When people ask me why I moved to Madrid, I always say that it was because I fell in love. The love I’m referring to is - as love tends to be - manifold, multifaceted and somewhat opaque. And the stories I tell about it change, depending on the day or my mood. One of them is that it all began with Pedro Almodóvar.
Like many memories, I’ve come to learn that this one is half-fabrication. However, who cares about facts. This is a love story. I prefer my half-fabrication, and I feel Pedro might agree with me. It goes like this:
Aged 12, two years before I would start studying Spanish at school, Mum, who was always interested in improving mine and my sister’s minds, took us to Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry’s only art house cinema, to see a film by Pedro Almodóvar. Despite the name, Warwick Arts Centre was actually located in Coventry, but - like many of us from there - they liked to distance themselves from that fact. Although we lived on an oh-so-very Coventrian council estate, the arts centre wasn’t that far from our home. We lived on the edge of the estate, occupying an in-between space. On two sides we were surrounded by woodland and a large open park, and on the other two by dilapidated housing and a long row of car factories. A setting which educated me perfectly in how to live in two worlds at once.
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In my unrealiable memory, that time when I was 12, we went to see Todo sobre mi madre. Although it actually came out 7 years later. So, if we really did see one of his films when I was 12, it would have been Tacones lejanos or Kika, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t see until I was already living in Madrid. And this is where I decide it doesn’t matter because, for me, his films are a world of their own. What they did, collectively and individually, was transport me.
(Later, when I started learning Spanish at school, language had the same effect. I would sit in class and instead of just mindlessly repeating, ‘Quiero un café solo, por favor’, I would be sitting outside, at a table shaded from the sun by a large umbrella, looking up into the face of the camerero and saying it. Even though my school had a bad reputation, I was still nowhere near the top of the class, but when I heard strange words coming out of my mouth, observed myself understanding the strange words that came from my teachers’ mouths, I was amazed, and could imagine that I was someone else entirely.)
They represented a world that was so hugely different to the one I was living in - a grey, industrial, Midlands city with its attitude of proud hopelessness. And people so different to me and those that I knew. Girls and women especially. The women in Almodóvar’s films were bold and colourful, not timid and worried like I was. Their lives were chaotic, they didn’t lay low as I had been taught, but that was okay too, rather than something dangerous or frightening.
When I finally visited Madrid as an adult and learnt about la Movida madrileña, the cultural revolution that followed the end of Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy, I came to understand how Madrid herself was a character in Almodóvar’s films. The city represented the thrill, the creativity, the abandon of the Movida. And so, like Pedro, I fell in love with Madrid too. When I finally emigrated, I ended up living in La Latina, the neighbourhood where many of Almodóvar’s films were shot. To walk down to buy bread in the morning, I passed the fountain where, in La flor de mi secreto, Marisa Paredes sat and paid a man to help remove her boots, a present from her absent husband, which she had been trapped in for days, owing to them being too tight. And the apartment building where, in the final scene of La ley del deseo, a fire broke out in a gigantic homemade altar. And the serpentine backstreet where Rossy de Palma beat up Antonio Banderas for stealing her drugs in ¡Átame!.
It was like living in one of his films: an inverted reflection of when I lived in Coventry and from that distance dreamed about the world I was now living in. Walking around La Latina, I could trace a psychogeographical map of those different selves, one transposed over the other: geological layers of the self.
I’ve recently started making my way through Almodóvar’s back catalogue, in chronological order, 32 years after that first trip to Warwick Arts Centre. It’s a different experience now, watching them from the other end of emigration, from the other end of young adulthood. It’s like looking at a cross-section of that strata of self, and reexamining what it took for the geological layers to form. I feel proud, and occasionally a little sad. Sad, perhaps, that it took me so long to start to grow up and out of that proud hopelessness (note: start). But mainly happy to be where I am today. Like I said, this is a love story. And maybe in the end it's myself that Almodóvar made me fall in love with.
Looooooove this Jayne - and like Sue felt I was living this vicariously through you too. The idea of the geological layers of self is such a beautiful one, makes me start to wonder about my own. ❤️
That's lovely. Almodóvar is my favourite director. A genius. And Madrid - what a city!