The Last Dream, by Pedro Almodóvar | The humility of a giant

Among the filmmakers who shaped my cinephilia at the start of my adulthood, there is the essential Pedro Almodóvar. I remember trips to the Black Box to discover his first feature films. In my DVD library are most of the works of the man who was revealed to the general international public in 1988, thanks to Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Almodóvar is an undisputed great master of the seventh art who we discover surprisingly humble and torn by doubt in his new book, The last dreamcollection of stories published by Flammarion and on sale in Quebec since Thursday. The 75-year-old filmmaker talks about his failed films (including Reading), the talent as a novelist that he dreamed of, but which he does not have, and the inspiration that comes to him less easily than at the time of Movida, a cultural movement of which he was a leading figure at the time. end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain.

I don’t know why I was surprised by his frankness, his self-deprecation and his lucidity. From experience – I have been interviewing filmmakers for 30 years – it is not the greatest who generally lack modesty…

“I have always refused to write my autobiography,” Almodóvar specifies at the beginning of his preface. The last dream is not a biography. Rather, it is a collection of 12 texts written between the end of the 1960s and 2023, kept by his assistant. Short stories and stories where we find themes and motifs from his baroque and exuberant films, sometimes dark, sometimes luminous.

We read this book full of images in our heads. Some short stories have directly inspired sections of scenarios, including The visitwhich is an embryo of Bad educationabout a sassy young woman coming to demand accountability from a priest at the school where her brother studied.

The author-filmmaker, raised in a village in La Mancha before his emancipation in Madrid, was only 18 when he started writing Life and death of Miguelwhose main character is born old and grows younger until his death. “Years later, I believed I had been plagiarized in Benjamin Button », he writes, half fig, half grape. It is one of the rare texts that he admits to having retouched, finding its style too bombastic.

Almodóvar draws inspiration from religious stories, fables and tales such Sleeping Beauty or Dracula (with lecherous priests who turn into vampires). It subversively diverts The Passion of Christimagining that Jesus becomes the lover of Barabbas in prison before his crucifixion. The former resident of Christian schools, who was destined for the priesthood, is never far away.

Other texts are more personal. In The last dreamwritten the day after his mother’s death, he pays homage to this storyteller who invented phrases in letters from relatives to her illiterate neighbors. The author signs his full name, Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, in memory of the woman who criticized him for signing his films with the name Almodóvar alone, ignoring his maternal lineage. And to whom he dedicated his masterpiece, All about my mother.

The filmmaker, who has just won the Golden Lion at Venice for his first feature film in English, The Room Next Dooralso delivers reflections on art and its relationship to creation. He talks about his obsession with The human voice by Jean Cocteau, who was already sweating in The law of desire et Women on the verge of a nervous breakdownthen in Broken Embraces. He made a medium-length film from Cocteau’s famous play starring Tilda Swinton, The Human Voicein 2021.

I adored Almodóvar sweet song by Leïla Slimani, who inspired a text on the artist’s solitude. Emmanuel Carrère is his favorite living author, even if his stories are miles away from his own melodramas. He writes about Parasite by Bong Joon-ho, Palme d’Or at Cannes, that it is a “brilliant South Korean film whose storyline can be questionable if you are not a fan of repeated twists and turns and changes of direction.” gender “. I couldn’t agree more.

If Almodóvar is right to say that he is not, as a writer, “up to par” with the filmmaker we know – the bar is high – his collection certainly allows us to better understand the artist he is, his unbridled and fanciful imagination, but also his increasingly solitary nature.

He writes that as he grew older he became “someone darker, more austere and more melancholic, with fewer certainties, more insecurities and fears”.

I find this doubt in the artist reassuring (much more than those who claim the opposite). Especially since he specifies that this is where he finds his inspiration. Lucky for us.