Pedro Almodovar's The Flower of My Secret
If I were to describe the bare bones of this film---a depressed romance writer's husband is leaving her, she gets a job at a newspaper to trash her own books---you might not want to see it. You might also miss the point of the film altogether. In Almodovar's own words, this is a film about abandonment. The theme was powerful and palpable, though the film never seems to decide how seriously it wants to take itself. There are many funny moments to this movie, and though it concludes with a happy ending, the ride along the way is, indeed, rocky. Leo, clearly has a melodramatic flair, on one level the viewer is not surprised that her husband is leaving her and that her friends and family have largely abandoned her: who could live with someone who walks in the world without any skin? But when her husband accuses her of being selfish as he is leaving her---which she unquestionably is---one might wonder how she or anyone else in her situation could be anything else? It does not matter if bombs are falling in Bosnia when one's marriage is falling apart.
This film is from 1996. Leo's husband is an officer whose job is strategizing an end to the Bosnian conflict, but is unable to face the conflicts in his own life. Finally pushed by her histrionics to admitting their marriage is over he tells her that warfare is nothing compared to conflict with her. Leo is writing an essay on the topic of 'Pain & Life' which includes references to many of her favorite authors, among the Dorothy Parker whose short story 'A Lovely Leave' is not mentioned, but has some resonance in this film. Structured around a woman's excitement on the return of her soldier for brief leave, the story ends not in fulfillment but disappointment. He returns not a conquering hero, but an exhausted husband, wanting food and sleep, needing his shirts ironed, but unable to fulfill the physical or emotional needs of his wife. It is a very accurate account of the way these moments we look forward to, filled with romantic yearning, often fall flat in the face of quotidian realities.
In 1996 I was reading Dorothy Parker and involved with an officer deployed to the same conflict. I experienced that same sense of dread and depression that fills Leo in this film: a free floating anxiety symptomatic of something far deeper than what had gone wrong on the surface of my life. In my case it came from knowing my relationship was over, but being unable to admit to it, or to hear the truth from my lover. I am also familiar with the way one's entire life can change with this kind of catastrophe as though the poles of one's personality have reversed. Leo can't write romances anymore, all she can manage is sad novels, one of which 'Cold Storage' is clearly the synopsis for Volver one of Almodovar's more recent films. (And in some ways one can see Volver as a revision of this film and its themes.) Her publishers aren't buying it. When Leo defends her novel she is told:
We're talking about novels, not children. Children only take away your life. Novels give you illusion to live. People buy our books to forget the sordidness of their lives... to dream, even if it's a lie. Who'll dream of people who live in a seedy slum like the living dead? Who will identify with a protagonist who works emptying shit out of hospital bedpans... who's got a junkie mother-in-law and a faggot son... who's into black men? ... We already have enough reality in our homes. Reality is for newspapers and TV... Reality should be banned...!
"Leo we hired you to write love stories... Your contract specifies five romance novels a year for the next three years. I'll remind you: Novels of love in cosmopolitan settings. Sex, suggestive but only suggested. Winter sports, radiant sunlight, suburbs, ministers, yuppies. Absolutely no politics. Absence of social conscience. Illegitimate children, okay. And of course, happy endings.
Running counterpoint to the dissolution of Leo's marriage is the conflict between her sister and her mother who has come to live with them in Madrid. Her mother's health is failing and she keeps telling everyone that if she were back in her village her health would improve. The repeated response to the mother's complaining is, "You are just like Aunt Petra... insane!" Strangely, when Leo and her mother actually return to their small village in La Mancha (lovingly recaptured in Volver) Leo's mother does become sane, again, as though she did not know how to be herself outside the sphere of her influence and identity: her village. She tells Leo who has accompanied her to grieve the end of her marriage, "You are like a cow without a bell---lost." She says that when a woman loses her man, it doesn't matter if it is to death or divorce, the process is the same: one must return to one's village, one's church, and pray novenas with the other woman. One must attend the funeral, grieve what is lost, and try to get one's bearings from the place that is one's home. There is also a poem Leo's mother had composed for Leo about the village so that she might never forget where she comes from. The poem has lovely word play in which the sound of Leo's name becomes conflated with the word her mother chooses for village. She is named Leo because this word also sounds like her home.*
I have lost two men in this life---three if you count M, though I tend to think of him and the NY experience as a different kind of trauma: an experiment in how far I could compromise myself in pursuit of the life I thought I wanted. My third Jason, like Leo's husband, went off to war never to return. Though he survived the conflict, he went missing from my life as surely as though he had died. He is the only man that I have ever seriously thought I would marry. The other man I lost was Jason #1, to a more horrible and literal death. That he would choose to live without me, I could accept... that he would take his own life still seems impossible, especially after I'd given him a piece of my own heart. I was certain when I gave it to him that the organ would grow back... but these things take time, and I'm not sure if we are ever 'the same' after we have gone through them. How can we accept that the organs are doled out to the sickest, those most in need, those most likely to die on us, when what we want is for our hearts to go on thumping, our lungs to keep breathing, our eyes to keep seeing in the healthiest body we can find.
There is also an organ transplant theme in The Flower of My Secret. One of the characters is involved with an organ donation society and puts together seminars for doctors so they know what kinds of resistance they might seek when making the suggestion to remaining family members of someone who has died. In the opening scene they try to explain 'brain death' to a bereaved mother telling her that though her son is on a respirator and looks as though he is breathing he is actually dead. I thought it was an interesting metaphor for the author's relationship in the film. It looks like it is breathing, but it is already dead. The opening scenes also involve a comedic scenario in which Leo has put on a pair of boots her husband once bought for her. Never a good fit, they are now too tight to get off her feet. She rushes about town trying to find someone to help her pull her boots off, but comes to the realization that she is so isolated that when her best friend and her maid are unavailable she must pay a beggar in the street for help.
Thinking back to those broken hearts I have often wondered if I could ever love with such intensity, again, or, more to the point, if I will ever find anyone to love me as I have loved them: to return that passion and intensity instead of run from it. Would I even find such a scenario comfortable or acceptable, accustomed as I am to being the lover rather than the beloved? Almodovar's film provides a convenient answer, reaching for comedy amidst all this grief. Leo trades her soldier for a clown: the chubby newspaper editor Angel falls in love with her through her writing. Some of the films most comedic scenes are also the most touching, as when she tells him to stop kicking a box down the street as though he were playing soccer. "It reminds me of my husband," she says. "Then from now on I will only dance," he declares and launches into a surprisingly graceful homage of the modern flamenco show they have just seen. He slips and falls at the end, limbs splayed across the cobblestones. She runs to him in concern, "Are you okay?" she asks. "I think I have broken everything," he says, before embracing her, that wily fox knows it will take feigning an injury to pull her in. He says:
Do you remember 'Casablanca'? When Ingrid Bergman enters Rick's Bar for the first time? They sit at the same table. Bogart is stiff, petrified by emotion. Ingrid asks him if he remembers the first time they met. It was in Paris. Bogart replies, impassive: "I'll never forget that day." It was the day when the German army occupied Paris. They wore grey uniforms, and you were in blue." You were in blue as well when you were escaping from your life, and entered mine.
Almodovar shoots this scene with student protestors all in white, Leo appears in blue, Angel in orange, these two characters the only color in a sea of white. Leo rebuffs his advances, telling him he is drunk and should go home. She gets another proposition from another character before the night is over, but rejects it, too, graciously thanking the thief who has come to apologize for his theft of her jewelry and her novel that her life and work could not have been better used: "Life is so incredible. So cruel and paradoxical. So unpredictable and sometimes so fair... Go before I lose control and forget that I'm a marvelous lady... And thank you... for giving meaning to the darkest months in my life and for helping me to forget Paco; I haven't thought of him for 15 minutes." The film could end on this note, but instead, Almodovar---ever the romantic---gives us the longed for kiss. With whom I won't say, but in ending the film two characters pretend it is New Years, toasting each others success: "Kiss me," he says. "If it is New Year's Eve, I want contact with human flesh." And she does, a fire burning between them in the hearth.
[* An interesting aspect of watching this film was catching a few things like this, or idioms not reflected in the subtitles, "You are pulling my hair!" as in English one might have one's leg pulled. My Spanish is so lost now as to be almost nonexistent, but occasionally it revives from its deep sleep to remind me of things I once knew.]
This film is from 1996. Leo's husband is an officer whose job is strategizing an end to the Bosnian conflict, but is unable to face the conflicts in his own life. Finally pushed by her histrionics to admitting their marriage is over he tells her that warfare is nothing compared to conflict with her. Leo is writing an essay on the topic of 'Pain & Life' which includes references to many of her favorite authors, among the Dorothy Parker whose short story 'A Lovely Leave' is not mentioned, but has some resonance in this film. Structured around a woman's excitement on the return of her soldier for brief leave, the story ends not in fulfillment but disappointment. He returns not a conquering hero, but an exhausted husband, wanting food and sleep, needing his shirts ironed, but unable to fulfill the physical or emotional needs of his wife. It is a very accurate account of the way these moments we look forward to, filled with romantic yearning, often fall flat in the face of quotidian realities.
In 1996 I was reading Dorothy Parker and involved with an officer deployed to the same conflict. I experienced that same sense of dread and depression that fills Leo in this film: a free floating anxiety symptomatic of something far deeper than what had gone wrong on the surface of my life. In my case it came from knowing my relationship was over, but being unable to admit to it, or to hear the truth from my lover. I am also familiar with the way one's entire life can change with this kind of catastrophe as though the poles of one's personality have reversed. Leo can't write romances anymore, all she can manage is sad novels, one of which 'Cold Storage' is clearly the synopsis for Volver one of Almodovar's more recent films. (And in some ways one can see Volver as a revision of this film and its themes.) Her publishers aren't buying it. When Leo defends her novel she is told:
We're talking about novels, not children. Children only take away your life. Novels give you illusion to live. People buy our books to forget the sordidness of their lives... to dream, even if it's a lie. Who'll dream of people who live in a seedy slum like the living dead? Who will identify with a protagonist who works emptying shit out of hospital bedpans... who's got a junkie mother-in-law and a faggot son... who's into black men? ... We already have enough reality in our homes. Reality is for newspapers and TV... Reality should be banned...!
"Leo we hired you to write love stories... Your contract specifies five romance novels a year for the next three years. I'll remind you: Novels of love in cosmopolitan settings. Sex, suggestive but only suggested. Winter sports, radiant sunlight, suburbs, ministers, yuppies. Absolutely no politics. Absence of social conscience. Illegitimate children, okay. And of course, happy endings.
Running counterpoint to the dissolution of Leo's marriage is the conflict between her sister and her mother who has come to live with them in Madrid. Her mother's health is failing and she keeps telling everyone that if she were back in her village her health would improve. The repeated response to the mother's complaining is, "You are just like Aunt Petra... insane!" Strangely, when Leo and her mother actually return to their small village in La Mancha (lovingly recaptured in Volver) Leo's mother does become sane, again, as though she did not know how to be herself outside the sphere of her influence and identity: her village. She tells Leo who has accompanied her to grieve the end of her marriage, "You are like a cow without a bell---lost." She says that when a woman loses her man, it doesn't matter if it is to death or divorce, the process is the same: one must return to one's village, one's church, and pray novenas with the other woman. One must attend the funeral, grieve what is lost, and try to get one's bearings from the place that is one's home. There is also a poem Leo's mother had composed for Leo about the village so that she might never forget where she comes from. The poem has lovely word play in which the sound of Leo's name becomes conflated with the word her mother chooses for village. She is named Leo because this word also sounds like her home.*
I have lost two men in this life---three if you count M, though I tend to think of him and the NY experience as a different kind of trauma: an experiment in how far I could compromise myself in pursuit of the life I thought I wanted. My third Jason, like Leo's husband, went off to war never to return. Though he survived the conflict, he went missing from my life as surely as though he had died. He is the only man that I have ever seriously thought I would marry. The other man I lost was Jason #1, to a more horrible and literal death. That he would choose to live without me, I could accept... that he would take his own life still seems impossible, especially after I'd given him a piece of my own heart. I was certain when I gave it to him that the organ would grow back... but these things take time, and I'm not sure if we are ever 'the same' after we have gone through them. How can we accept that the organs are doled out to the sickest, those most in need, those most likely to die on us, when what we want is for our hearts to go on thumping, our lungs to keep breathing, our eyes to keep seeing in the healthiest body we can find.
There is also an organ transplant theme in The Flower of My Secret. One of the characters is involved with an organ donation society and puts together seminars for doctors so they know what kinds of resistance they might seek when making the suggestion to remaining family members of someone who has died. In the opening scene they try to explain 'brain death' to a bereaved mother telling her that though her son is on a respirator and looks as though he is breathing he is actually dead. I thought it was an interesting metaphor for the author's relationship in the film. It looks like it is breathing, but it is already dead. The opening scenes also involve a comedic scenario in which Leo has put on a pair of boots her husband once bought for her. Never a good fit, they are now too tight to get off her feet. She rushes about town trying to find someone to help her pull her boots off, but comes to the realization that she is so isolated that when her best friend and her maid are unavailable she must pay a beggar in the street for help.
Thinking back to those broken hearts I have often wondered if I could ever love with such intensity, again, or, more to the point, if I will ever find anyone to love me as I have loved them: to return that passion and intensity instead of run from it. Would I even find such a scenario comfortable or acceptable, accustomed as I am to being the lover rather than the beloved? Almodovar's film provides a convenient answer, reaching for comedy amidst all this grief. Leo trades her soldier for a clown: the chubby newspaper editor Angel falls in love with her through her writing. Some of the films most comedic scenes are also the most touching, as when she tells him to stop kicking a box down the street as though he were playing soccer. "It reminds me of my husband," she says. "Then from now on I will only dance," he declares and launches into a surprisingly graceful homage of the modern flamenco show they have just seen. He slips and falls at the end, limbs splayed across the cobblestones. She runs to him in concern, "Are you okay?" she asks. "I think I have broken everything," he says, before embracing her, that wily fox knows it will take feigning an injury to pull her in. He says:
Do you remember 'Casablanca'? When Ingrid Bergman enters Rick's Bar for the first time? They sit at the same table. Bogart is stiff, petrified by emotion. Ingrid asks him if he remembers the first time they met. It was in Paris. Bogart replies, impassive: "I'll never forget that day." It was the day when the German army occupied Paris. They wore grey uniforms, and you were in blue." You were in blue as well when you were escaping from your life, and entered mine.
Almodovar shoots this scene with student protestors all in white, Leo appears in blue, Angel in orange, these two characters the only color in a sea of white. Leo rebuffs his advances, telling him he is drunk and should go home. She gets another proposition from another character before the night is over, but rejects it, too, graciously thanking the thief who has come to apologize for his theft of her jewelry and her novel that her life and work could not have been better used: "Life is so incredible. So cruel and paradoxical. So unpredictable and sometimes so fair... Go before I lose control and forget that I'm a marvelous lady... And thank you... for giving meaning to the darkest months in my life and for helping me to forget Paco; I haven't thought of him for 15 minutes." The film could end on this note, but instead, Almodovar---ever the romantic---gives us the longed for kiss. With whom I won't say, but in ending the film two characters pretend it is New Years, toasting each others success: "Kiss me," he says. "If it is New Year's Eve, I want contact with human flesh." And she does, a fire burning between them in the hearth.
[* An interesting aspect of watching this film was catching a few things like this, or idioms not reflected in the subtitles, "You are pulling my hair!" as in English one might have one's leg pulled. My Spanish is so lost now as to be almost nonexistent, but occasionally it revives from its deep sleep to remind me of things I once knew.]