Review of Pedro Almodóvar's assortment of quick tales “The Last Novel” | EUROtoday

Pedro Almodóvar has not but written an autobiography. It couldn't have been resulting from a scarcity of fabric to stay on: what wouldn't there have been to inform, from his childhood within the province of Ciudad Real in La Mancha, to the expertise of the monastery faculty in Cáceres, his transfer to Madrid in 1967 and the contact there with the experimental movie and theater scene, the Movida of the Seventies, to the spectacular success of “All About My Mother” (1999) or his thrilling collaboration with the actor Antonio Banderas?

It was positively not resulting from a scarcity of capacity to jot down. It is subsequently sympathetic and assured that as an alternative of memoirs, Almodóvar has now offered a set of twelve tales which, because the writer writes within the foreword, come “as close as possible to a fragmented, incomplete and somewhat cryptic autobiography”.

Foreshadowing of his movie

The now seventy-four-year-old, internationally acclaimed movie director didn’t simply strive his hand at being a author in his outdated age, however reasonably the texts collected in “The Last Dream” have been created within the lengthy time-frame from 1967 to 2022. Almodóvar blames its present publication totally on the efforts of his long-time assistant Lola García, who had archived his texts through the years and to whom he has now devoted the ensuing e book.

It is subsequently an intense, non-public want to jot down (“From an early age I saw myself as a writer”), which is on the identical time surprisingly acutely aware of type and exhibits us an Almodóvar for whom cinema, life and literature are inextricably linked. Whose “literary vocation” is a recurring theme right here.

The first textual content within the quantity, “The Visit”, apparently written in 1967, earlier than the beginning of her movie profession, tells of the go to of an extravagantly dressed girl to a faculty run by the Salesian Order, with whose director she has an outdated rating to settle. The narrative is atmospherically dense, characterised by a exactly developed dialogue, and by way of dramaturgy it’s an nearly classically composed quick story. For these aware of Almodóvar, it’s clear that it foreshadows his later movie “Bad Education” (2004), during which a narrative referred to as “The Visit” performs a central position.

“Write down everything that comes to mind”

In the next story, a theater director experiences in a extra private, anecdotal type about his love affair with an actor named León, whose “irrepressible postmodern spirit” and “border-transcending character” encourage him to learn the works of Tennessee Williams (“Endstation Sehnsucht”) with him “), Jean Cocteau (“The Human Voice”) and John Cassavetes (“Opening Night”) in a brand new means, and naturally meaning from a queer perspective.