Dress It Up with Reality

Amelia Anthony aims to separate the art from the artist while reading James Miller’s “The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films.”

By Amelia AnthonyJuly 31, 2025

• Film

FOR MANY MONTHS, the only place in New York City still showing Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent film—his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door (2024)—was Lincoln Center. Like many of Almodóvar’s films, the film features a relationship between two women, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton); the latter now has terminal cancer, and they rekindle their friendship after years of estrangement. The film centers upon a “big ask”—will Ingrid be in the “room next door” while Martha takes a euthanasia pill to end her life? Inexplicably, Martha decides to broach this topic with Ingrid while they sit in the lobby of Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Imagine watching this scene at the Lincoln Center theater, that brief meta-cinematic thrill—the viewer is not just next door to the characters on-screen; they are in the very same room.

This mirror between the film and the extradiegetic world forms the heart of the argument made by James Miller in The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films, published this April by Columbia University Press. Clearly a superfan, Miller considers Almodóvar a philosopher—reminding us that the first philosophies were “fictions, not closely reasoned treatises”—embarked on a quest for self-knowledge, one complicated by the countercultural movement of which he was an integral part. Miller traces the evolution of Spain’s most acclaimed director not through a chronology of release dates, but rather by examining selected works that correlate to and illuminate stages of his life. The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar thus offers a fascinating glimpse into the auteur’s life during and after the Franco dictatorship and highlights some of his lesser-known works for fans of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) or All About My Mother (1999). However, what is most interesting about Miller’s book is that it succumbs to an overreaching extension of auteurism—so that the portrait of Almodóvar that emerges ultimately defers critical or creative interpretation of his works to the director himself, either through Almodóvar’s stated intentions in notes and interviews or the biographical facts of his life.

The first of the book’s seven chapters is a look back at the filmmaker’s youth through his 16th feature, Volver (2006), which means “to return.” The film is set in a pueblo in La Mancha that resembles where Almodóvar was born in 1949. Miller considers each film within its distinct universe: the screenplays, press kits, and Almodóvar’s interviews with media are all equally viable source material for close reading alongside the film. A diary entry of Almodóvar’s during the shoot appears to invite us to consider what in the film may have come from his real life. From this, Miller reads Volver in terms of Almodóvar’s own biography, interpreting the film as Almodóvar contending with the loss of his mother and, more interestingly, the tug-of-war between retributive and restorative justice in post-Francoist Spain.

Miller moves on to Bad Education (2004), a film that realizes a plot idea Almodóvar had been working on for a decade. Veiled and complicated in the film through several frame narratives, the film follows a trans woman who blackmails the priest who sexually abused her as a student. This trauma has biographical origin: at the age of eight, Almodóvar attended Catholic boarding school and was sexually abused by priests there. He found refuge in his budding love for film: “[C]inema became my real education, much more important than the one I received from the priests.” Miller sees Almodóvar’s creation of Bad Education as part of a Nietzschean schema of using “bad accidents to his advantage,” yet the frame narratives and iterative history of Bad Education complicate the notion of Almodóvar having worked through his trauma to completion.

It is not until the third chapter that we encounter Almodóvar the inchoate filmmaker. His first feature film Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) serves as a time capsule of La Movida Madrileña, the countercultural movement of which Almodóvar was a central figure. Pepi, Luci, Bom stars Carmen Maura as Pepi, in the first of her several collaborations with Almodóvar. Pepi is raped by a policeman in the first scene and travels across Madrid’s burgeoning Movida, spying on him in search of revenge. Portraying piss play, female masochism, and a dick-measuring contest emceed by the director himself, the film is “giddily shameless in publicizing the music, drugs, and previously taboo sexual practices favored by Almodóvar and his friends.”

Almodóvar moved to the capital city in 1967 and joined up with artists making shorts and participating in avant-garde theater; Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 and the nation’s slow transition to democracy that followed allowed the subculture to emerge into public view. Miller characterizes Pepi, Luci, Bom as “two movies in one”:

an unblinking documentary of the underground Madrid scene that Almodóvar was part of in these years and a far-fetched comedy about rape that plays like a cartoon, even as it is seriously exploring the erotic paradox of finding deep pleasure in humiliating pain.

In the former aspect, he sees the influence of Andy Warhol, and in the latter, parallels to John Waters. In a lucid critique, Miller asserts that, despite the characters’ apparent freedom, the film operates from within a punitive conception of justice and revenge.

To Miller, this ethical split is emblematic of the ills of La Movida Madrileña as a “proudly amoral subculture of defiant individualists” that prioritized sexual and social liberation over political ideology. Almodóvar’s work contends with the fallout from this rupture, rendering him “the only first-rate narrative filmmaker of his generation to grapple seriously with the implications of the postwar global counterculture.” Miller compares Almodóvar to Steven Spielberg, born a few years earlier, as both are self-taught directors that were heavily influenced by classic Hollywood—and is quick to point out that the Americans ignored the ongoing cultural revolution in favor of absorption into Hollywood’s machine. Yet this comparison overlooks how Almodóvar’s counterculture and its objects emerged about a generation later, having been repressed by censorship, curfews, and restrictions on socializing and homosexuality. By the time punk rock and postmodern writing came into view in Madrid, the Anglosphere countercultures had long since been assimilated into hegemony.

The rest of the book focuses on Almodóvar’s writer-director protagonists: Law of Desire (1987), The Flower of My Secret (1995), Broken Embraces (2009), and Pain and Glory (2019). Miller views these characters as self-conscious avatars for Almodóvar’s development as an auteur. Law of Desire is the first film produced by Almodóvar’s own production company, El Deseo, which he formed with his brother Agustín after the 1986 success of Matador. Law of Desire follows a twisted gay love triangle between a film director, his lover, and a deranged Antonio Banderas, their erotic and creative desires conflicting to comedic effects. Miller examines the film in relation to philosophies of desire, drawing upon Bernard Williams’s “categorical desire” that gives life meaning. Miller posits that filmmaking is the categorical desire that drives and shapes Almodovar’s life. In this sense, Miller’s book functions as a Künstlerroman—Almodóvar transforming from a young bohemian artist into an award-winning auteur—and is more interested in the director’s artistic journey than the artworks themselves.

Miller excels at conveying the exacting control Almodóvar wields over all aspects of production, including art, costume, set design, casting, and score. The director’s painstaking and costly choice to shoot some of his films, like Volver, chronologically—so that actors experience their characters as the narrative unfolds—echoes the teleology attributed to Almodóvar’s journey from artist to auteur. Miller takes this discussion even further, however, by positing that Almodóvar’s critical and commercial successes represent a triumph over the political and moral superficialities of La Movida. In his discussion of The Flower of My Secret, Miller suggests that discipline was key in the development of the auteur: “A vaulting ambition to become the greatest auteur of his generation has enabled him to lead a life of balance and moderation, knowing as he does that he will need to focus all of his energy on realizing his chosen project in life.” In a reading of Pain and Glory, drug use is metonymical for the hedonistic “excesses” of the countercultural movement; Almodóvar’s restraint in that regard, Miller suggests, led to his artistic success.

Considering his oeuvre as one of linear development, however, elides the significance of its recurrent motifs and meta- and intertextuality. Sexual assault repeatedly functions in Almodóvar’s films in other ways to both provocative and poignant ends—from the romance of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) to the tragedy of Talk to Her (2002). As Miller mentions, several key influences like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice (1930), which he adapted in a 2020 short, put Almodóvar in conversation with a wider ecology of cinema. Moreover, even his own diegetic objects are recycled and resignified—one example is the recurrent narrative that eventually became Bad Education. The director’s willingness to experiment with narrative, content, and form in iterative and repetitive projects disrupts a sense of straightforward progress.

Almodóvar is an incredibly prolific director—his works span 23 features and numerous shorts. Alongside these works, he offers his plentiful commentary and interviews, and speaks candidly about his creative process and his own feelings about the works. By frequently citing the director’s own interpretation, Miller appears game to take the director at his word. Almodóvar’s post-release output should be considered an extension of the auteur’s control over all elements of his films, from inception to interpretation, but the highly constructed universe of each film should invite further critical interpretation, not forestall it. Miller’s most vivid readings of the films draw upon his expertise in philosophy, knowledge about Spanish history, and familiarity with works of other filmmakers; when he lets Almodóvar get the last word, the original and creative act of criticism becomes diminished.

To circumscribe the works of such a prolific and complex director within the boundaries of his singular life story seems strangely confining—a flattening of all that is most strange and gripping in the aesthetic experience of these films. Almodóvar’s work insists on questioning and transgressing neat boundaries, defying fixed conceptions of identity. This is most apparent in his treatment of sexual and gender identity as fluid and mutable, like in Labyrinth of Passion (1982), which cheekily portrays a monogamous love story between a gay man and straight female sex addict. In Law of Desire, a cis actor plays a trans character, and a trans actor plays a cis character; this contradictory casting anticipates and embodies a Butlerian ideal of gender performativity. Indeed, Almodóvar treats gender rigidity as violent, evidenced by the horrifying nonconsensual sex reassignment surgery depicted in The Skin I Live In (2011). In Spanish, the word for gender is the same word for genre—a category Almodóvar subverts too, with his comedy-melodramas that borrow from noir and telenovelas and adapt plays and novels. More recently, Almodóvar’s foray into English-language films with shorts The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life (2023) and the feature The Room Next Door shows his willingness to transgress borders of language and culture. Overall, the book’s kind of biographical reading runs counter to the philosophy advanced in the director’s films.

Finally, taking Almodóvar’s word as the ultimate truth, and his life story as the overarching narrative, overlooks a central aesthetic and narrative aspect of his work: camp. (Here I defy the auteur’s own opinions of his work, as Almodóvar has stated in an interview that “we don’t even have the word camp in Spain.”) The extreme colors, hyperbolic and exaggerated narratives, and irreverence undercutting serious themes, all of which are native to Almodóvaria, epitomize textbook camp sensibilities. Camp is an international phenomenon—from Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to John Waters and Josef von Sternberg—and manifests a shared lived experience that is both visceral and, crucially, nonbiographical. In Almodóvar’s work, sometimes the irony of camp conception is rendered quite literally: the doublings of characters, the gender-bending performances, or the crude treatment of rape. What is most camp, however, is the slippery relationship between fiction and reality in his films. In a diary from the shoot, Almodóvar wrote that “everything in Volver is fiction. But the best way to tell a fiction, at least in my case, is to dress it up with reality.” Rather than an invitation to analyze his biography for what is “real” inside the fictional narrative, this statement evidences the highly constructed nature of the real. Considering the specific cultural context of Spanish cinema, this aspect becomes even more urgent: Almodóvar came of age under a dictatorship where censorship obscured objective truth and propaganda produced fictions to be taken as real. The “reality” of the auteur’s life and the objectivity of his interpretations of his films are actually part of a highly constructed performance, shaped with the same precision that goes into the creation of his fictional films. Conflating the fiction of filmmaking with the reality of biography without scrutinizing the artifice inherent to both suggests that films can be read for empirical takeaways—like “Easter eggs.”

Almodóvar is a once-in-a-generation talent. The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar provides new and comprehensive insight into the historical context and artist influences, as well as the creative processes, of an auteur who is widely beloved and unusually prolific. When a director exhibits such control over all aspects of production—and creates such excellent pictures—it is tempting to want to defer even interpretation back to him. Yet reading an auteur’s films in terms of an auteur’s life, as this book often does, creates a closed circuit that circumscribes critical engagement. And thank goodness there’s a bit more to be found in them, because otherwise we critics would have little to write about.