobnob with the worst elements imaginable and one sister, perhaps not to patronize those she must save, sniffs cocaine. Almodóvar’s approach can also be grasped through a story told in the convent – of Sister Virginie who embarked for Africa to save black souls but was eaten by cannibals. A scandal surfaces around her when a letter is received from Africa accompanied by a photograph. Sister Virginie had taken up with a white hunter and had given birth to a baby boy. The boy was lost but discovered several years later, brought up by apes. The photograph accompanying the letter, appropriately, is that of someone who might be Tarzan, in leopard skin briefs and playing with two chimpanzees.

My impression of Dark Habits may not have done justice to it because Almodóvar’s humour is not simply facetious. Certain subjects are treated as sacrosanct in mainstream cinema (like faith, the church, marriage and childhood) as if there is a consensus on what is acceptable in their treatment. Almodóvar – like Luis Bunuel – gets his effects by ignoring the conventions. The protagonist of What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) is a cleaning woman living with her husband in a block of flats with a well-meaning prostitute for a neighbour, who offers her a chance to make some easy money. The neighbour’s client for the day happens to be a voluble exhibitionist and all the cleaning woman needs to do is look at the two of them having sex and listen to the man talk. What Almodóvar does here is to blur the dividing line between two categories – housewife and prostitute – kept apart by social convention, in the process questioning the conventions themselves.

The turning point in Almodóvar’s career may have come with All about My Mother (1999) in which he reveals himself to be a great filmmaker and not merely a provocative one. In this film, Manuela is a single mother whose only son Estaban is killed in a traffic accident when he pursues a stage actress Huma for her autograph after a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire. Manuela had left Estaban’s father in Barcelona when she had found herself pregnant and has not seen him since. She now goes to Barcelona and runs into a transvestite prostitute named Estrado and asks him where she can find ‘Lola’. Another important character in this film is Rosa, a pregnant nun infected by AIDS by another transvestite Lola, who is also Esteban’s father.

All about My Mother is essentially a domestic melodrama, and one needs only to substitute prostitute, transvestite and pregnant nun with more common fictional types to recognize this. But where conventional melodrama lavishes attention only upon examples of bourgeois respectability, Almodóvar deliberately constructs dramas around the ‘marginal’ categories normally shunned by the genre. The film is deeply affecting, and this is partly because of the way the categories are admitted into the mainstream. The tool that enables this is ‘sexuality’, and it is perhaps the universality of the sexual impulse that helps him accommodate the marginal into his narratives without patronizing them.

Almodóvar’s next and perhaps greatest film Talk to Her (2002) can be roughly described as a ‘love story’ between a male hospital nurse, Benigno, and a woman in coma, Alicia, who becomes pregnant by him. Benigno is charged with rape and sent to jail where he kills himself. The film can be divided into three major segments corresponding to the three key relationships in the narrative. The first segment pertains to that between Benigno and the patient in his care. The second pertains to the relationship between Lydia, a woman bullfighter, and Marco the journalist who first meets her for an interview. Lydia is later injured in a bullfight and also becomes comatose. While Alicia recovers, Lydia dies. The third relationship is the camaraderie between Marco and Benigno, which concludes with Benigno’s suicide.

The first sign that a comparison is being made between the two heterosexual relationships is that Lydia’s dressing for her bullfight is filmed in the same intimate way as Benigno’s dressing of the comatose Alicia. Lydia and Alicia occupy adjacent rooms in the hospital and both have ‘lovers’ watching over them and this is where the analogy between the two stories becomes explicit. The relationship between Benigno and Alicia is, at first sight, a simple one of violation. Viewers may be disquieted by Almodóvar persuading us that ‘love’ is involved in the relationship because, coma being generally understood as a brain-dead condition, Benigno answers more readily to the description of a necrophile/rapist than that of a lover. But Benigno is punished and Almodóvar is, perhaps, characteristically, making out a case for the humanity of those marginalized.

If we observe the actual way in which Almodóvar films the sequence in which Benigno ‘violates’ Alicia, we see that the girl’s fecundation immediately follows the screening of the film Shrinking Lover. This is a silent movie that Benigno describes to the unconscious Alicia, where a young scientist discovers a chemical which shrinks him to miniature size. Not being able to find the antidote, he is cared for by his girlfriend. Being awake beside the slumbering girl one afternoon, he is unable to contain his desire for her; he therefore climbs naked onto her and remains inside her forever.

In Talk to Her it is as though the imaginative power of Shrinking Lover is responsible for Alicia’s pregnancy, with Benigno only mediating or playing the role of an agent. Benigno understands women and worships them; he has been attending to his incapacitated mother for twenty years and has been keeping her still beautiful. He is also deeply affected by Lydia’s condition and tells Marco that she needs to be treated better and talked to although she is in coma. Women need to be loved and cared for and Lydia dies perhaps because she does not get enough affection. Almodóvar presents Benigno’s feelings towards Alicia as a deep (although one-sided) love. Alicia does not ‘return’ his love but is subliminally affected by it, and she comes out of coma when she gives birth to a dead child. Almodóvar shows her to be deeply transformed because she has a gravity she did not possess earlier and Benigno has assisted in her transformation although he himself is swept away.

In the second of the two love stories, we see that Lydia has been in love with another bullfighter but they have now broken up and Marco has simply stepped into the void left behind in her life. Lydia is in a distracted state after her break-up with Nino de Valencia, and there is a suggestion that she has a death wish that Marco cannot help her overcome. Marco keeps talking to her, asking her numerous questions and she agrees to answer them after her fight in the ring, where she unfortunately succumbs to the bull. After her injury and subsequent relapse into coma, Marco is unable to ‘reach’ her. Then her