Almodóvar’s Baroque Transitions in the Early Films (1980–1995)

Abstract

Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar has been detected early on by film critics as a Baroque filmmaker, a qualification to which he has agreed in interviews. This promotion of his style is certainly questionable as the word ‘Baroque’ is often used outside of its artistic and historical contexts. It is undeniable, however, that there are many Baroque features in his tragicomedy. One of the key aspects that ties Almodóvar’s early films to Baroque art is their exaggerated and melodramatic storytelling. Like Baroque art, which often featured grandiose and emotionally charged narratives, Almodóvar’s films are filled with intense emotions, complex relationships, and larger-than-life characters. This exaggerated portrayal of human emotions and experiences is a hallmark of Baroque aesthetics, which sought to evoke strong emotional responses from the audience. This paper seeks to focus exclusively on the rise of the director’s style in the last two decades of the 20th century that corresponds to Spain’s problematic and somewhat tragic transition from dictatorship to democracy and explore the ‘Baroque transitions’ that led Almodóvar to national, European and international recognition prior to the obtention of the Academy Awards he received for “All about my mother” in 2000. After defining the Baroqueness of his early filmography, this article will take a closer look at the ricochet trajectory he designed for actors such as Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, and Antonio Banderas, who will all act in several corresponding roles and embody characters in transition, before becoming emblematic for the public. In the tradition of the Spanish Baroque, Almodóvar will develop his tragic outlook on his ever-changing culture around these iconic actors who will, in turn, unfold the complexity of the transition years for Spanish women and men.

1. Introduction

It is not unusual to read the word ‘Baroque’ used extensively in contemporary film reviews, and Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has had a fair share of cinema critics apply this adjective in all kinds of publications to his filmography, and he seems to agree repeatedly with this qualification: in a 1994 interview with Ela Troyano from Bomb (Troyano 1994), while reflecting on a decade and a half of rising to celebrity, the filmmaker does not hesitate to also use this word to qualify his work and claim that: “The characters in my stories are very baroque, very expressive” (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1994/04/01/pedro-almod%C3%B3var/) (accessed on 15 September 2024). Over twenty years later, in a 2016 interview to D.T. Max from The New Yorker, he reaffirms again that: “[t]he color in my movies is very Caribbean, and it has a Baroque quality—the same as Hitchcock’s” (Max 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/05/the-evolution-of-pedro-almodovar) (accessed on 15 September 2024). While it is very common to quickly attribute a Baroque character, nature or dimension to artists coming from Spain and their art, a particular attention should be given to the multiple ways in which Baroqueness can be observed in his films. Indeed, Pedro Almodóvar is a filmmaker known for his unique storytelling style, colorful visuals, and complex characters who can quickly code switch between the languages of comedy and those of tragedy. He contributed to the rise of the post-Franco Spanish cinema as a leading figure during the last two decades of the twentieth century when Spain copes with a traumatic and dramatic transition from dictatorship to democracy. But is this enough to self-define one’s style as “Baroque,” an artistic word that carries its own weight, is associated to the seventeenth century in Art History, and could very well disguise the kitsch and the camp aesthetics identified in his early works over twenty years ago? Or is it just part of a marketing strategy on his part to justify his experimental collages with a term vaguely known by the international public, and very often associated with Spain and the Counterreformation.

In the footsteps of his predecessor and fellow countryman Salvador Dalí, the artist who paved the way for this resurgence of Baroqueness in Spanish contemporary arts, he is perceived by many as the heir of some atemporal Baroque aesthetics with a typically Spanish essence. In Madrid, the Catalan-born “Dalí was steeped in the pictorial language of a Baroque sensibility, though he approached it through the lens of modernity” (Jeffett 2016, p. 3), as he often sought to recycle some of its motifs and show the full spectrum of historical periods intertwined. The city of Madrid became the capital of Spain in 1561 under Philip III, at the dawn of the most Baroque phase of the country’s formation and history. Four hundred years after Cervantes and one generation after Salvador Dalí, the young Pedro Almodóvar discovered, in the aftermath of Franco’s death in 1975, a labyrinthic city eager to lead and experiment with the social transformations, as well as to make its Baroque past and extravaganza resurface wearing the colors of democracy. Before the almost four decades of dictatorship, the Surrealists had already established an atemporality of the Baroque attitude in Spain, intrinsic to its cultural fabric. The poetry of Góngora was rediscovered by Dámaso Alonso, while the obsessions of Diego Velázquez or Caravaggio inspired the whole group of artists at the Residencia de Estudiantes. It was only natural that this interest for the Baroque heritage would resume once the arts and letters became liberated from fascist censorship. With the advent of vanguard filmmakers in other Western democracies (in particular the US, the UK and France), Spain had a lot to catch up to integrate the Baroque aesthetics in the seventh art, but the enthusiasm for it shows early in the low-budget films of Pedro Almodóvar.

His early films are often categorized as kitsch or camp due to their exaggerated aesthetic and melodramatic narratives, mostly between the release of “Pepi, Luci, Bom” in 1980 to “All About My Mother” in 1999, a year that will mark a turning point in his career as he will secure an international reputation with the obtention of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. This obtention of this prestigious award and the resulting growth of his reputation coincide with the end of the transition years in Spain. Beyond the recognition of his work, the international community also admires the efforts Spain has made to catch up with its European and North American neighbors. In his ground-breaking monograph published the same year, Un canibal en Madrid, Alejandro Yarza (1999) offered a firsthand analysis of the rising movie director that had all critics focus on the Spanish film renaissance:

[U]no de los dilemas más grave con que se enfrentaron estos nuevos creadores fue el problema de la identidad, de cómo construir una voz propia. El modelo existente para casi la mayoría de las actividades artísticas era extranjero, fundalmente anglosajón. Por ello, el joven artista español estaba condenado a realizar, en la mayoría de los casos, la versión nacional de un estilo estranjero, algo así como un doblaje artístico para el consumo interno.

(p. 29)

The idea that the Baroqueness of Almodóvar would be the answer to a tragic identity problem, both individual and collective, and that his productions would be a ‘national version of a foreign style’ explains partially why he would find in the Baroque taste a permission to practice odd juxtapositions and experiment with voyeuristic humor. But does this suffice to justify a Baroque quality as a whole such as that the director himself often seems to advertise.

2. The Baroque Nature of the Early Films

Pedro Almodóvar’s films between 1980 and 2000 are often described as more Baroque due to their flamboyant visual style, theatricality, and tragicomic storytelling, without a doubt. After 2000, there is a clear separation of comedy and tragedy in his movies. However, a deeper analysis could reveal that these films are fundamentally Baroque in nature, drawing inspiration from the extravagant, provocative, psychological and emotional artistic movement developing in the seventeenth century. The ‘old’ Almodóvar films are characterized by bolder colors, intricate set designs, extravagant costumes, and complex narratives filled with tragedy, passion, emotion, and excess so characteristic of the Baroque. But so were the movies of fellow Spanish filmmakers Bigas Luna or Alejandro Amenabar in these two decades. Along with Almodóvar, these film directors redefined Spanish cinema and contribute to its international visibility through their Baroque uniqueness: in their visions, characters all have in common a social and often sexual confusion caused by the transition to democracy itself, the contemplation of new freedoms in conflict with traditional principles. It was a trend in Spain’s Zeitgeist that can still be observed today but not nearly as much as it could be in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Alejandro Amenábar, Pedro Almodóvar, Víctor Erice and Bigas Luna will, in this sense, continue the work of respected senior directors and role models such as Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Jesus Franco or Juan Antonio Bardem. Their films will focus more on the ambiguities of the Spanish social subjects by emphasizing the chiaroscuro nature of their individual identity and Spanish society at large.

This common ‘Baroque’ style reflected and enabled this generation’s interest in pushing boundaries, challenging conventions, and exploring the complexities of human emotions and relationships, mostly as a response to the tragic and traumatizing repression caused by the dictatorship. While the Renaissance elevated the beauty, the potential and the discoveries of humanity, the Baroque age became an age of questioning the tragic nature of life leading to identity crises and self-doubt. It echoed the same need to come out of the darkness with shock therapy in modern psychology. Almodóvar and other artists from the end of the twentieth century found in Baroque Spain a precedent in history in which traumas are cured with comic treatments of tragic and traumatic situations and conditions. In his early films, comedy often serves as a façade to hide the tragedy of Spain at the dawn of its transition to democracy. The post-Oscar Pedro will move away from this carnivalesque mechanism and unveil his own tragedies with far fewer comic effects for his aging public.

In the early 2000s, however, Almodóvar began to shift away from this post-modern eroded Baroque style and started to explore more restrained and subtle storytelling techniques. He departed from a collective search for identity to land progressively on an individual and autobiographical one, in an almost ad nauseum way for most of his old fans. After the international success of “All About My Mother” released in 1999, the director will release a series of implicitly autobiographical films and use his own persona as the main tragic epicenter in the narratives. Although these new focuses could still qualify as Baroque, they are no longer concerned with Spanish society as a whole but appear to many viewers as purely egocentric. Films such as “Bad Education” (2004) or “Pain and Glory” (2019) are clearly taking the director’s experience of aging in a now-democratic Spanish society as an exceptional trajectory rather than a common one experienced by most Spaniards. For this reason, this article is not focusing on any film beyond the year 2000. This change in direction coinciding with the turn of the century, the advent of the euro and the free circulation of culture in the European Union can be attributed to a variety of factors, including personal growth, evolving interests, and the changing cultural landscape. As Almodóvar matured as a filmmaker, he also became a brand (El Deseo, S.A.), and began to delve into more nuanced and introspective themes, focusing on tragic character development, psychological depth, and social issues.

For this reason, the Baroqueness of his 21st-century production is still discussed by critics such as William Eggington, who sees “in Almodóvar’s cinema an imagistic rendering of the world that subtly undoes major baroque presuppositions concerning the relation of appearances to the world out there” (Egginton 2010, p. 108). By exploring new directions and pushing himself creatively, Almodóvar was able to expand his artistic horizons and continue to evolve as a filmmaker. Additionally, the shift in Almodóvar’s style may have been influenced by a desire to experiment with different genres and storytelling approaches. For this reason, this research will not focus on any film produced by the director beyond the reception of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2000, but rather understand the filmmaker’s work prior to the reception of this maximal recognition, before the shift from a collective search for identity to an individual one. While his later films may not feature the overtly Baroque elements of his earlier works, they still retain his signature blend of drama, humor, and visual flair.

One of the key features that connect Almodóvar’s early films to Baroque aesthetics is the exaggerated and theatrical portrayal of emotions. Baroque art aimed to evoke strong emotional responses from viewers through its grandiose and intense narratives, and Almodóvar’s films are no exception. The characters in his early films experience extreme passions with comic relief and self-derision, conflicts that often reunite sexual desire with the death drive, and desires that can be inspired by religious mandates, mirroring the emotional intensity commonly found in Baroque paintings and literature. In terms of visual style, Almodóvar’s early films also exhibit a Baroque sensibility through their use of vibrant colors, elaborate costumes, and ornate set designs that all contribute to create pastiche identities, as if the different components of Spanish society would look better on the passerella of a fashion-show. The richness and opulence of these visual elements create a sense of extravagance and luxury, reminiscent of the lavish and decorative aesthetics of Baroque art where characters become tragic prototypes. In sum, the bold color schemes and lavish costumes in Almodóvar’s films serve to heighten the melodrama and create a sense of heightened reality, much like the theatricality of Baroque art, which looks at the world as a stage, and people as actors. He somewhat translates the taste for meta-theatricality developed in the 17th century into cinematic duplications and intertwined plots.

Furthermore, the narrative structures of Almodóvar’s early films display a complexity and intricacy that are characteristic of Baroque storytelling. The traditional lines between tragedy and comedy are blurred at the same time, so that the audience is never totally prepared to accept the traditional differences set by Aristotle between them. Multiple subplots, interconnected storylines, and overlapping themes are common features in both Baroque literature and Almodóvar’s films, creating a sense of depth and layers of meaning. The blurring of reality and fantasy in Almodóvar’s narratives also echoes the Baroque fascination with illusions, disguise, and theatricality. While Almodóvar’s early films may be perceived as kitsch or camp on the surface, a closer examination reveals their deeper connection to the Baroque artistic tradition. Through their exaggerated emotional content, ornate visual style, and complex narrative structures, these films embody the theatricality, extravagance, and emotional intensity that are hallmarks of the Baroque period. Almodóvar’s blending of kitsch, camp, and Baroque elements creates a unique and vibrant cinematic style that continues to captivate audiences worldwide.

Pedro Almodóvar began his career as a filmmaker in the late 1970s by making short films and writing scripts. He gained recognition with his first feature film “Pepi, Luci, Bom” in 1980, which was a provocative and comical take on Spain’s post-Franco culture. Almodóvar’s early works were heavily influenced by the daring and provocative underground cinema of John Waters and the avant-garde films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. While Almodóvar’s films often feature bold and vibrant colors, exaggerated characters, and melodramatic plots, it would not be fully accurate to say that his main influences were exclusively Baroque. Instead, he has cited influences from a variety of sources including classic Hollywood cinema, Spanish melodrama, and pop culture. Additionally, Almodóvar’s unique style and approach to filmmaking have been shaped by his personal experiences, political beliefs, and cultural context. Overall, Almodóvar’s work is characterized by his distinctive voice and his ability to blend different genres and storytelling techniques. Instead of attributing a Baroque style to the director, it would be safer to observe in his works the many declinations and transitions that emulate the chiaroscuri of the seventeenth century.

3. Pepi, Luci, Bom, the First Baroque Transition

“Pepi, Luci, Bom” is one of Pedro Almodóvar’s early films, released in 1980. The film is often seen as a reflection of the end of Francoism and the beginning of the Transition period in Spain. It features a Baroque style in various aspects that connect to the historical and cultural context of the time, especially in the recreation of a female parody of the Holy Trinity. The Baroque elements of “Pepi, Luci, Bom” can be seen in its use of vibrant colors, exaggerated characters, and melodramatic storytelling for the purpose of imitation of behaviors, accents, attitudes and episodes of violence. The film’s bold and irreverent approach to themes of sexuality, gender, and power reflects the rebellious and subversive spirit of the Baroque era in a scarred post-Franco Spain that can only understand shock therapy, according to the young director from la Mancha. The three caricatural characters in the film are larger-than-life, with their exaggerated emotions and actions serving as a critique of societal norms and expectations. In the context of the end of Francoism and the Transition period in Spain, the Baroque style of “Pepi, Luci, Bom” can be seen as a response to the need for artistic and cultural freedom after years of repression and censorship. The film’s daring and provocative content challenged the conservative values of the Franco regime and celebrated individuality, diversity, and subversion. Emanuel Levy notes that:

Depicting sexual and scatological taboos, which challenge acceptable (bourgeois) taste, “Pepi, Luci, Bom” shows the director’s penchant for excess and provocation, his need to shock viewers with ultra-frank dialogue and biological and sexual acts that are considered “degrading” by mainstream society.

(Levy 2014)

This provocative Baroque style, with its emphasis on excess, theatricality, and emotional intensity, was well-suited to capture the turbulent and uncertain atmosphere of Spain during the Transition period. The film’s decadent and chaotic aesthetic mirrored the complexities and contradictions of the time, offering a space for dissent, imagination, and creativity. “Pepi, Luci, Bom” embodies the Baroque sensibility through its bold and unconventional approach to storytelling, its flamboyant visual style, and its critique of societal norms through its exhibitionist qualities. By embracing the Baroque style, Almodóvar was able to create a film that resonated with the changing social and political landscape of Spain during the Transition period, offering a unique and defiant voice in the face of a potential return of repression and censorship. Obviously, the success of the low-budget film that took three years to make (1977–1980) will motivate the director to engage even more in this style in subsequent works.

4. The Fold in the Dark Habits

In his analysis of the “fold” in his 1991 essay titled “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,” (Deleuze and Strauss 1991). French philosopher Gilles Deleuze explores the concept of the fold as a metaphor for the intricate and complex nature of reality and existence:

The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds…Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity. First, the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinites, as if infinitely were composed of two floors: the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul (3).

The fold represents the idea that reality is not linear or straightforward but rather multi-dimensional, with layers of complexity and interconnectedness. When applying Deleuze’s analysis of the fold to Pedro Almodóvar’s film “Dark Habits” released in 1983, we can see how the film’s narrative and visual elements embody this concept of complexity and interconnectedness. Titled “Entre Tinieblas” in Spanish, the movie tells the story of a singer who seeks refuge in a convent full of eccentric and troubled nuns. The film explores themes of faith, sin, redemption, and the complexities of human nature as Spain enters its second year of Socialist government under the direction of Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a central figure in the development of the film industry in Spain who will soon become Almodóvar’s friend. Unfolding Catholicism and its ‘dark habits’ is part of a life-long commitment and continues to be reflected in later works.

In the film, Almodóvar uses the convent as a metaphorical space where different layers of reality and identity come together. The nuns, each with their own personal struggles and desires, represent the diverse facets of human experience made in Spain. The convent, a metaphor for the nation, itself becomes a kind of fold, where different narratives, emotions, and conflicts intersect and overlap. Additionally, Almodóvar’s use of vibrant colors, bold visuals, and melodramatic storytelling techniques in “Dark Habits” can be seen as reflecting the Baroque sensibility of the fold, enhanced by the Dalí-esque delirium of a heroine-addict Mother Superior after she shoots up alongside the prostitute she falls in love with. This film is not, of course, the only one where we can witness such phenomenon.1 The film’s exaggerated and stylized aesthetic adds a layer of complexity and depth to the narrative, inviting viewers to explore the multiple dimensions of the characters and their interconnected stories. By applying Deleuze’s analysis of the fold to “Dark Habits,” we can see how Almodóvar’s film embodies the complex and multi-dimensional nature of reality, identity, and human experience, inviting viewers to delve deeper into the intricate layers of the narrative and the characters’ inner worlds, in the footsteps of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels or Zayas’s Disenchantments of Love, both published in the early 17th century. The Baroqueness of this film is also amplified by the constant chiaroscuri of the convent rooms, a very feminine space where the only male presences (the priest and the tiger) are treated as children by the nuns who have repressed their maternal instincts, somewhere in the Baroque infinity of folds. Like the tiger in his cage, the nuns in the enclosed space of the convent symbolize the traumatic years of repression that Spain is still trying to cope with in the early 1980s.

In order to represent triptical characters and ‘unfold’ them, Almodóvar will use in subsequent narratives the Baroque technique of actor’s ricochet, which consists in having actors carry the significative weight of previous roles into new ones. In other words, the transitions will become visible by exploiting to its maximum capacities the archetypal qualities associated with one particular actress or actor and have them bounce in three to five roles that will form together an interpretative paradigm, in the fashion of Baroque mass entertainer Lope de Vega who understood the significative weight associated with actors. Almodóvar is not the only narrative-builder that is aware of the long-term effect of ricochets. I want to argue that the ‘four angels’ of his cinematic apocalypse, the four flat stones that will rebound on the surface of the years of the Spanish transition in the last two decades of the 20th century, are Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas and Marisa Paredes. They all define a very clear continuity in the larger representation formed by the ensemble of films released between 1980 and 2000. Obviously, Cecilia Roth, Julietta Serrano, Chus Lampreave, Véronique Forqué, and others recurring actresses will design similar trajectories in the background of their stages, but these four figures will remain attached to the works of Pedro Almodóvar until he obtains the Oscar, as they offered their best years of acting to the ricochet roles he had in mind for each of them. Their collaboration with the director is long over, except for Antonio Banderas, the only male figure in this batch of tarot deck, who continues to work alongside the Spanish director, oftentimes representing the aging Almodóvar himself, as can be seen in “Pain and Glory” (2019).

5. Carmen Maura, or the New via Crucis of the Spanish Woman in the 1980s

What has she done to deserve this? The 1980s woman certainly has a face in Almodóvar’s world, and it is Carmen Maura’s. From Pepi, to Sor Perdida, to Pepa, to Gloria, to Tina, to Julia, the Spanish actress will collect many roles in his films during the two decades that Spain needs to undergo its transition to democracy.2 Carmen Maura knows her Baroque classics and comes from a strong record in theater performances. Her debut in cinema and her international recognition is largely due to Almodóvar’s fascination with her capacity to be this every-woman in a post-Franco Spain. She also secured national recognition with “Ay, Carmela!” in 1990, a culminating and highly acclaimed moment in Carlos Saura’s filmography. She will appear as a recurring figure, an archetype of the new Spanish woman, in constant search of definitions and representations, and potentially an prototype of the independent childless female stepping into the world of male domination and reversing the roles in comic situations.

Unlike other chicas Almodóvar, Carmen Maura didn’t get stuck to a social class in her many interpretations of Spanish women at the center of the action. Alongside Pedro, she was able to impersonate high-end bourgeoise just as much as she could play the role of an overwhelmed working-class mother in the high-rise projects on the outskirts of Madrid, confined with a family that starves her mentally, sexually and physically. Gloria, whose name is already a Baroque comic device of dark irony, is a body in prison and yet the immediate future of Spain, given the need for working class relocation around the capital in an economy that is trying to catch up to the rest of Europe and the world. Almodóvar takes a very intimate look at this woman who carries the weight of a whole generation with comic pessimism, self-derision, excess and addiction, generational conflicts and not much to contemplate on the horizon. Once again, since the Baroque period of the Spanish Empire, the abuse of the working class by a dominant class holding on to most of the country’s wealth becomes a central theme of popular narratives. There is a need to represent the new misery, the poverty of the aftermath of dictatorship. In times of darkness, the Nietzschean perception of existence as trapped in eternal return tends to surface. During the years of the transition, the festive spirit that Spain seeks to project often appears tainted with doubt, fear and despair. Not only does the economy meet some serious drawbacks, but the people themselves are questioning the new system that does not seem to get them to decent economic circumstances fast enough. This general feeling of circling back to a previous historical situation makes the film “What have I done to deserve this?” (1984) very central in the Baroque declinations that Carmen Maura was able to offer during her collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar. Even though this friendship has come to an end since then, both actor and director shared the Baroque vision of the challenges that women have to face between 1980 and 2000 in the myriad of films that united them.

Pessimistic visions with drastic contrasts and very little space for hope of a better future such as the one that we have in this movie are very Baroque in nature. The saturation and the excess that characterizes the artistic period we are connecting to Almodóvar’s early work is present in all of the other films he produced in the decade, with more imagery that we would ever have room to discuss. Nonetheless, “What have I done to deserve this?” echoes the questioning of Christ during the Passion, and it is truly a composition worthy of the very best Baroque via crucis, or in other words, the justification of suffering through passion. This film sticks out as very Cervantine in many aspects, including the heavy irony, the multiple meanings in dialogues, the striking contrasts between the different actors of society, the multiplicity of spaces contained within the same building. The religiosity of the storyline might not appear as obvious as in previous or future films, but the chiaroscuri are consistent in the film and emphasize the Passion of Gloria throughout this brand-new Madrid housing project that is already falling apart. The confinement and the ephemeral nature of her environment emulates the architecture of Baroque churches, with their labyrinthic and vertiginous artefacts, along with the lack of care for durability. Too old already to truly enjoy the potentially brighter future of Spain beyond the transition, and too young to completely give up on life, Gloria embodies a sacrificed generation of women in Spain who have nothing better to do than cleaning the room of her prostitute neighbor, Kristal, after—or even during—the sex she has with her clients (Figure 1). Some of these men enjoy seeing this mother figure in action around them while they consume the body of a sex worker who has created a stereotypical American love suite, and dreams of becoming famous in Hollywood one day, creating therefore a completely artificial persona that slowly changes her identity. This contrast puta/madre between the two women is a very Baroque triangular desire system that can be read from different angles and remains emblematic by nature.

In contrast with Gloria, Carmen Maura will move on to interpret one of the most important roles of her career with Pepa, the protagonist of “Women of the verge of a nervous breakdown” (1988). As the title also indicates, the via crucis is not over for the modern Spanish woman. Unlike Gloria, Pepa has no apparent financial trouble and lives in a Baroque space of abundance: a huge penthouse with an enormous terrace full of plants and animals, which she compares to Noah’s Ark, as if she wanted to save the rural life at the heart of the city. Just like her poor counterpart Gloria, the central female figure who Maura interprets is psychologically tortured by Iván, a stereotypical galán and obviously modern Don Juan, who turns out to be a very Baroque character. Like Calderón de la Barca’s famous character Segismundo from the celebrated Baroque theater play Life is a dream composed in 1636, Pepa is never sure to fully know in what reality she is with all the anxiolíticos she takes to forget about her romantic break-up. Iván, as typical narcissist, creates for her and maintains her in a situation of cognitive dissonance that literally keeps her on the verge of that nervous breakdown. Her bourgeois love story is somewhat rendered pathetic for the viewer’s perspective as the movie begins after the break-up. Fiction and reality seem intertwined for the entire duration of the film. According to Carlos Jerez Farrán (2010): “Semejantes titubeos entre ficción y realidad son característicos de la filmografía de un director que se propone replantear nuestros conceptos de lo real y lo ficticio, de la verdad y de la mentira, sin que lleguemos a ver plenamente dónde empieza una y termina la otra” (p. 75). As woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Pepa will have to overcome her anxiety to take control of her life through trials and tribulations, offering an example of strength for all women of her generations caught in between two eras, women in a Baroque transition. In spite of the threat of breaking down, this 1988 film remains somewhat optimistic and suggests a somewhat brighter future for working women in urban contexts, as long as they keep sacred their connection with nature, animals and rural traditions outside of the city. In subsequent films, many female characters will be trapped between their urban identity and their rural one, and this Baroque tension they will face will be a recurrent theme in the works of the director from la Mancha.

6. Victoria Abril, or the Scarred Sensuality of Spain

Almodóvar will cultivate another Baroque project to represent femininity in transition with actress Victoria Abril, a rising star of Spanish and French cinema already acclaimed by European neighbors who sees in her the projection of the new Spanish woman. Abril was never a co-star of Maura in an Almodóvar film, because he would never have been to give his full attention to the both of them. He might be capable of combining leading actresses in his 21st-century production, but back in the 1980s and 1990s, there was always a unique chica in his película. Abril is the most sensual and sexual of his actresses during the years of transition. Oftentimes adopting a very infantile behavior to seduce men, she clearly exposes conflicts dealing with the conflicts between the different masculinities around her. She is visited by male prototypes like Dicken’s Scrooge by the ghosts; there are the men of the past, of the present and of the future in her life. These three generations of men are familiar to most Spanish female spectators. Her desire is often stronger than her principles and she gives into forbidden pleasures very naturally. In “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!” (1990), “High Heels” (1992) and “Kika” (1994), Victoria Abril will offer her early thirties, a very prime time in the life of actors and actresses, to Pedro Almodóvar and will interpret under his direction some of her most complex roles, contributing in each of them to representing the erosion and reformation of the Spanish femininity. As Paul Julian Smith (2000), a Baroque specialist turned Almodóvar expert, points in his 1994 milestone volume Desire Unlimited: the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar: “In Victoria Abril’s subtle performance, Marina is initially presented as a woman confident enough to survive male voyeurism (…). This female lineage, so comforting in its continuity, is however constantly under threat, menaced with interruption” (109–10). This tension is one of many in the characters to which Abril will give birth thanks to her unmatched capacity to go from comic to tragic in the blink of an eye.

In “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!,” she plays Marina, an ex porn star with an addiction problem trying to get her life together as actress in mainstream cinema under the guidance of a crippled man from the Franco years who has lost all inspiration. She ends falling in love with her kidnapper because he shows signs of traditional masculinity. In “High Heels,” Abril is Rebecca, a TV journalist who has married the ex-lover of her celebrity mother of the same name and secretly has sex with a transvestite who happens to be a criminal judge under cover. In “Kika,” finally, she is also a TV figure hosting the overly pessimistic and caricatural reality show Lo peor del día as Andrea Caracortada, already a woman who has been wounded by men and is desperately seeking pleasure from them (Figure 2). The three figures have a conflictive relation with the Baroque masculinity of the transition years, where men are now facing different models and become mystery to the female audience. Victoria Abril, on the other hand, embodies the female counterpart character who displays a frantic laughter when having an orgasm with the wrong man.

Through both Maura and Abril, Pedro Almodóvar draws the challenges of the Spanish woman in years of semantic confusion; nothing appears to be what it is used to be anymore and the constant change of signifiers in the transition years gives way to tragic situations that are turned into comic scenes in the films of the Spanish director. Although concerned with the representations of dire economic circumstances and financial hardship in “What have I done to deserve this?,” Almodóvar full remains focused on professionally successful woman who show financial independence until he shortly revisits it in “Volver” (2006) with the character of Raimunda. This Baroque impulse to show contrasts in society reminds the viewer that the transition years are not lived equally by all women: while some achieve success and independence from men, many remain slave to a system that now calls itself democracy but remains largely influenced by decades of authoritarian rule on women. As J.C. Hawkins (2019) clearly sums up: “Almodóvar’s baroque serves to offer a departure from an oppressive past without denying the harm it has done” (514). Carmen Maura and Victoria Abril became the icons of this departure in the 1980s and 1990s.

7. Antonio Banderas: The Male Baroque Sexuality in the Urban Labyrinth

Through the promotions of the famous chicas Almodóvar, male actors in Almodóvar films often had to stay in the Baroque shadows of their female counterparts. It is often ignored by the general public, for instance, that Antonio Banderas, Spain’s most iconic and famous male actor from the turn of the century, began his acting career playing sexually confused young men in the then-daring Almodóvar films. It is therefore worth analyzing another very Baroque approach in the director’s project to represent Spanish male sexuality in its full transition during the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps the four films that better speak to this artistic endeavor are “Labyrinth of Passions” (1982), “Matador” (1986), “Law of Desire” (1987), and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988). The Baroque transition we can observe in the continuation of these four narratives revolves around the characters played by Antonio Banderas. These years will cement a partnership between the actor and the director that seems to last strong to this day. Although we will see him in “Women on the Verge” and then later in “Tie me up, tie me down!” as heterosexual man, Banderas will embody male sexual confusion in the three films during the years of the transition, and more such roles will come his way into the next century (Figure 3).

In his 1980’s roles of Sadec, Ángel, Antonio or Carlos, Antonio Banderas embodies the Spanish man in transition, opening up to a reconfiguration of society in the aftermath of an eroded authoritarian regime with very little flexibility in terms of sexuality. While women face the cruelty of new spaces that open up to them, men are confused with the spaces in which they have normally envisioned sex. Madrid is, of course, this Baroque labyrinth in which all of Spain, Europe, Latin America and the rest of the world converge with a clear understanding of the random nature of sexual attraction. Since the Hapsburg dynasty made this central crossroad in Spain the capital city, they brought with them the culture of the labyrinth, which also becomes a metaphor for the years of transition to democracy, when Spain takes many wrong turns and doesn’t know its way out of trauma and tragedy yet. Labyrinths are a very Baroque motif that only wealthy aristocrats could make in their gardens to entertain their guests. According to Walter Benjamin (2002), “ the city is the realisation of that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth. It is this reality to which the flâneur, without knowing it, devotes himself” (429).

Its principle is very simple: each individual will be challenged by wrong turns, and the dead end becomes part of everyone’s experience. Instinct is activated in characters played by Banderas to find the exit, and random encounters happen along the way. The labyrinth or the maze is the exercise that Spaniards need to undergo in order to become democratic subjects and simulate their new identity as Baudelaire’s flâneur.

The role of the urban space and the connection with Madrid in Almodóvar’s films have been observed and analyzed copiously in the constant scholarship about the Spanish director. But less has been said about the Baroque nature of Madrid and its connection with the sexual transitions that Spanish men can experience. From a middle-eastern terrorist, to a clearly repressed gay man psychologically abused by an Opus-Dei mother, to a obsessive homosexual lover turned killer, to a castrated fiancé in the shadow of a Don-Juan-esque father, Banderas collects roles of conflicted identities that can only survive in the only place that allows it: the capital city. Mark Allinson notes in A Spanish Labyrinth: the films of Pedro Almodóvar (Allinston 2001) that: “The use of the actor Antonio Banderas in three successive gay-coded roles has had a curious effect on film audience reception of homosexual characters” (107). In the streets of Madrid or in those of Philadelphia (as goes Springsteen’s soundtrack of the American film where Banderas will also play a gay role), the Spanish/Hispanic prototype Banderas decomposes male sexuality in a myriad of possibilities while reaffirming his heterosexuality in the media world and selling other masculine items such as cologne and leather bracelets to the world. Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito claim in Live Flesh: the male body in contemporary Spanish cinema (Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito 2007) that: “the period of political transition towards democracy was a productive time for cultural productions in Spain during which previously oppressed marginal identities were allowed to merge and develop. (…) This was a time in which male bodies would become eroticized in magazines for the first time” (115). In cinema, the characters interpreted by Banderas are all an invitation to join the urban labyrinth, the spaces in the city where anonymous men can bump into new sexual situations and enjoy the new eroticization of their bodies as flâneur. Anne Friedberg claims that “this ‘perfect spectator’ was resolutely male, an observing ‘prince’ who was allowed the paradoxical pleasure: to be at home away from home, in the midst of the world and yet hidden from it, impassioned and yet impartial, here and yet elsewhere” (Friedberg 1993, p. 29). The characters embodied by Banderas often tell the story of Almodóvar’s unachieved dreams but are also somewhat biographical and all share this paradoxical pleasure. The randomness of Madrid gives men identifying with the Banderas archetypes an opportunity to go from one identity to the next without justification and with art. With each homoerotic encounters, the male identity in the maze continues to find its new definitions.

Indistinguishable from the paths of life themselves, the streets of Madrid, where the director finds in all of Spain the most complex spaces of transition to capture on film, are the theater where Spanish masculinity finds new reflections, new archetypes, new emblems, new icons to emulate, with all of their ambiguity. Without a doubt in one of these most flagrant cases, Antonio Banderas does not ‘age out’ of his roles, like his female counterparts, but will continue to embody Almodóvar’s male prototype that will evolve into a stereotype at times but mostly into an archetype. The 2019 film “Pain and Glory,” is a very clear example of how the director becomes obsessed with his own life trajectories in this use of the actor for self-portrait. In this sense, Almodóvar and Banderas have maintained a quite symbiotic relationship. The Baroque period is highly focused on emblematic characters and adopts the ricochet roles as new technique. Just as in the textual labyrinth we find in Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares or his most celebrated Don Quixote, Almodóvar raises mysterious and ambivalent characters who shed a strong chiaroscuro on the scenes of his films. Antonio Banderas will start his career in this Baroque trajectory as one of the most picaresque characters of the early films.

8. Conclusions: The Baroque Versality of Cecilia Roth and Marisa Paredes

In their 2009 comprehensive volume titled All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema, Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki look back at a filmography that has taken turns in and out of the Baroque trajectories defined at the dawn of the director’s career. In the reunion of fifteen recognized scholars working on Almodóvar, the two editors remind their readers in the introduction of “the director’s work as an experiment in the baroque” (15) and claim that:

[t]he essays included in this volume could be said to create their own ‘baroque’ or ‘neobaroque’ approach to Almodóvar’s œuvre, making reference to melodrama, comedy, tragedy, horror, science fiction, pornography, and film noir, music, song, television, video, photography, design, and visual arts (16).

(Epps and Kakoudaki 2009, p. 16)

Maybe the actresses who will show this most Baroque versatility in transitioning from one genre to another in the early films of Almodóvar are Cecilia Roth and Marisa Paredes. Their presence at the director’s coveted court will be long, and often more discreet as well. Their capacity for excess and their background in theater give them naturally Baroque acting qualities. Unlike the ricochet figures interpreted by Maura, Abril and Banderas, their roles can be all seen as individual and not necessarily part of a narrative thread across movies. In other words, there is nothing directly connecting the Marisa Paredes interpreting Sister Manure (Sor Estiercol) in “Dark Habits” with the character of Huma Rojo from “All about my mother,” on the surface. There is little in common between the Cecilia Roth of “Pepi, Luci, Bom” having to pee in a phone booth with the tragic character of Manuela she delivers in “All about my mother.” Not everyone gets to be a Baroque ricochet. Cecilia Roth will not have a main role between “Labyrinth of Passions” (1982) and “All about my mother” (1999). Marisa Paredes, on the other hand, will have her successive years of triumph in the nineties with “High Heels” (1991) and “The Flower of my Secret” (1995).

“High Heels” might, in fact, be one of the culminating Baroque films that Almodóvar ever made. The parodying of one another’s identity, which can at times be perceived as appropriation, alters the characters’ desires. When Becky del Páramo, Rebeca, Alberto and Femme Letal meet at the cabaret after Letal’s lip-sync performance of “Un año de amor,” there is a mirror effect between the aging singer and her imitator (Figure 4a,b). Rebeca, whose name is the official version of her mother’s, has married Becky’s ex lover Alberto, and is about to have furtive sex with the transvestite who impersonates her mother in his changing room in the next sequence. “The plot is almost Shakespearian in its inclusion of outlandish disguises and absurd romantic entanglements (…) Rebeca and Letal’s identities are consciously constructed in response to, and as a reflection of Becky’s” (Ashleigh 2017). In this sense, the shadow of the seventeenth-century English playwright is very Baroque, and yes, we can find in this sequence the reunion of all the characteristics usually attributed to the Baroque period and the genres it deals with.

Marisa Paredes and Shakespeare have already met earlier on in life, when the young actress started her career in the sixties, under Franco. Paredes was, and will remain for long, the incarnation of this generation ‘in-between’ who is already too old to contemplate a lifetime in democracy and too young to be nostalgic about the dictatorship years. As an artist who develop during the years of the dictatorship, she enters cinematic celebrity rather late in life, but her tragic interpretations will contribute to Almodóvar’s growing reputation and the obtention of his many recognitions precisely for this reason. Yet, when Becky del Páramo (the role that most viewers associate with her) tells Femme Letal that she should impersonate her in most recent songs of hers, the transvestite (interpreted by then-sexually-ambiguous Spanish singer Miguel Bosé) looks at her and replies with sincerity: “A mí me vas más lo antiguo tuyo…” (I much prefer your old stuff…). The nostalgia of songs she performed under Franco is experienced by the drag queen whose culture has realized an appropriation of the old boleros, with all their Baroque essence. Now that these songs of authoritarian times are displaced in the democratic present, they become baroque. In the same fashion, Almodóvar is already aware that soon his films will also become “old stuff” but will remain just as Baroque by essence. The early films have this quality that will be hard to maintain in the next three decades, where mirror reflections and parodies will take a different aspect. The early films are the foundations on which the Spanish director will continue to be recognized and celebrated, his most creative and inspiring ‘stuff.’ And, as a critic and aficionado myself, I am not afraid to claim it as Letal did: “A mí me vas más lo antiguo!”3