12TH APRIL 2022
RECORD 4 INSIDE THE EMOTIONS OF ALMADOVAR’S NOVELA
Last weekend I got a chance to finally see Parallel Mothers (2021), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was waiting to go global. In the sold out room of Cinema 1 at ICA by Mall street, one half of the audience took the masks off and the other grouped closer together once it went blackout-dark in the room and the projector got rolling. As the polarity of two leading characters, two mothers whose story we get to share on screen. Same goes with the movie as you see it. Between Pedro Almadovar’s signature moves on juxtapositioning feelings and situations his characters respond to, mostly how, in comparison to what probably most of his viewers would not accomplish. The opposite, they would probably act the other way round. Nevertheless, between the colours and shots and casting that all let you know who this movie is by, the characters talk to this tightly seated pandemic audience to their face. When being caught up in the global movements and shared issues, the characters (all females) question what a feeling of a life is and that twenty twenty two can be everything and no place for memory to be vanquished. After being over with many tragedies and sores of everything in time that gets caught in twenties (here comes the whole twentieth century and twenty twenty), these women go with us, the audience, through a path to figure out how to live through painful memories and not forget them.
At first what is seen as the director's calling card on the colours (literally and plot-wise) and what could be seen as a peculiar story of a peculiar telenovela, the way the camera lets us see this story changes everything. Almadovar somehow reminds that it's all staged, all moves, and parts in the frame are rehearsed but however, the core and subject is so sincere and naked that you weep and cry, and relate. Another master of twisted and very descriptive storytelling is Woody Allen. For one of his movies, he even placed his characters in Spain and casted Almadovar’s one of the favourite Penelope Cruz to act. His main (semi-biographical) characters are very narrative-based but also very controversial and questionable in their preferences (if you just remember the debate around the age gap between Woody Allen’s and Mariel Hemingway’s characters). Which is another type of a telenovela so to speak and is more of a diary/memoir-based. But just as honest, witty and mundane as movies by Nanni Moretti, when remembering Caiman (2006) or Aprile (1998), for instance. Pedro Almadovar takes the format of telenovela and brings it to a level of an art work. Like artist Yang Fudong studies the filming process of a period meoldrama, Almodovar’s movies study the brigth and eccentric surroundings that the characters exist in but they never question authenticity of the emotions and the emotional journey characters are going through. Coming back to his international breakthrough All About My Mother (1999), as many of his other movies, Matador (1986) or Return(2006), concerns themes of death and the process of revival, the whole alphabet of these emotions. Then, let’s come back to Nanni Moretti and his movie Son’s Room (2001) too, where parents are getting over a very sudden departure of their son.
At first what is seen as the director's calling card on the colours (literally and plot-wise) and what could be seen as a peculiar story of a peculiar telenovela, the way the camera lets us see this story changes everything. Almadovar somehow reminds that it's all staged, all moves, and parts in the frame are rehearsed but however, the core and subject is so sincere and naked that you weep and cry, and relate. Another master of twisted and very descriptive storytelling is Woody Allen. For one of his movies, he even placed his characters in Spain and casted Almadovar’s one of the favourite Penelope Cruz to act. His main (semi-biographical) characters are very narrative-based but also very controversial and questionable in their preferences (if you just remember the debate around the age gap between Woody Allen’s and Mariel Hemingway’s characters). Which is another type of a telenovela so to speak and is more of a diary/memoir-based. But just as honest, witty and mundane as movies by Nanni Moretti, when remembering Caiman (2006) or Aprile (1998), for instance. Pedro Almadovar takes the format of telenovela and brings it to a level of an art work. Like artist Yang Fudong studies the filming process of a period meoldrama, Almodovar’s movies study the brigth and eccentric surroundings that the characters exist in but they never question authenticity of the emotions and the emotional journey characters are going through. Coming back to his international breakthrough All About My Mother (1999), as many of his other movies, Matador (1986) or Return(2006), concerns themes of death and the process of revival, the whole alphabet of these emotions. Then, let’s come back to Nanni Moretti and his movie Son’s Room (2001) too, where parents are getting over a very sudden departure of their son.
Next writing → Tuesday 1st February
Yours,
CallMBYFilm