FALSE START

Pedro Almodóvar's adaptation of three Alice Munro short stories – ‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’, which appear consecutively and as episodes in one character‘s life in the collection Runaway (2006) – was a much-anticipated project. Not only has Almodóvar noted frequently his great admiration of Munro‘s work, but the planned film (provisionally entitled Silence) was to be the director‘s first English language feature, and the first of his films to be set and shot outside of Spain – i.e. in Canada, the setting of the stories. The disappointment, then, was palpable when the director returned to Spain announcing that the project, in Canada at least, was off. Ignominy was then added to discomfort when, shortly before the Spanish release of Julieta, Almodóvar and his brother Agustín were embroiled in a tax scandal – leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm revealed that El Deseo (founded by the brothers) had set up an offshore company in the early 1990s (Romney 2016b).

The journey then from the excitement of the Munro-Canada pilgrimage project to the bruised and withdrawn figure that Almodóvar apparently became seems short. If, however, the director seemed to turn in on himself, this for Lange-Churion accords with his trajectory as a filmmaker and artist. Lange-Churion argues that Almodóvar's ‘late style’ (2016: 441) is characterised by inwardness, and an increasing tendency both to reference his own films, and imitate the classical language of Hollywood cinema. Lange-Churion suggests that a decline in Almodóvar's critical and artistic capabilities is evident from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1986) onward. Furthermore, Lange-Churion argues that La Movida, and by extension the films of Almodóvar, is more complicit with than critical of fascism in Spain. It (they) represents a superficial avant-garde, where history is neither confronted nor revised. The cultural transvesticism evident in La Movida and Almodóvar‘s films is a form of apathy and recycling, not radicalism. The contradictions and multiple valences of Spain's past – political, religious, ethnic and cultural – are repressed: ‘This inability to reckon with the past resulted in a lost moment of social imagination and possible innovation, and ensured for the continuity of the most reactionary elements of Spanish political life’ (2016: 444).