Whether they like it or not, when talking about apriori filmmakers like Woody Allen and Pedro Almodóvar, if it’s easy to agree on one thing, it’s enough for us to watch a minute of any of their films. to instantly recognize the personal and inalienable universes of their respective creators. Those who have only seen one or two of these—even those who have never seen one—know exactly what we mean when we say that such a situation or such a house is “from Almodova,” or that this dialogue or this character is from a “Woody Allen movie.” They are also one of those rare—perhaps the only—two directors that even those who have never seen one of his films would recognize on the street. We find few trajectories as coherent and recognizable as these.
Even if he’s not that old, someone who’s coming of age can feel the compassion and gratitude to both of them that those who enter something resembling youth at that rare moment of passing adolescence have. The situation I’m talking about is a little over two decades ago, when both creators had already done many of their best works that I was forced to discover late, while their films taught me to love cinema even more. And like those friends you’re not close to but happy to know from time to time, I’ve followed their careers with pleasure, interest, and sometimes at a distance since then.
Over the years, the initial dazzling for these geniuses (that’s how I rate them), especially the dazzling I felt towards Almodóvar, has partially faded or become qualified. The adult I am today fondly remembers and rewatches almost all of his films, from Between Darkness (1983), The Law of Desire (1987), The Flower of My Secret (1995) and All About My Mother (1999). But when faced with supposedly more “round” works like Talk to Her (2002) or The Skin I Live In (2011) I feel little or no emotion; last version to date.
The relationship with Woody Allen has always been more fluid, more natural, perhaps because his films have always had a patina of lightness that avoids the desire for transcendence that so often haunts Almodóvar’s (and paradoxically leads to far more transcendence). from his). When I saw Annie Hall (1977) at the age of seventeen or eighteen, my influence was long gone, and although I continue to revisit her period before my “discovery” more or less frequently and with more pleasure (more or less realized), later than the next, I admit that it never disappointed me, and that I did not feel the complete disconnection that some of Almodóvar’s works created in me. In any case, I insist, I never stopped watching a single movie of his on the big screen as much as possible, or following his progress in general, looking forward to that new dazzle that would probably never happen again.
The truth is, luck or whatever, on the occasion of the recently released Zero Gravity and The Last Dream, got me interested in the life and wonders of Woody and Pedro on a few weeks apart. any movie, but the last two books signed by one and the other.
Yes, the books… and certainly not the first to be published. Woody Allen and Pedro Almodóvar’s relationship with the world of writing and the book is long and fruitful. Not only have they written or co-wrote all of their films, they have also been one of the few filmmakers whose scripts we can read more or less regularly here. Between the 1980s and 1990s, at least a dozen of the New Yorker’s best screenplays were published in our country by Tusquets publishing house, first in those silver “Cuadernos infimos” and then in the “Fábula” collection. characteristic small black dots. As for Almodóvar, at least six of his screenplays that I know of have been published in book format; Moreover, the last two are in valuable and careful editions filled with photographs, notes and side texts.
Before el último sueño and leaving behind the scenarios mentioned above, we were already able to enjoy the prose of the man from La Mancha in two very interesting books. One of them, Fuego en las enterils with illustrations by Mariscal, was published in 1981, when Almodóvar was hardly known (there is an affordable 2013 reprint of Libros del silencio). The other, much more common, is Patty Diphusa, a book of various texts written between the late seventies and early nineties that was repeatedly reprinted and expanded in Anagrama after its first edition in 1991.
The last dream, published by Reservoir Books a few weeks ago, seems to us perhaps in the wrong way. In the generation they want to sell us as “a self-portrait articulated in twelve stories,” and well … not a self-portrait (or not entirely), nor necessarily stories. The book is a mix of texts from different eras where pure fiction is mixed with more or less successful, overtly autobiographical writings (and be careful, I don’t mean that as a bad thing… they are the most interesting part of the book in the author’s opinion. In my opinion, the biggest mistake is the year these texts were written) not to be imprecise in the preface. We are only informed that some, the earliest, were written between 1967 and 1970, when the future filmmaker had not yet left his town… and this shows. Stories like “, if we count only three, are read with a certain religious contempt, given that their author is a teenager with a head full of dreams and ideas. But if they say that the person who wrote them is a prestigious artist who has won dozens of awards… what surrounds us might be even more embarrassing. But Let’s not be too mean to the good old Pedro.Like so many people, what he knows best is talking about himself, an art he shares with Woody. Admittedly, the more he confesses, the more affected we are, the more interested we are, the more easily we forgive his delusions again. In the texts that give the title of the book or “Adiós, volcán”, she manages to make us emotional by reminding us of the deaths of two very precious people to her, such as her mother Francisca Caballero and her other parallel mother, Chavela. Vargas. In “Memory of a Leisure Day”, perhaps my favorite text in the book, Almodóvar opens up, the result of a life devoted solely to work and creation, and the emphasis and importance he has given to people, friendship, family, and his work for decades.
I believe creators should be judged to the best of what they have to offer us, so I prefer pages that are as personal and emotional as those final pages, and regarding some of the fictional stories chosen here… what have I done to deserve this to us years later! o Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Woody Allen, on the other hand, made several generations laugh with the stories in How to end Culture once and all (1971), Without Feathers (1975), Profiles (1980), compiled in the volume Talesless Feathers, and more recently, Pure Anarchy (2007) All are happily and easily accessible for you. His recent autobiography, About Nothing (Alliance, 2020), came as a pleasant surprise to those who wrote it, but it’s true that there are an excessive number of pages devoted to self-defense against the charges made by the courts, although there is no definitive public opinion. We’ve already dealt with him more than once.
And at just 87 years old, when we thought he gave his all, he surprised us with this new collection of nineteen totally hilarious stories, some unpublished and others published in The New Yorker between 2008 and 2013, called Zero Gravity. What first catches our attention is the complete coherence between them and the devotion to pure comedy without hypocrisy. In the last two decades, I don’t know if Allen’s films have tended to be more or less romantic, more or less melancholic or sentimental comedy, here we find some texts charged with the parodic and surreal humor of their beginnings. To understand each other, the look or style in which Allen writes these texts reminds us more of Take the money and run (1969) or The Sleepyhead (1973) times than Scoop (2006) or Midnight in Paris (2011). . I don’t know if this is better or worse, but meeting this delightfully weird Allen again is definitely a pleasant surprise. It’s true that sometimes lots of Yiddish terms, untranslatable puns, or specific cultural references that we don’t know can distract us, but hey, all these factors are also part of a game. Join whoever it is.
After reading both books, I won’t deny it, the feeling I have left is bittersweet… On the one hand, I have no doubt that Woody Allen’s book is much more literary and plot-driven than Almodóvar’s. However, I must admit that I devoured the latter with a greater appetite, with its irregularities and flaws. Perhaps the first is a book with a much more consistent rhythm and free of surprises. With the latter, on the contrary, I was able to dialogue, replacing those eerily plain texts with others of agonizing depth, keeping me alert, but waiting for those glimmers of genius that occasionally surfaced.
In short, I found the best and worst of both authors in both volumes; It’s the same thing I’ve felt in his movies for years. In one, a constant rhythm is perfectly formed, with no surprises, and it makes me feel relaxed and smiling from start to finish. In another, a collage of contrasts where the greatest absurdities coexist with moments of blinding beauty.
The fact is that at 87 and 73 years old, great masterpieces are no longer expected from them, but both are still at the peak of their form. This 2023, if nothing stands in the way, they will premiere their new works: Coup de Chance and Extraña forma de vida. And there we are, reunited with these two old friends to whom we owe so much…