I saw this the other day with my boyfriend and I couldn’t stop thinking about how Pedro Almodóvar has slowly but surely become my absolute favourite director. Even in a film like this, with a fairly (and comparatively) unassuming story, with relatively banal twists and turns, the craft work, level of skill and thought put into every frame leaves me enraptured.
When I was 15 I desperately wanted to be a film director (an ambition that fell by the wayside when I started writing music) and my ambition was to make films where not a single shot was throwaway. This might sound obvious, right? But even in middling to great Hollywood fare, most shots seem to be set up for simple convenience. In Almodóvar’s films I feel like he’s obsessed over every frame, and in the process come up with something totally unique. Shots filmed backwards via a small mirror, from under a table, from a distance. Whatever. Always bizarre and beautiful.
Of course, Almodóvar is by no means the only director to work this way, there are thousands of auteurs who similarly obsess over the aesthetic details, but Pedro’s heady mix of melodrama, sisterhood, surreal humour, colour palette, farce and high emotion make him my absolute fave.
I mean, not that anybody particularly cares, but jsyk.
