Out of the Past: Pedro Almodóvar and Film Noir

ONE OF the most deeply personal works by a filmmaker whose cinema is never anything less than personal, Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 spins a complicated, meta-filmic tale centered around two young gay artists in 1980s Spain: up-and-coming director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) and struggling actor Juan (Gael García Bernal). The latter will assume several roles throughout this tempestuous, shape-shifting drama, which reveals itself, in its final act, to be a work inspired by, and indebted to, classical American film noir—evident here in the structure of Almodóvar’s narrative, replete with extended flashbacks, psychologically revealing voiceovers, and a string of double-crosses, as well as in the self-serving motivations of his largely antiheroic characters. Through Bernal’s unscrupulous Juan, in particular, we find a character whose (triple) role-playing updates and absorbs the functions of noir’s femme fatale, funneling her treacherous energy and notorious status as an arousing and unknowable object of desire into a villainous