..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Man from La Mancha
"Viva Pedro!"
Almodovar Festival Dazzles

Part One Of A Two Part Feature

The "Viva Pedro!" festival, which begins in NY and LA on August 11 is a dazzling first. It's a two month-long celebration of the life's work of the great Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodovar, culminating with the commercial release of his spectacular new movie Volver, starring Penelope Cruz in a career-capping role.

Cruz may become the first actress in a Spanish language film to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. And she could win, too. Her performance is so staggering in this mind-blowing slapstick tragedy of Volver (Spanish for "To Return"), that the Academy will be hard-pressed to ignore her virtuosic work, even if it is in a foreign-language film.

If that weren't enough cinematic excitement to look forward to, moviegoers are going to have the historic chance to see eight, count 'em EIGHT, of the Maestro's greatest films, remastered and re-released, one-a-week, for the next two months! Fantastico!

They start unspooling at the Loew's Lincoln Plaza in New York and the Laemmle Sunset in L.A. on August 11. Then, after their week's run there, in New York they move to an open-ended run at the Quad Cinema. (And hopefully, LA is copying the same release paradigm.)

"Brand new prints have been made of all eight films," according to Sony Pictures Classics. "Several of these titles have not been shown in theaters since their original release. All of these films have been withdrawn from the DVD marketplace to accommodate their theatrical re-release, while Matador and Law of Desire have never been released on DVD."

Viva Sony Pictures Classics! for taking this bold, unprecedented step, which is sure to turn 2006 into "The Year of Almodovar." The films are so wonderful, vibrant and varied, how could it not?

Take it from one who has just seen all nine of them in one amazing, mesmerizing week. They (almost) all stand up to the scrutiny of time, and of being compared both to each other, and to Almodovar's greatest, most recent, mature works, the Academy Award winners Talk to Her (Best Original Screenplay 2002) and All About My Mother (Best Foreign Film, 1999) which are included as an essential part of the "Viva Pedro" festivities. As a body of work, or even singly, there are simply no films around today that even begin to measure up to with them.

I was reading James Shapiro's excellent, recent biography, "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare - 1599," by night, as I was being overwhelmed by the sheer filmic magnificence of seeing these cinematic masterworks, sometime two a day, on the big screen (where they belong), by day.

And I felt the comparisons my mind kept making between these two geniuses, working four centuries apart, was apt.

If Shakespeare were alive today and working in the Spanish cinema, he would be Pedro Almodovar. The richness of the characters and the language, the depth of these soul-searching imaginations, the enormity of the body of work, the earthy humor, the wit, the intelligence, the enthralling theatricality are astoundingly similar.

But, oh yes, Pedro has written many more parts for women than Shakespeare ever did. But, then Shakespeare had an all-male acting company he had to constantly write parts for, and he had to keep the doors of his new Globe theater open, by turning out in 1599 alone, according to Shapiro, FOUR of his greatest plays - "Henry V", "Julius Caesar", "As You Like It' and "Hamlet!"

It boggles the mind. But then if you see all of "Viva Pedro" in its entirety, it will boggle your mind forever, too. The celebrated auteur DESERVES these "Viva Pedro" celebrations! We, and a whole new generation of film goers, NEED to see movies of this quality, grandly re-mastered, and we need it NOW!

The filmmaker's greatness lies in his insistence on always and totally being himself, which includes his being an Out Gay Man, an activist, and writing and expressing his unique world-view in his native Spanish in Spain. Safe to say that if Almodovar was an American, working here, he would not have gotten as many or any of these great films made, the open homosexuality of most of these films would have kept the studio doors firmly shut against him, esp. in the 1980s. He would not have flourished and prospered in the USA as he was allowed to in Spain.

And he shot all these wonderful movies almost exclusively in Madrid. Sometimes, as in All About My Mother, he ventured out as far as Barcelona. A limited canvas, perhaps, but one perceived in astounding depth and variety. In Volver, we are in a small town in the dusty, windswept, parched area of Spain that Almodovar hails from himself, that is his La Mancha.

But what a movie he makes from these seemingly humble, arid, mundane surroundings! God, as they say, is in the details.

Right off the bat we are plunged into the film's main theme, death, when we see scores of black-clad village women, scrubbing and cleaning the tombstones of the La Mancha cemetery that their ancestors, husbands, and someday they themselves, will inhabit. It's a weekly ritual, like going to Mass on Sunday. And the women (no men to be seen) who are doing it are all working class, if not poor.

Penelope Cruz, wisely leaving Hollywood, the English language and Tom Cruise far behind her, is a revelation. It's as if we've never seen her act before. She's so assured, so multi-faceted and so good as a put-upon, working class housewife, Raimunda, that it's astonishing. She seems about to burst out of this film. Almodovar pushes her, challenges her, with every twist and turn of Volver's complicated film noir plot. He pushes her to an actress's ultimate breaking point, then even goes beyond it, as he piles complication after complication on Raimunda in scene after amazing scene. And Cruz rises to every challenge of Volver. It's the performance of a life-time.

She begins the film dressed down in the same kind of tight-fitting, dowdy, but on her fabulous figure splendid-looking, housedresses and kerchiefs that immediately call to mind Latin screen sirens of the past, Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, especially, when they were slumming in their Italian neo-realism, peasant periods. Unbelievably, Cruz's Raimunda is a janitor!

She's also the wife of a very abusive husband, who is barely in the film, before… well, I'll skip over the details, because among the many things Volver is, it is also, incredibly, a thriller.

Later, Volver turns into a comedy, hilarious and suspenseful at the same time. A very tricky maneuver. Volver here echoes Hitchcock, in its fraught, eerie score by Alberto Iglesias and in its dead-on, dark comic timing of Cruz and the all-female cast.

There is so much more, including a glam up, some songs, and the ghost of Raimundo's dear, departed mother, played by the great early Almodovar actress, Carmen Maura.

It's with this uniquely Almodovarian, extraterrestrial surprise, that Volver truly spirals into greatness. Mama Maura brings joy, delight, fright, and confusion, appearing to Raimunda's great aunt, who is, of course, Almodovar's indispensable regular, the divinely dithering Chuz Lampreave. Then she makes herself known to her lovelorn, lonely sister Sole (Lola Duenas) and then Raimunda's own teenage daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). And finally Raimunda herself.

It's Magical Realism con brio, the juggling of all these complex levels of comedy, death, the supernatural and the workaday, that makes Volver so intoxicating and yes, haunting. Volver is a career-high for even the great Almodovar.

You feel at 57 he's too young for such an extended months-long tribute as this, but Volver's arrival in November really does justify the "comeback" of the eight other great films of "Viva Pedro" that we have to delight us every week until then.

Part II - The Rest Of The Viva Pedro Films

- Stephen Holt

August 8, 2006

Stephen Holt is a veteran NY-based journalist. The Stephen Holt Show continues to run weekly in NY.

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