This past summer, we put out a call on social media for writers to pitch us stories that they wanted to share with our film-loving community during Pride Month. We received a bounty of wonderful proposals from folks across the world, leading us to the realization that these stories don’t deserve to be restricted to just one month of the year.

With so many of our members detailing how certain films or filmmakers helped shape the way that queer identities are portrayed in cinema, it was inevitable that more than one pitch would invoke the same artist. Such was the case with Letterboxd members Carlos Crespo and Aaron Ruttenberg, who both wanted to go deep on what the films of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar mean to them.

So we invited these Almodóvar-loving strangers—Carlos in Spain, and Aaron in the US—to have a conversation with one another about the Spaniard’s canon, and his place in queer culture.

Almodóvar’s latest film, Parallel Mothers—the story of two single women (Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit) who form a bond after meeting in the hospital room where they are set to give birth—arrives in US theaters this month after screening in several countries internationally. Whether you’re new to his work or a repeat visitor, this holiday season might just be the perfect time to indulge in an Almodóvar retrospective—with Aaron and Carlos in conversation alongside you.

Read on as they dig into their personal histories with the filmmaker, swoon over his extravagant use of color, and celebrate his complicated, messy portrayals of queer characters.

Aaron Ruttenberg: To kick off our conversation about the prolific, queer filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, let’s start by discussing his 2013 comedy, I’m So Excited, which is something of an underappreciated film in his canon. It follows an eccentric flight crew and passengers as they distract themselves from an impending plane crash with mescaline, alcohol and sex.

This film was not warmly received upon release and may end up being Almodóvar’s final full-fledged comedy. As a defender of I’m So Excited, what does it mean to you and why do you think it didn’t connect with audiences as strongly as work past and present from Almodóvar? 

Carlos Crespo: Well, I’ll be the first to admit that it might not be his most formally or narratively innovative film. It’s a bit meandering, and the whole plot happens in what would be an ellipsis in any other movie.

However, most of the criticism I have heard on the film comes from people who were a bit ambivalent on Almodóvar’s most extroverted efforts, and found themselves in front of… well, a very kitsch, thinly plotted exercise in queerness, class struggles, and just a rehash of everything that worked for the filmmaker when he began directing back in the 1980s.

I love the film precisely for these reasons; he’s back to his young and brassy self but holds all the power that a successful career has awarded him. It’s the film that shows that he doesn’t have to hold back, and now it doesn’t even have to be underground: he’s made it, and can do whatever he wants.

It definitely feels, at least to me, that this extravagance was what made audiences and critics bail on him on this one, as if they were expecting a more mature, serious work. But you don’t need to become boring just because you are older! Almodóvar’s claim on queer narratives has always been that of putting his characters on par with more traditional narratives, to the point where they can be villains, murderers, or just about anything and that changes nothing about their queerness, because what they do can never change what they are.

I feel it’s messed up that a stance that can be summed up as “queer people should be allowed the possibility to be fallible” is still so controversial, but alas, here we are. What do you think about the film though, Aaron? What was your first contact with Almodóvar’s work and how did you react to it? I am always interested in this.

AR: I’m So Excited reminded me of his scrappy, sprawling early movies, right down to the ultra-specific characterization and transgressive comedy, all of which are what I appreciate most about Almodóvar. If it didn’t feel as emotionally revelatory as something like Pain and Glory, it makes up for that with the titular musical interlude, which was easily worth the price of admission (or at least my HBO Max subscription).

What I find most interesting is that I’m So Excited feels like an attempt to do something with mass-market appeal, but he hasn’t let go of his thematic mainstays; crime, psychic powers, alter egos and sex workers. For that, I understand its disconnect with an audience that perhaps needed the film to lean in one direction or the other.

When he began working, I find it worked well thematically: Spain was just transitioning from a 40-year dictatorship and there was this sense that anything and everything was valid; this hunger for change and progress became such an intrinsic part of Almodóvar’s world that he couldn’t help make it a key element of his movies, even if he was dealing with simple domestic affairs.

In his most recent, sober films, his characters try to escape to that sort of place (and in cases like I’m So Excited, they succeed massively). In a world filled with ennui, where their lives have plateaued and the only excitement seems to come from a reminiscence of the past, as happens to Antonio Banderas’s character in Pain and Glory… maybe resolving to the kind of excess that made their youth so exciting is the only solution. Or… maybe it isn’t, because they now know how much pain it can cause, even if they have not forgotten the good parts about it.

I want to bring up Lucrecia Martel’s speech at the 76th Venice Film Festival. Presenting the Honorary Golden Lion award to Pedro, she said that: “Long before women, homosexuals [and] trans people got collectively fed up with the miserable place we had in history, Pedro had already made us heroines.”

I find this statement so raw and powerful. The whole speech just makes me emotional every time, but this particular segment is poignant in its specificity of why Almodóvar holds such a relevant place in the world—not only within the industry, but in terms of queer representation at large. What do you think about it?

AR: I think that statement speaks to the creative agency a filmmaker finds when they don’t attempt to placate an audience and instead just make the movie that they themselves want to see. Almodóvar has clearly never been interested in couching queer stories in a metaphor about being Frankenstein’s bride. I like that Martel is essentially saying that Almodóvar was telling stories about queer lives before it was cool.

The queerness is always front and center. His films reflect the lives of people who are out, but not just out in the sense of making your sexuality known—out as in authentic, honest. There are plenty of characters with secrets in an Almodóvar film, but they’re usually well-reasoned in their secrecy. There is no shame in the Almodóvar-verse, just pragmatism. To me, this is the significance of color in his films, it represents the outness of being out.

And of course, his short film The Human Voice, which I have grown quite fond of, and feels like a perfect companion to Pain and Glory in this sense, lets us into Almodóvar’s own apartment to see how the interior life of his characters is extremely active, even if they seem like they are constantly going through a rough patch. I feel like only a master filmmaker could translate so well the same style over genres and decades while not necessarily changing that many things along the way.

But do you maybe feel like he has lost a bit of his touch with the times? There’s a strong sense of nostalgia and a melancholic undercurrent that’s growing stronger with each new film of his.

AR: Most filmmakers, over a long-enough career, get lost at some point; they become obsessed with the new tech of the day, they repeat their stories to diminishing returns, they lose favor with fans or, simply, they lose potency. I think Almodóvar is as sharp of a storyteller as he ever was. He’s stayed his own course and continued to mine familiar themes and aesthetics without feeling redundant or impotent.

It’s true, he’s become more retrospective—and, consequently, melancholic—but Pain and Glory in 2019 feels as authentic and specific as Pepi, Luci, Bom did in 1980.

I would imagine he’s never made a movie he didn’t want to make, which sounds over-simplified, but his signature is so prominent in every frame of every film he’s touched for the last 40 years that I can’t help but feel as enthusiastic about his films as he does. As you said, his style has largely stayed the same all these years, and he’s obviously fond of bringing back actors time and again. It’s a testament to creative perseverance. It shows that you don’t always have to adapt so much that you lose your voice in the crowd.

As a Spaniard yourself, can you tell me how Pedro Almodóvar is regarded in his home country? Is there a more mainstream appreciation for him, or is he still considered somewhat of a niche artist?

Gregg Araki comes to mind as a filmmaker who similarly blends queer stories with crime and genre storytelling, albeit with a more cynical tone. Emerald Fennell is someone I’m excited to follow. Just from her debut, Promising Young Woman, she clearly understands how to use color to accentuate tone, and how to marry comedy and tragedy as effortlessly as Almodóvar. I realize both Araki and Fennell have sex as a theme in their films, but in a more, shall we say, sobering context than Almodóvar.

I would also like to highlight Patty Jenkins as a sort of Almodóvar successor. Jenkins, an outspoken fan of Almodóvar, has largely worked in TV, but her sole feature films, about real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos and the superhero Wonder Woman, concern women at opposite ends of the spectrum, who are both at odds with their place in the world. Her doing something more hedonistic that still appeals to a broad audience would be quite interesting.

CC: That is so interesting! I wasn’t aware that Jenkins was such a devoted fan; hopefully she can embrace a more lavish style in her next few big-budget features. When you mention that both Gregg Araki and Emerald Fennell have made sex a big part of their narratives, I’m reminded of Almodóvar’s diss on superhero movies for being sexless and tepid.

To that extent, I think a couple of the more interesting films that I have seen recently and could work as Almodóvar-inspired are Ema, by Pablo Larraín, and El Ángel, by Luis Ortega. Both are colorful and extravagant, both have queer main characters, and in both of them sex plays an important part in the plot; although this might be cheating, as El Ángel was produced by Almodóvar himself, and feels so clearly indebted to him.

One of the main issues about trying to find an heir to Almodóvar is that his cinema is so attached to his personality, and has been built over a series of extremely important years for the development of queer narratives in the industry and LGBTQ+ acceptance in the world, that anyone who tried to draw from his work directly would end up feeling like a copycat. As a result, when people saw their film they would immediately think that they were pulling an Almodóvar.

In that sense, maybe someone who could be an heir is Harmony Korine. He is someone who does very stylized, naked portrayals of characters who inhabit a certain moment in contemporary history. While he is very far from the queer narratives of Pedro, and the sobriety and maturity of his latest efforts, I can certainly see in films like The Beach Bum or Spring Breakers an exploitation of the state of the world at that specific point in time, along with the same taste for lavishness and extravagance, where comedy and drama are loosely threaded together.

I feel like Parallel Mothers falls on the more sober side of his filmography, because the plot deals with certain subjects that are difficult to talk about in Spain—even taboo in certain spaces. Almodóvar has said that this is his most political film, and while I wouldn’t agree with that statement, it is certainly the one that touches most directly on the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.

I find that one of the best aspects of the movie is how it manages to thread together its narrative with a tone that’s exaggerated, almost theatrical, and a visual appearance that resembles a painting with how it uses light and color—even more than in some of his recent films.

I do feel like it’s going to be one of his most divisive films, but that [isn’t due] to any lack on Almodóvar or his team’s part. The filmmaker’s machine is firing on all cylinders in this one, despite a rushed shoot, and it’s up to the audience to let themselves loose and adapt to a film that doesn’t shy away from showing its true colors and adopting a more artificial approach.