With his new film Parallel Mothers, the director dials down the camp to address the shadow of fascism hanging over his homeland
transition to democracy and in opposition to all that had gone before. La Movida was punk, promiscuous, queer, anti-clerical and rampantly hedonistic – just like Almodóvar’s films.
But now Almodóvar has had a change of heart. He is speaking in long, fiery sentences with few pauses – a very different passion from the high-camp passion of his younger days. He is not only now willing to discuss Franco, he thinks it is essential. Now, he says, is the time to remember Franco lest his victims be forgotten.
As a teenager, he started to understand how oppressive life was. “I felt afraid of the ‘Grey Uniforms’ as we call them, the national guard. The policemen were the ones repressing us. I realised that there were films we could never get to see in Spain, there were books that never got to us, there were things we couldn’t buy. I remember the total darkness of that time.”
Almodóvar believes that the pact was pragmatic at the time, but should have been challenged as soon as democracy was re-established. “After the left had been consolidated in political power, we should have gone back to the whole scene of the mass graves and all those crimes from Franco’s dictatorship that were still unresolved. What Franco did was bury those people so deep into the ground that he almost denied their very existence.