Pedro on The Verge of a Nervy Breakthrough

By RICHARD CORLISS

Dark Habits: a chanteuse brings her boyfriend to her Madrid apartment, where he ODs on heroin and dies. What Have I Done to Deserve This?: an illiterate woman has quickie sex with a muscular student in the shower stall of the kendo academy where she scrubs floors. Matador: a beyond-gorgeous woman picks up a stranger, makes violent love, then stabs him to death with her hatpin. Law of Desire: a young stud is directed through some steamy autoeroticism by an unseen older man. Shock the bourgeoisie? The opening scenes in Pedro Almodovar's films seem designed to shock the Borgias. And that's just for appetizers. The one aesthetic commandment of this Spanish writer-director might read: Begin in delirium, then floor it till the closing credits.

In post-Franco Spain, whose artistic class has been liberated into hedonism, a figure like Almodovar can serve as both court jester and king. He was so proclaimed last week when the Spanish newsmagazine Cambio 16 named him Man of the Year: "Our best representative in a world in which Spain is in fashion." And now the 37-year-old man from La Mancha is world cinema's flavor of the month. His latest film, the relatively benign Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is a solid international hit. The comedy has earned $2.5 million in just ten weeks of limited U.S. release, and threatens to become a breakout foreign hit like La Cage aux Folles.

Imitation, it has often been said, is the sincerest form of Hollywood. So movie moguls are now hot to remake Women on the Verge, with perhaps Jane Fonda, Sally Field or Goldie Hawn playing the main role -- taken in the original by Almodovar's house superstar Carmen Maura -- of a TV actress whose lover has just moved out. This week Almodovar goes to Los Angeles in hopes of picking up a Golden Globe statuette. Women on the Verge has already won the Felix, Europe's highest movie prize. And on Academy Award night, Felix may find an odd-couple mate: an Oscar for best foreign film.

How quickly one progresses these days from anonymity to notoriety to fame. And how perfectly Almodovar and his films are suited to this chic spotlight. He is a poor country boy made good: he came to Madrid at 17, fronted a rock band, wrote a porno photo-novel, and for a decade worked for the state phone company, where he wrote the scripts for his first two pictures. He had no fear of leaping from phones to films: "When I wanted to become a director, I became a director." And his films have all the exuberance of somebody who wants to tell everything -- every one of the heart's dirty little secrets -- to his coterie audience. At the core, these are high-gloss melodramas with high comedy along the edges. They move like Roger Rabbit on speed, and so do the horny, drug-hyped, tortured, ironic, cartoonish creatures of his imagination.

Almodovar says his movies are about the "five essential themes: death, liberty, equality, beauty and, of course, love." Scanning Dark Habits (1983), one finds not love but revenge. It is your basic anticlerical Latin comedy: Reform School Girls set in a convent. The film can be seen as Almodovar's payback for a Catholic education "full of hypocrisy -- you can't learn by being terrorized." But the convent's mother superior isn't kidding when she tells the chanteuse, "My only sin is to love you too much," for that is the only sin and salvation of any Almodovar heroine.

"My movies are autobiographical," says Almodovar, "but only in the essentials, not in individual anecdotes." In the subversive sitcom What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1985), "I wanted to talk about my family, and about the horrendous family life of the barrios." Mom (Maura) sniffs glue, pops pills and burns the chicken. Dad sings German songs -- reason enough for her to kill the dull brute with a ham bone. By this time the viewer may feel like put-upon Mom or bashed-in Dad, so assiduously has Almodovar cataloged his atrocities. But the filmmaker had more cunning indiscretions in store.

With Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987), Almodovar displayed his brazen assurance of style and vaulted from comic realism to soap-operatic mannerism. Matador is a contemporary vampire story: an ex-bullfighter and a woman lawyer, believing that death is the ultimate climax, impale each victim on the cold steel of their lust. Law of Desire draws a bent triangle: a gay movie director, his transsexual sister (Maura) and her adopted child's rightful mother (played by a Spanish drag queen). Revelations of murder, incest, suicide and lotsa hot sex follow, but the tone remains knowing, tender. As Matador is about desire, Law is about caring; the first picture is a morgue shot, the latter a cardiogram. The film is as heartfelt as the tears that seep from behind its hero's red plastic sunglasses.

Law of Desire and other Almodovar films take many cues from homoerotic cinema, from the fascination with lust and death that animated certain films of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, John Waters and R.W. Fassbinder. But Almodovar also looks back in glamour to '50s Hollywood, when Rock Hudson could comfort a dying Jane Wyman in one film, then woo perky Doris Day in another. Thus his pictures are both bleakly comic and defiantly romantic, hipper than tomorrow and nostalgic for a pre-AIDS era when love's most toxic complication was a broken heart. "To classify movies is to impoverish them," he says. "Law of Desire was about a gay couple. But passion is the subject. I was trying to tell a love story."

In Women on the Verge, Almodovar tried to make a mainstream farce and succeeded beyond the dreams of, say, Billy Wilder -- a Hollywood filmmaker he admires for "revealing a sordid society through the most delicious light comedies." Women doesn't meet that standard; it's more like The Big Chill with a bitter taste. But it does have a plot right out of some beloved old screwball comedy. When the disconsolate Pepa (Maura) tosses a couple dozen downers into her gazpacho cocktail, she triggers a plot device that ricochets happily through the film.

Pepa's posh apartment is like the stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Strange people just keep piling in. In the course of a long day, Pepa runs into her lover's ex-wife, his new mistress, his son and the lad's fiancee. Plus a couple of doped-up cops and a Jehovah's Witness concierge. The film is devious enough to have speared every foreign-language prize from U.S. critics and obvious enough that Hollywood is genuflecting at Almodovar's door. "Pedro is going to become a major director," says Orion Pictures' Mike Medavoy, "either in Hollywood or wherever he decides to work."

Almodovar is in no hurry to move to Hollywood. "For now, I'm afraid," he says. "I'm not used to sharing decisions. But when I discover the story I want to tell in English, I will do so." That should be no problem for a self- confessed child with a huge imagination. "Cinema you can learn by yourself," he says. "But the stories must come from inside you. When I am writing something, I have the feeling that I am really reading something, and that I have to keep on writing to find out what is going to happen next."

Hollywood can't wait either.

With reporting by Margot Hornblower/Madrid