The 33rd entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. MUBI's retrospective, The Art of Transgression: The Cinema of Almodóvar, is showing August 18 – October 19, 2019 in the United Kingdom.
Artistic and media representations of every kind (film, theater, song) take pride of place in the films of Pedro Almodóvar. All such vignettes mirror the main action and comment on it in various ways. But Almodóvar juices an even greater value from them: he generates a plot from their gradually knit or unfolded interconnection, as the years of the story pass and the various pieces fall into place.
Kika (1993) is an extreme entry in this auteur’s filmography, an outrageous satire that temporarily abandoned the sentimental vein in his work. For that very reason, it reveals the formalist aspect of his storytelling structures all the more clearly. The Flower of My Secret (1995) took another path: its rich emotions belong as much to location, landscape, music, and dance as they do to the unforgettable characters.