Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/13/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986)

Nacho Martínez and Assumpta Serna in Matador

Cast: Assumpta Serna, Antonio Banderas, Nacho Martínez, Eva Cobo, Julieta Serrano, Chus Lampreave, Carmen Maura, Eusebio Poncela. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar, Jesús Ferrero. Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández. Production design: Fernando Sánchez. Film editing: José Salcedo. Music: Andrés Vicente Gómez.

Pedro Almodóvar was just getting established as a major filmmaker -- his big breakthrough, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, would come in 1988 -- when he released Matador, a film whose spicy stew of eccentrically transgressive characters, sex, and violence, all treated with a comic vision, led critics to compare him to Luis Buñuel. It has become more clear that Almodóvar is his own man, whatever the influences may have been.