Previews - A vote for Pedro

One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary world cinema, art-house firecracker Pedro Almodóvar is a veritable gazpacho of heartbreak and kink pulverized into a vivid, tangy brew. Next to scandal mac-daddy and fellow lapsed-Catholic Luis Buñuel — who made sliced eyeballs in Un Chien Andalou and sex-starved housewives in Belle de Jour into the stuff of cinematic legend — Almodóvar is Spain’s biggest directorial export. Together, Almodóvar and Buñuel are proof that when it comes to turning out surreal, status-quo-goosing carnal delights, it’s best to ask a Spaniard.

Viva Pedro is an eight-film tribute to Almodóvar’s own well-stocked kit bag of shock, sleaze and a surprising amount of heartache. Sony Pictures Classics’ Pedro lovefest comes Sept. 22-Oct. 5 to Landmark Midtown Art Cinema in new 35 mm prints of proto-Pedro — from the early 1986 kinky thriller Matador, featuring a baby-faced Antonio Banderas as a reluctant bullfighter, but skewing more toward mature Almodóvar typified by the 2004 tragedy-infused gay film noir Bad Education. Sandwiched in between are doubleheaders featuring the many moods of Almodóvar: All About My Mother, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Sept. 22-25); The Flower of My Secret, Talk to Her (Sept. 26-28); Law of Desire, Matador (Sept. 29-Oct. 2); and Bad Education, Live Flesh (Oct. 3-5).

The auteur theory holds that you can see evidence of a director’s personality, fixations, fetishes and visual style by surveying the breadth and depth of his films. But Almodóvar’s films are distinctly bipolar, the ultimate in fusion cuisine. They’re all at once spicy and sweet, pungent and comforting, nasty and nice. The twin poles of Almodóvar’s obsessions move between superficial kink and emotional depth, perversity and poignance, sexual transgression and soul-lifting love.

From his kitschy ambience to his pulpy story lines, Almodóvar (like Buñuel) has a surreal streak a mile long and a desire to épater le bourgeois that would do his progenitor proud. His wit is perversely, decidedly illogical and informs brilliantly surreal lines like the one in Bad Education where the emcee at a small-town drag show says by way of an introduction for Gael García Bernal’s drag queen: “She defines herself as a mix of desert, hazard and cafeteria.”

His visual sensibility is just as demented, as in the climax to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in which a jilted wife in a ladylike pink suit races through Madrid on a motorbike brandishing a gun meant for her husband, her hair whipped into a Bride-of-Frankenstein meringue.

Almodóvar’s view of humanity is comprehensive and embraces the most brutal side of life, like the priest who rapes his schoolboy acolyte in the tragic neo-noir Bad Education. But within the same film, Almodóvar glories in the drug-snorting, drag show and sexual misadventures of the wronged schoolboy grown up — examining how extreme people are born of extreme circumstances.

In Almodóvarville, life is truly bittersweet, especially for the fierce and tragic gay men and jilted ladies he has crafted into compelling, memorable subjects. His characters are governed by similarly conflicting urges, like the closeted romance novelist (Marisa Paredes) in The Flower of My Secret, desperately in love with her husband but determined to verbally cut him to ribbons.

A woman scorned is a recurring feature of his films, and it drives Almodóvar’s dames to hell-bent distraction. They love and hate fiercely, attempt suicide, guzzle cocktails, rage and fall to pieces with all the messy abandon of the great screen heroines played by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

And the emotionality isn’t just limited to his characters. His film references are schizophrenically diverse, as inspired by the slick thrills of Hitchcock to the underground angst of Douglas Sirk, though his genre nods can include television soap operas and bargain-basement porn. His credit sequences reference the incredible graphic work of credit-sequence artist Saul Bass and his scores the swooping, infernal passions of Hitchcock’s frequent collaborator Bernard Herrmann.

Thinking globally and acting locally, his films partake as much in the international culture of fashion, movies, gay nightlife, stiletto-equipped career women and recreational drug use as they revel in the color-drenched specificity of the Madrid where Almodóvar has lived since the La Mancha country boy fled for the bright lights.

Born into a working-class family, as a child Almodóvar attended a Catholic boarding school where he witnessed the kind of sexual abuse that would later inform Bad Education. But his sentimental education came when he moved at age 16 to Madrid, where he eventually became an active member of a post-Franco cultural renaissance. He cut his creative teeth in the city’s counterculture, flitting from ironic punk-parody bands (Almodóvar performed in a housecoat and curlers) to a working-stiff gig as a Telefonica phone company employee, which allowed him contact with a wide array of social classes and allowed him to save enough money to buy his first Super 8 camera.

Though his mood can change dramatically from film to film, the one consistency is Almodóvar’s deep love of the movies, and the promise of escape from mundane reality they offer their devotees. Catholicism was Almodóvar’s cultural legacy, but his real religion is the church of cinema. In Catholicism, Almodóvar has also found a foil to all of the bright and uncontainable impulses in life: Religion is the inverse of the movies in Almodóvar’s point of view.

Over the years, Almodóvar seems to have tempered his hipster desire to be cool and his irreverence for irreverence’s sake, and begun to dig deeper, proving a passionate contemporary poet of female angst and rage. Like other gay directors who have found their emotional proxies in women — François Ozon, Todd Haynes — Almodóvar resides in a world that is decidedly feminine.

In an age when Hollywood’s interest in women ends sometime in their 20s, Almodóvar continues to craft poignant, loving tributes to middle-aged female characters dealing with dissolving marriages and career troubles. And even the male characters that in previous films critic David Denby has characterized as “handsome stiffs,” have also deepened, becoming the rich and almost-complex-enough-to-be-female leads of Talk to Her or Bad Education.

Recent films have not lost the visual outrageousness of a mise-en-scène juiced up with pomegranate red, cobalt, citron and lipstick pink, even as his theme of the tragic toll of love denied has resulted in masterworks such as Bad Education, which has a soul-ravaged melancholy you could cut with a knife.

At 57, Almodóvar is well into middle age and may simply not need to goose propriety with the impudent zest he practiced in his youth.

Or as he told London’s Observer newspaper, “Today, I am less baroque.”