"THERE'S no man more boring than a Latin lover." So says modern Spanish cinema's preeminent director, Pedro Almodovar, a consistently irreverent and provocative chronicler of sexual mores in his native land. Sexual behaviour, persuasions and revelations are as unpredictable in an Almodovar movie as the costumes and set design are flamboyant and kinky.
The unbearable boringness of being a Latin lover came up when I met Almodovar in London recently. Whatever human frailties are thrust upon Almodovar's characters in his screenplays, the writer director nonetheless treats his fictional creations with a palpable affection, and even though Antonio Banderas is by far the biggest international star to emerge from the cinema of Almodovar, it is the women in his movies who have the strongest, most complex roles.
"I do find women more fun and more surprising than men," he says, but I don't necessarily approach writing a film from that point of view. Certainly, I'm not conscious of that."
So it's instinctive? "Instinctive, yes, and in Spain, you know, we have always had much better actresses than actors. That is completely true, so perhaps I'm just being very realistic. The Latin male is just macho, which is why there's nothing more boring than to be a Latin lover. So many Latin males feel all they have to prove is that they re the strongest and that's enough, as it there did not need to be anything else to them."
He was born in La Mancha on September 25th, 1951. "I was educated by Catholic priests, like everyone else in Spain," he says. "My education was based on sin and punishment, which is very unfair when you're just 10 years old. I don't feel Catholic now, though I like the Catholic ceremonies - they are the spectacular invention of the Church, I believe.
"But now, with this Pope, the Catholic mentality is moving further apart from reality. This Pope is very dangerous for the Catholic, religion because you can't discuss what he says. He has senile dementia. When he says you cannot use a condom, I think he is committing a crime against health. I. respect the Catholic people, but I don't respect the Pope at all. It's a serious problem for the sincere and responsible Catholic people."
At the age of 16, when his family had mapped out a future for him as a clerk in the town bank, Pedro broke away from his roots and headed for Madrid where he has lived and worked ever since. The abundant affection he displays for the characters in his movies extends to the city of Madrid, which he photographs as lovingly as Woody Allen photographs Manhattan.
His latest film, The Flower Of My Secret, employs location shooting more extensively than any of Almodovar's movies and this afforded the director the opportunity to qualify his love for his country.
"I wanted the film to be realistic, to use realistic locations," Almodovar says, "and I wanted to place the movie very clearly in, time and place. This is Madrid as it is now. The Spanish people feel very frustrated: we want to reject this socialist government of Gonzalez, but at the same time we don't want a right wing government. It's very frustrating that there's no other alternative, so I wanted to put that frustration and aggression into the movie.
"When we were shooting, the demonstrations were going on all the time in Madrid, so I decided to include one of the actual demonstrations in the movie. I liked the rhythm of the way they moved and the fact that they all wore white, so I could isolate Leo with the colour of her blue dress in that crowd scene - colours are very important in my movies for representing emotions."
IT was a very different story back in 1966, during the Franco regime, when the young, gay and idealistic Pedro Almodovar came to Madrid. He spent 12 years as an administrative clerk with the national telephone company. Stimulation came after hours as he immersed himself in the city's growing underground artistic movement in avant garde theatre; through his pop band, Almodovar and MacNamara; in articles, comic strips and short stories for alternative magazines; and with his Super 8 short films in the mid 1970s - such as Sex Comes, Sex Goes and F**k. . . F**k.. . F**k Me, Tim - some were almost as outrageous as their titles suggested.
As a new decade for democracy dawned in 1980, Pedro Almodovar made his debut in feature films with Pepi, Luci, Bom And Other Girls On The Heap, in which the director made the first of many Hitchcockian cameos as the MC of a General Erections contest. More significantly, it set the tone for the 10 feature films that have followed in pacey succession and launched the first of his collaborations with versatile actresses in strong willed roles - in this case, Carmen Maura, who worked with Almodovar regularly until they split after his biggest international success, the witty and wise Women On The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown.
In the first of Hollywood's hesitant flirtations with the gifted but unconventional talent that is Almodovar, Jane Fonda bought the rights to the Americanisation of Women On The Verge, and then retired from movies when she married Ted Turner. "Columbia have the rights to the movie now," Almodovar says, "and the latest I've heard is that Whoopi Goldberg is going to play the leading role. I think she will be good in it. I've had many offers from Hollywood and I'm sure that some day I'll make a film in English, though maybe not in Hollywood."
Following an acrimonious a break up, Carmen Maura was replaced as Almodovar's leading lady by Victoria Abril - in Tie Me Up!, Tie Me Down!, Kika and High Heels - and most recently by the excellent Marisa Paredes, who was in High Heels with Abril and now stars in The Flower Of My Secret. It was no fault of Abril's that her trio of movies for Almodovar represent the least satisfying of his recent output, and Kika was criticised - quite rightly, in my opinion - for its very dubious rape scene.
Almodovar adamantly defends that film and that scene. "It's very easy to misinterpret my films," he says. "There was a very hypocritical reaction to Kika in English language countries - they were really scandalised by the rape scene. I think it was exaggerated. A movie is a movie and real life is real life. It's as simple as that. I think some of the criticism in US and Britain was because a lot of "the subtleties lost in the English sub titles. You can't translate the significance of each dialect. You can only translate the words.
"I don't think Kika is a perfect movie - I don't think I've ever made a perfect movie - but it's a kind of visionary movie which will be better understood in time. Since the 1960s explosion the whole world has become much more reactionary and conservative. Sexuality is linked to a lot of illnesses now. Unfortunately, it's become a pretext for society to oppress something that's very natural to the human being. Sexuality is one of the few gifts that everyone has and things related to pleasure are always among the first victims of conservatism."
