A review of Pedro Almodóvar's short story collection “The Last Novel”

sEdro Almodóvar has not yet written his autobiography. It couldn't be for lack of material to live on: what couldn't he have told, from his childhood in the Ciudad Real district of La Mancha, to his convent school experience in Cáceres, he moved to Madrid in 1967 and there came into contact with the experimental film and theater scene , Movida of the 1970s, to the stunning success of All About My Mother (1999) or his exciting collaboration with actor Antonio Banderas?

It was certainly not due to a lack of writing ability. Therefore, it is a matter of sympathy and confidence that instead of memoirs, Almodovar has now presented a collection of twelve stories, which, as the author writes in the introduction, “comes as close as possible to a fragmentary, incomplete and somewhat vague autobiography.”

Introduction to his film

The world-famous film director, now seventy-four years old, not only experimented with being a writer in his old age, but the texts collected in “The Last Dream” were created in the long time frame of 1967 to 1967. 2022. Almodovar Cast He blames its current publication primarily on the efforts of his longtime assistant Lola García, who preserved his texts over the years and to whom he now dedicates the resulting book.

Therefore, it has an intense and particular need to write (“From an early age I saw myself as a writer”), and at the same time it is surprisingly conscious of form and shows us an Almodovar with whom cinema, life and literature are inextricably linked. . whose “literary career” is a recurring theme here.

The first text in the volume, “The Visit,” which appears to have been written in 1967, before her film career began, tells of the visit of an extravagantly dressed woman to a school run by the Salesian order, who has a long-standing relationship with its headmaster. Score to settle. The narrative is climatically dense, features finely developed dialogue, and in terms of dramaturgy is an almost classically composed short story. For those familiar with Almodóvar, this clearly foreshadows his later film Bad Education (2004), in which a story called The Visit plays a central role.