pretentious critics movie blog

Pedro Almodóvar, the greatest living big-draw Spanish film director still churning out product, has more issues with the mother archetype than Dr. Sigmund Freud. His latest offering splattered on the silver screen is no exception. This movie is dominated by a cast of strong women, while the male characters are relegated to the roles of dead beat father, womanizers, cheats, and incestuous child molesters.
So if you hadn’t guessed from the title - which means “return”, as in, from the dead - the movie is about death, especially the death of men. Pretty much every male character is either already dead or meets his demise during the two hours and one minute we spend saturating in this slice of cinematic bliss. The “story” here is, as is usual with Almodóvar, a complex exploration of intertwining relationships and layers of mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, nieces, granddaughters, second cousins twice removed… you get the picture.
Most important to me is Almodóvar’s use of color and his unique camera positions and angles and sense of direction of space. We have plenty of the latter here, and some color but the palette was nothing extraordinary. As you probably know, and certainly should know, Almodóvar’s 1988 masterpiece “Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios” set the standard for startling vibrancy which even he has never surpassed.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.