Grow Me Up! Grow Me Down!

"Almodovar is a director with an enormous following around the world, but movies like "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" leave me feeling increasingly left out. His previous film was the widely-praised "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," a movie I had a curious relationship with. I saw it once, and had no discernible reaction at all. It did not engage my attention for even a scene, and at the end I had trouble even remembering it. So I went to see it again, and the same thing happened.

That doesn't mean the film contained nothing; what it means, I think, is that Almodovar's polarities are so perfectly lined up in opposition to my own that it is quite possible for one of his movies to shoot right through my brain without striking a single cell. I seek an explanation for this phenomenon not in film criticism but in the behavior of subatomic particles."

—Roger Ebert

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Dear Kate,

To say Pedro Almodóvar is one of my favorite movie directors is to give too much of myself away.  To say my other favorite is Ingmar Bergman is to equivocate about who I am.  To say I have been revisiting Almodóvar much more often than Bergman is to give a State of the Union about my contradiction.

Last night I revisited Almodóvar's "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" on Blu-ray and found joy unspeakable.  Tears too, predictably me, but a genuine surprise when my cheeks felt the warmth.

I am sure you are not familiar with either's work.  It is overly simplistic to say the sensitivities of these two directors were at "polarities so perfectly lined up in opposition," but I beg you to live with this reduction for now.

What I want to write about today is what Roger Ebert, possibly the best and most influential movie critic ever in America, said above, how it is possible for an Almodóvar movie to "shoot right through [his] brain without striking a single cell."

This too is my memory of my first Almodóvar film, "All About My Mother."  Despite it having won an Oscar and I being a growing, rapacious film lover, it went over my head without much being registered.  I remembered the by then signature Almodóvar saturated palette, larger than life sights and sounds, but not much stayed with me by the time I walked out of the theatre.

Was I more cerebral than I am now?  Most certainly.  I was reading Calvin's Institutes cover to cover, meeting Küng in my dreams.  So it was a heart matter then?  Yes, but it wasn't a matter I could have addressed if I had have wanted to.

My heart grew over the years.  (Bigger?--I would rather not stick to any single metaphor.)  Growing takes discipline, time, patience, to enforce a certain order on chaos, to make sense of what shall forever escape the best of our senses.  Yes, growing up is a paradox, to cultivate contradictions that must coexist and thrive in no predictable manner, with no controlled measures.  One often grows up by growing down.

Enough for today.  I realize I've not spoken much at all, about either filmmaker or anything else.  I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

Yours, Alex