The Spanish director’s 12 tales, written between the late 60s and today, are a heady mix of factual and fictitious, befitting of one of cinema’s most imaginative storytellers
, though, sure enough, that description doesn’t quite cover it. Assembled from a presumably dense and disparate archive of prose written between the late 1960s and the present day, the book’s dozen selections mingle elaborately fantastical fictions with candid personal essays and the odd self-reflexive curio piece that sits somewhere in between.
Almodóvar invites readers to view the book as a stand-in for the fuller memoirs he steadfastly refuses to write. That notion seems fanciful as you begin reading. The first story, The Visit, describes a transgender woman’s bloody revenge mission; others early on cover queer Catholic vampirism and a peculiar nesting-doll rewrite of Sleeping Beauty.takes more complete if still amorphous shape later with pieces of plain autobiography.
One story, Confessions of a Sex Symbol, filters his thoughts on Andy Warhol through the perspective of an invented female character, Patty Diphusa, “a porn star in the photo-novel industry”. Another, the sparse, wistful confessional Memory of an Empty Day, resumes the subject of Warhol from the diaristic vantage point of Almodóvar himself, with scant difference between the two trains of thought.
The fictional pieces, on the other hand, largely read as early treatments for films he either has made or never got around to shooting, which isn’t always to their advantage. The aforementioned The Visit is plainly a crude, even naive blueprint for, the director’s searing, shapeshifting 2004 study of Catholic school abuse and trauma, which was itself richly coloured by personal experience – but the story has none of the film’s narrative or emotional intricacy.
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