A simpler weapon will do just as well it turns out. Jean-Luc Godard once said “all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun”. The shot is a bird’s-eye view from above: the knife being cleaned in the sink and Cruz’s breasts feature heavily. Attempting to hide the body of her dead husband, Penélope Cruz is shown cleaning a bloodied knife in the sink. Detail shots like this, that pick out and focus on small objects, are commonplace in Almodóvar’s world, and a fine example of his brilliant visual imagination which brings to life his stories.Īnother great example is a shot in Volver, arguably the most famous and most emblematic shot in all Almodóvar’s cinema. The interest in the details of hospital equipment prefigures the film’s occupation with illness and death within families. Finally, it lifts its gaze upwards and frames Cecilia Roth in closeup. It tracks their details moving only in straight horizontal or vertical lines, picking out the flashes of colour within them, whilst the credits roll on screen. The camera, in an close detail shot, fixes its gaze across a variety of standard hospital equipment. Returning again to All About My Mother, let’s look at the opening credits. One can tell that he aches over the composition of his shots, choosing and selecting them carefully, all to manipulate or generate a specific emotional reaction in the audience. There is a control and strength to his imagery, aided by the extremely talented cinematographers he surrounds himself with.įew directors are as capable as he is at drawing your eye to a detail or an actor’s gesture as he is. For all Almodóvar’s love of style and brightness, his sense of framing and composition within the screen is second to none. So why don’t films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Matador fall into their soap opera abysses? It is forever threatening to be overblown, overwrought melodrama, with screaming colours alongside screaming actors. He loves strong, primary blocks of colour and extrovert costume design (Kika, tellingly, has Jean-Paul Gaultier on such duties), and combined with the madcap mood of his earlier comedies, there is the sense of a director always teetering on the edge of complete and utter mayhem. Read any description of Almodóvar’s work, and one of the first elements to be discussed will nearly always be his sense of style.

Colourful yet stately and very controlled cinematography

Almodovar films