Volver pedro almodovar cast
It took 18 months to shoot and required its director to return to his post at the telephone exchange before it was finally completed. Pepi, Luci, Bom… wasa film, plagued by financial and technical problems. Finally, in 1980 he shot his first feature Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón,a bizarrely ribald chronicle of life on the wilder fringes of the Madrid night-time experience.
#Volver pedro almodovar cast series#
Commencing as a stage hand for the theatre troupe, Los Goliardos – where he met Carmen Maura, the actress who would become his leading lady for the first half of his filmic career – he also performed in a punk rock group, wrote pornographic photo-novels and, significantly, purchased a super-8 camera with which he shot a series of outlandish shorts which guaranteed his burgeoning notoriety.
Meanwhile by night, and following the death of Franco in November 1975, Almodóvar was steadily becoming the leading figure in Madrid’s flourishing alternative cultural scene that would become known as La Movida. For a filmmaker who had no formal training, he has drawn on his experiences to develop what is almost universally acknowledged as one of his greatest strengths: his ear for the sounds, the rhythms and the dialects of the street, and thus his capacity to direct actors. Almodóvar has often spoken of how much he learned from listening to the women who surrounded him in the office where he worked. Indeed, in several of his films we see homages to this period of his life, such as the Madrid skyline in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988), marked by the emblematic red light of the Telefónica clock tower and the pervasive, almost obsessive presence of telephones in almost all his films of the 1980s.
It was a position he would maintain for more than a decade, with occasional unpaid leaves of absence to work on his various projects. After completing the compulsory military service and spending periods as a hippy in Ibiza and London, he secured a day job as a clerk for the national telephone company Telefónica. Later, when Almodóvar was eight years-old the family moved to Extremadura in the west of the country where he would receive the brutish education at the hands of the Catholic Church that is reflected in the richly baroque tale of priests and child abuse of La mala educación (2004).Īt the end of the 1960s Almodóvar arrived in Madrid.
#Volver pedro almodovar cast movie#
His most recent movie Volver (2006) deals directly with the ghosts of the nation’s past in its portrayal of the typical Spanish village. The rural home town, while at the heart of the Spanish national imaginary – this is a country in which most of the urban population is only one generation away from the feudal pueblo – is an ambiguous Arcadia. Many of his films see their urban-dwelling protagonists return to their ancestral family homes in the country, variously, for refuge or redemption.
He often cast his own mother (Francisca Caballero) – possessed of the archetypal wisdom of peasant womanhood – in cameo roles in his movies prior to her death in 1999. His humble origins, as a member of a large and impoverished family of peasant stock, have left their indelible mark on his work. Like Don Quixote before him, Almodóvar was born in the region of central-southern Spain known as La Mancha. Whatever reaction he provokes, there is little doubt that Almodóvar rarely – if ever – inspires indifference. This has led often to a mixed domestic reception, which takes the form of unconditional acclaim by certain sections of the Spanish media but that has also seen him vilified by conservative critics. While subversion of identity is the key subject matter of his cinema, Almodóvar has consistently flirted with his own sense of “Spanish-ness” (most frequently in his recourse to – and resignifying of – the symbolism of the Catholic Church). However, it is Almodóvar’s ambivalent relationship with the country of his birth (and where he has made all of his 16 feature films to date) that has proved symptomatic of the complexities surrounding the filmmaker. Since Almodóvar’s emergence as a transgressive underground cineaste in the late 1970s and early 1980she has gone on to establish himself as the country’s most important filmmaker and a major figure on the stage of world cinema. Pedro Almodóvar is the cultural symbol par excellence of the restoration of democracy in Spain after nearly 40 years of the right-wing military dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
September 25, 1949, Calzada de Calatrava, Spain