Almodóvar, Pedro
A change of tone entered Aldomóvar's work with The Flower of My Secret (1995). He turned away from the extremes of campy parody to concentrate on a more open and somewhat mournful emotionalism in which sorrow can be transformed, largely by the power of art, into tenderness and beauty. Among his later films are All about My Mother (1999), winner of the Cannes best director award and the Academy Award for best foreign film, two male-centered works, Talk to Her (2002) and the noir-inflected Bad Education (2004), the decidedly female-centered Volver (2006), the enigmatic, somber yet sparkling Broken Embraces (2009), the darkly melodramatic The Skin I Live In (2011), Julieta, a woman-centered melodrama of loss, grief, and guilt loosely based on three linked stories by Alice Munro, and the semibiographical Pain and Glory (2019), in which a melancholy aging filmmaker is somewhat redeemed by memory, love, and creativity. Almodóvar, who produces all his own films, has also written the screenplays for many of them.
See Y. Baigneres and F. Strauss, ed., Almodóvar on Almodóvar (1995), and P. Willoquet-Maricondi, ed., Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews (2004); studies by N. B. Vidal (1988), P. J. Smith (1994), K. M. Vernon and B. Morris, ed. (1995), F. Strauss (2000), and M. Allinson (2001).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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