Almodóvar: two Oscars, a legend and a story that never closes

Almodóvar, two Oscars and a legend that refuses to close

Pedro Almodóvar is the most celebrated Spanish filmmaker in history. Not even his fiercest critic disputes that. What is disputed is whether that recognition measures talent or something else.

A complete re-reading of his filmography, film by film, has just peine a wound that seemed healed. The result: few directors with such a trophy-laden career concentrate so many failing grades among their own audience.

The awards are not in question; the work is

The official figures are uncomfortable for the detractor. Two Oscars, three BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, three Césars, four European Film Awards and six competitive Goyas. Add the Golden Lion in Venice for The Room Next Door, in 2024, and the Palme d'Or for best director and best screenplay at Cannes. It is a résumé that admits no modest reading.

But when the analysis moves from the red carpets to the actual films, the consensus breaks down. The re-reading turns up titles with mediocre scores: High Heels, a 5; The Flower of My Secret, another 5; Kika, a 4. Against Live Flesh, which rises to a 7, or Law of Desire and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, with a 6. The gap between the trophy catalogue and the individual assessment is enormous. Nobody fully explains that gap.

Two irreconcilable camps

One camp holds that Almodóvar has a handful of masterpieces –Volver, All About My Mother, The Skin I Live In, Talk to Her– and the rest are failed exercises or outright pastiches. The other goes further: the filmmaker would be a product of Spain's post-Franco cultural narrative, elevated for ideological rather than aesthetic reasons. In between sits a more nuanced position: an undeniable personal style, weak screenplays and a drift toward excess that even his own admirers acknowledge.

Some even add a counterfactual: under the censorship he fought against, his work would have gained in restraint. It is a provocation, but it forces a separation between the public figure and the creator. Something almost nobody in this re-reading manages to do.

The human factor that contaminates the verdict

Here lies the underlying problem: Almodóvar never provokes indifference. His activism, his public appearances and his closeness to political power appear in nearly every critique, both to praise him and to condemn him. Aesthetic judgment gets contaminated by personal sympathies and phobias. And the result is that every film is seen through a pre-existing filter.

The filmography does not help either. The early works of the eighties, with their deliberately kitsch aesthetic, are seen today as a document of an era; those of the nineties, as attempts to fit a style that had not quite found its shape. Those who champion the director of Live Flesh are not the same people who defend the Kika era. It is an uneven corpus, and that fuels the disagreement.

• Two Oscars and a Golden Lion (2024) coexist with scores like Kika's 4.
• Volver and All About My Mother concentrate much of the critical consensus.
• The only point of agreement: the visual style has no equivalent in Spain.

With all this, the most reasonable prediction is that the Almodóvar case will remain open as long as he keeps releasing films. If the history of Spanish cinema is written with data, he will occupy an entire chapter. If it is written with screenplays, the chapter will be shorter than his trophy list suggests. Let everyone choose their own yardstick.