It was not planned but i watched 8 1/2 again just about a week ago. I like self-reference, i like layers, i love it when those layers mean something. Usually that meaning comes through auto-biographical self-reflexion.
Almodóvar is now entering that stage when he no longer seeks inspiration, but simply uses his life, and uses it as cinema. Memory and life as the layers for the film. I suppose you can come to this film, it being your very first Almodóvar, and take something from it. But if you know where he comes from, it all makes so much sense. I don't mean the biographical facts, those are obvious and pretty easy to read, even if you don't know anything about him. I mean the cinematic journey, of which this is yet another chapter.
So again we have the unfolding of a story, in the context of other stories. In the journey we get many sorts of self-reflective devices to pull us into the thing:
We begin without a story. The director has no desire, can't write, falls into drug abuse and replaces his lust for life and film for his lust for drugs. He cannot direct, he cannot write. The actor who was a part of an old film (and himself once burnt out by drugs) now performs a monologue anonymously and previously written by the director. That performance and inadvertently allows an old lover (about whose relation the monolog was about) to find him, and that fleeting meeting puts a final chapter to that story. The director finds the will to through drugs away, as his desire is renewed, and he has the strength to revisit his life, and write about it. We visit his past, his love for his mother, his (unexisting) relation to his father, his youth sexual desires and urges. In a somewhat mechanical but apt ending, the fourth wall is broken, and we find out that the memories we visited were literally the film the director wrote after he left drugs. I wish that after we saw the sound girl and the illusion broke, that someone would call Penélope by her name, and the director was no longer Banderas, but Almodóvar himself. But i can imagine that would be crossing some lines he wasn't ready to cross.
This film is a meaningful journey to a valuable soul. I think you should watch it.
Almodóvar is now entering that stage when he no longer seeks inspiration, but simply uses his life, and uses it as cinema. Memory and life as the layers for the film. I suppose you can come to this film, it being your very first Almodóvar, and take something from it. But if you know where he comes from, it all makes so much sense. I don't mean the biographical facts, those are obvious and pretty easy to read, even if you don't know anything about him. I mean the cinematic journey, of which this is yet another chapter.
So again we have the unfolding of a story, in the context of other stories. In the journey we get many sorts of self-reflective devices to pull us into the thing:
We begin without a story. The director has no desire, can't write, falls into drug abuse and replaces his lust for life and film for his lust for drugs. He cannot direct, he cannot write. The actor who was a part of an old film (and himself once burnt out by drugs) now performs a monologue anonymously and previously written by the director. That performance and inadvertently allows an old lover (about whose relation the monolog was about) to find him, and that fleeting meeting puts a final chapter to that story. The director finds the will to through drugs away, as his desire is renewed, and he has the strength to revisit his life, and write about it. We visit his past, his love for his mother, his (unexisting) relation to his father, his youth sexual desires and urges. In a somewhat mechanical but apt ending, the fourth wall is broken, and we find out that the memories we visited were literally the film the director wrote after he left drugs. I wish that after we saw the sound girl and the illusion broke, that someone would call Penélope by her name, and the director was no longer Banderas, but Almodóvar himself. But i can imagine that would be crossing some lines he wasn't ready to cross.
This film is a meaningful journey to a valuable soul. I think you should watch it.