Ladies' Man

I'm behind in my reading, as well as my moviegoing, these days, but I just caught up with something great: Daniel Mendelsohn's 5,000-word New York Review of Books piece, "The Women of Pedro Almodóvar." He charts the shift between "the director's earliest movies, with their DayGlo emotions and Benzedrine-driven plots, and the technically smoother and emotionally subtler films of the past few years," a shift most evident in his treatment of women:

The newfound emotional subtlety and technical restraint that you get in these films seems connected to a deeper appreciation of women than was previously evident—women not as camp harpies or hysterics or vamps (which is to say women as drag icons), but as something closer to the women of real life. This is so even in Talk to Her, where the women are more the objects than the subjects of deep emotions; it's as if his two principal male characters' fraught attention to the comatose women they adore has elicited from Almodóvar some deeper feelings of his own. It is surely no coincidence that the most disappointing film of the director's recent period, the overwrought and overrated Bad Education … has almost no female characters at all.

It's fascinating, and culminates in a well-observed examination of Volver, which took him two viewings to appreciate: "Out of an abandoned melodrama he has fashioned a drama that, in its very restraint, may be the most radical thing its creator has yet attempted." Check it out.