Pain and Glory, The Story of Pedro Almodovar

Amy Winehouse may have gone back to black, but Pedro Almodovar chose going back to color. 

During most of the 2019 film, Pain and Glory, Almodovar's choice between black or color is too close to call. On the pain side of the story, there is a lot, and it's physical as much as it is spiritual. On the glory side of the story, there is less than there is pain, but as Almodovar shows us, even in small amounts, glory is catalyzed by healing.  

Salvador Mallo is a thinly-disguised version of the film's director, Pedro Almodovar. Salvador is a film director who has stopped working. His body is racked with pain and mysterious ailments.  His memories of childhood are a counterbalance to the darkness of his present pain-filled life, yet they provide no way forward from his painful present.

 Salvador as a child is portrayed by Asier Flores. As an adult his character is played by Antonio Banderas. 

Pain and Glory is the story of how friends, some long-standing and others long-lost, reflect back to us the self that we cannot see on our own.    

A chance encounter with an old friend who has seen an actor he once worked with starts the film and Salvador's journey.  A screening is planned for the remastered version of the director's break-out 1980's film. This is not a cause for celebration. He has been unwilling to see the film for 30 years. Salvador's break-out film caused him a near breakdown: He had a friendship-ending quarrel with one of the principal actors. His addicted partner of three years left Madrid for Buenos Aires and a new life.  His efforts to be the son his mother always wanted ended with her death in an ICU in a hospital in Madrid instead of within the traditions and customs of her village where he had promised she would be taken to die.  

In one of the movie's luminous flashbacks Salvador as a small child teaches a young, handsome mason from his village how to read and write. After setting in some tiles in Salvador's mother's sunny kitchen, the mason removes his clothes to wash off the mortar.  He asks Salvador to bring him a towel. The boy faints either because he’s been in the sun too long or because he is overcome by the sight of the mason bathing. 

Almodóvar uses color in this film as in his whole work like a painter. Whether you are in a cave, a doctor's office, kitchen or a theater stage, color is as important to the story as the actors. And it is most important in this film, because Salvador, who  lives in the dark literally works his way back into light and color. 

This film is about choosing carefully. Almodóvar clearly made the right choices.

Mothers and Daughters

It was in Mom's nature to both love and to also be critical. Criticism was a way she wished her kids a better future. If you heed me you will do better. But when I heard her criticize her mother, Ventura, Mom seemed to blame the past for what she saw lacking in her mother.  

Mom cared for her mother, for sure.  There were gifts of baby chicks, food, shoes, and frequent visits with a 90-mile one-way trip to the town in Mexico where Nana lived, Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas.

What was going on between this mother and daughter?  All I could figure out as a kid was that they must have gone in different directions. Mom went on into modern times with her family and her life in Arizona and Texas, while Nana stayed in the 19th century when she was born. Her arranged marriage at the age of 13 took her from the tiny town of Parras where she lived with her family to Porcion 23, the ranch owned by her husband Matias and his two brothers, Eduardo and Espiririon Flores.  

I hugged and loved my grandmother, but she was not a warm and fuzzy grandma. Kids have great BS detectors, and I could tell that she was honest, however different she was from what I imagined she should be. A telenovela grandmother. I remember watching telenovelas with my mom back home in Laredo and seeing the old Mexican actress Sara Garcia offering her family wise advice and consolation. Sara Garcia was the grandmother for all of Mexico in film and TV for several decades. Her face was so recognized it was displayed on boxes of chocolates and cookies. The movie grandmother with twinkling eyes and soft, round cheeks.

Ventura Molina Flores, who we called Nana, was nothing like Sara Garcia. Nana’s eyes were dimmed by cataracts from working in the fields planting and tending crops. She tended fires all of her days standing before the hearth cooking for her family and in later years making, cooking and selling tortillas. Sara Garcia's fictional grandmother loved to sit and chat. Nana was not a sitter or chatter. She moved all through the day in a steady manner with short steps and  sturdy posture. You wouldn't want to get in between her and where she was going. When she wasn't selling tortillas from her kitchen window, she chopped wood, washed clothes, tended her garden, and looked after her chicken coop and the pig she raised to sell.

She loved us children but didn't show it by playing with us or interviewing us the way Art Linkletter did those kids who said the darndest things. We children had a place at her table with a plate and food upon it. We knew we had our place in her world because of who our parents were, but there was little curiosity about us after the obligatory hugs when we said hello or goodbye.  The difference between Nana and the fictional grandma's on TV made me wonder if we grandchildren fit into her brain like some new chicks or a piglet to raise. She called me "la niña" instead of by my name.

I found it interesting she didn’t go to church, but her old print of the Virgin of Guadalupe hung on her wall in a hand-carved wooden frame. It now hangs in my home.

As a kid I watched my mother talk about her mother with pity for her hard life. Now I wonder if the differences might have made Mom uncomfortable or even guilty. But Nana's life looked comfortable, secure and sane to me. She wasn't a big worrier. She seemed self-contained, content and never asking for or needing anything.

As I see Nana today, I think of her as deserving more credit than Mom gave her.    She married as a child.  She and her husband had nine children. She lived through the Revolution, the 1930's double-whammy of drought and depression, World War II where her son Adolfo served in the U.S. Army,  the death of her husband and two of her children, the displacement of her town for the construction of the Falcon Dam. She lived too through the steady leaving or dying of each of her children and her husband.

Nana was clean and tidy in her appearance. She always wore black print dresses because she was a widow who continued to feel the loss of her husband.  She wore flannel slip-on loafers with the flesh colored hose. She had long silver hair gathered in a bun. Here is my most clear memory. Nana always smelled of smoke from the fire she worked close beside in the kitchen.

I saw her angry a few times, but she generally had a steady temperament. While she wasn't playful or affectionate, she was kind and approachable. In her last year, she became lost in her world. She was acting strangely her neighbors told us so Mom and my aunt brought her to live in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. At our house she lived in the boy's bedroom while they were in college and the Navy. One night I watched as she stood in her nightgown and urinated on the linoleum floor. I saw she was busy talking to someone in the room with her. Her silver hair loose around her pale shoulders in such a contrast to her saddle leather brown arms and hands. Who is Nana talking with? She is conversing with people only she can see Mom told me. Who are they I asked? Mama said Nana was talking to her Papá and other relatives gone before. Gone to the same place she was now approaching.  We cleaned up the urine and got her changed into fresh clothes. Nana soon gave up on eating and drinking and she died a few weeks later in the Nuevo Laredo hospital. She was buried in Nueva Ciudad Guerrero beside her husband’s bones that Mom and she had moved from Old Guerrero after the town was flooded and the waters had receded.

There were no secrets that my BS meter ever uncovered about Nana. No alcohol, no abuse, no dire circumstances or deceits. But I always wondered about her lack of outward affection, the sense of obligation instead of connection between mother and daughter. Maybe in Nana's world, you don't name your chickens and pigs for the same reason I was always "la niña". Nana's children all left to find their livelihoods far from home. Maybe something in you closes and locks after so many departures.

In my memory, my Nana still stands at the gate to welcome us and send us off again. She is solid and straight backed, seeing the flow of her family arrive and leave with the same calm equanimity. With or without us, she and her strong hands return to chores like chopping wood, feeding animals, watering plants and trees, making tortillas and cooking food on the hearth in the kitchen. In the evening she sits on the porch greeting passersby. A cool shower before bedtime. Next to her bed was a metal trunk that held important papers. A castaña where titles, birth and death certificates, identification papers were kept.  I never looked inside of the castaña to see what Nana might have collected in a lifetime that she held private and contained as her emotions. 

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The Wonders and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) are two Italian films by award -winning Italian director Alice Rohrwacher.

Both films offer a view to an invisible border where one culture ends and another begins, where the old collides with the new.   

In the 2014 film, The Wonders, we are witness to the ripping of the fabric of farming culture by the twin scissor blades of television and consumerism.  A television crew's taping of a reality show pits contestants from the farms to sing from their cultural traditions for audiences across Italy for a cash prize.

Some contestants are happy to trade in their farms for an easier-on-your-back bed- and-breakfast economy. The distrusting father of a family of bee-keepers sees the trade off as a rip-off. Others in the family, however, are eager to leave their seven-days-a-week work lives for the easier life television advertises.

Is the trade-off fair or is it a rip-off? This is the conflict that both films leave for you to judge.  In The Wonders, the Earth provides the bees and the honey that the Gelsomina an adolescent girl and her family collects and sells. Using the family's profits to buy a camel for Gelsomina is a last ditch effort on the part of the father to keep his eldest girl from growing up.

The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro are set in rural Italy. The children's names in The Wonders are old. Gelsomina, Angelica, Luna are names that remind me of my own family‘s names like Concepción, Socorro, Josefa, Angelica and Maria.  Names from the past that have lost out in recent years in favor of newer style names like Yaliza, Yseña and my own name, Linda.

The films show the tug of war of evolution. At one end of the rope, Mother Nature provides: Bees are harvested for their honey with hard labor and a little help from nature. At the other end, civilization encroaches imposing a new order. Besides new hygiene rules for beekeeping, there is the intrusion of nearby hunter's firearms blasts that disturb the bee colonies. The neighboring farmer raises pigs. Weed killer sent by the state to improve his farm further damages the bees.

Dad works while dressed in his jockey shorts among his family of toddlers and nearly adult children reminding me this film reflects a less sexualized era than our's. It's interesting to me that it is less Puritan than our era with its ubiquitous sex-for-sale themes in advertising.

The conflict of old and new is captured under the electronic circus of reality television. Gelsomina, the eldest child of the beekeeping family  is in the spotlight. She happens upon a production team preparing to record a show for a large cash prize. That distressed sound you hear is fabric tearing. She may know all she needs to know about bee-keeping, but that doesn't mean it is the world she wants to live in. Despite her father's wishes, Gelsomina sees her life beyond the farm and the reality show contest is her ticket out of bee-keeping. It is also her ticket out of being the only adult in a family where her parents are either not willing or prepared to face the challenges of modern time bee-keeping or child-rearing.

Both movies' greatest value is that the director, like a forensic scientist, uncovers  glimpses of the natural era that are now nearly ended.  In the first movie, The Wonders, ancient music is sung in harmony by the women in the reality show competition. A boy's whistling of bird songs are another relic brought out for the cameras. In the more recent film, Happy as Lazarro, there is a midnight serenade by male singers at the window of the centuries old stone farm house. The kerosene lamp lit kitchen scene after the serenade shows us singers who have entered to join the family. They pass a cup of wine amongst each other from a nearly empty glass. There is an easy accommodation to scarcity of food, drink or space. Sleeping six to a room or more, the extended family wakes and sleeps to the sun's rising and setting. The planting and harvesting of crops drives the calendar, not the other way around.

Include in the accounting of wonders the bees traversing the skies in their work of pollination also disappearing with insecticides, the ties of people to the seasons for their work and leisure under the rhythms of the sun and the stars.

Both movies trace the nearly lost treasures of communal living a hundred years ago almost everywhere on the planet including the borderlands of Texas and Tamaulipas where my family settled in farms and later in towns.

I grew up listening to my own folks at night on cool front porches talking about their elders hunting deer by kerosene lamp or driving mule packs of bootleg tequila through the desert at night to the US border, their journey guided by the stars. The labores, the fields, tended by many hands of brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents. Families sleeping on pallets of corn husks in a one room jacal with adobe walls of logs and branches, dirt floors and warmth from the hearth where food was cooked. Kerosene lamps provided the light before the era of electricity.

Sounds awfully hard to me, but my mother spoke fondly of her times growing up there despite the family's tight quarters and hard work in the fields.

I am privileged to also study the collision of ancient and modern cultures of the rural the urban, the natural world and the world we’ve been inventing with electricity and it’s many technologies. The world these bright lights eclipsed I only glimpsed through my mother's stories.

The light that Alice Rohrwacher shines on what is nearly lost when one culture dies and another is born helps bring honor and recognition to the ancient songs and ways of living before they are gone for good.

Maybe in the discovering their scarcity we can figure out how to preserve or maybe reinvent the songs and customs within our own time. I have seen it happen before. Witness the preservation of mariachi and conjunto music in South Texas, of Gaelic language and culture in Ireland. We have seen it in the recording of Appalachian songs that were brought from the Old World to the Americas by 1930's song-catchers. We have seen it in the work of Zora Neal Hurston who captured stories and myths in the south during the Depression. We have seen it with Juan Quezada who re-pioneered the thousand-year-old Casa Grandes pottery making tradition in the Chihuahua in desert town of Mata Ortiz. Add Alice Rohrwacher and her films to this incomplete list.

In this time of limited travel because of the pandemic, take a trip back in time to the way most of us lived in rural areas not cities, before the advent of electricity and electronic media, when we lived closer to nature.