ACTION! by Pedro Almodóvar

Before shooting I always fall ill. This is so recurrent that it has turned into a tradition: it means that everything is ready to start. This time I was beginning to worry, two days away from shooting and I am still in perfect health. Until yesterday, in Almagro, where part of the story takes place.

At night in the hotel I bent down to pick up something and then I couldn’t stand up again, lumbago. 40 degrees in the shade and there was I, applying heat to my back. At last, we are ready to begin shooting.

By the time you read this, the film crew will have invaded the Granátula cemetery, where we shoot for the first two days. Penélope Cruz, Lola Dueñas and Blanca Portillo, characterized as countrywomen, clean and spruce up their relatives’ tombstones while Yohana Cobo looks on with adolescent indifference.

The crew will be roasting in the crucible of white walls that make up my homeland at this time of year.
Unavoidably, I remember my childhood: the whitewashed streets, deserted until eight thirty in the afternoon, a time that we children used to discover the mysteries of the organism while the rest of the family slept under the narcotic effect of the heat. I remember the red earth, the yellow fields, the ash green olive trees and the patios, blooming with life, plants, neighbours, secrets as deep as wells and loneliness. Female loneliness. (Thirty years had to pass before I faced male loneliness).

The patio was the holy of holies, where life took place. In the patio, the woman making lace would work on, catching the sun’s last rays with her bundle of bubbly wood bobbins. Plants were watered, women sewed, and time passed while sitting on rocking chairs in the shade.

In “Volver” I’ve paid homage to the patios of La Mancha (less sensual, much more austere than the Andalusian ones, like everything in this region). There is also a tribute to the “neighbour”. Female neighbours are an appendix to the family.A necessary and complementary appendix. Many of our mothers ended their lives in the company of such women because us children had other lives to live.

The neighbour lives embedded in the patio and she sometimes has access to the higher and more private area of the house. In this case, the character of Agustina, played by Blanca Portillo, is the ultimate neighbour. She has absolutely no life of her own. She is a lonely spinster (who has been taking care of her own grave for years) and each morning she raps on the window of a senile Chus Lampreave and refuses to move until the other woman answers.

The solidarity displayed between neighbours is a quality that all characters of Volver bring with them into the city. We talked about this and many other questions during the press conference held in Madrid on the 30th of June.

A historical day, and not due to our meeting with the press but to the fact that while it was taking place, the Spanish Parliament passed the law that enables people of the same sex to get married.

Since morning I’d felt like I was living a very special day. For a start, all the actresses (except the adolescent Yohana) had arrived dressed in white, without having arranged it previously.

Pure chance. And that spontaneous and casual white connected very well with the white of the houses in La Mancha, with the white orange blossoms that adorn brides, and it also put all the actresses on a similar wavelength. The white of their dresses seemed to underline an event that will be a landmark in our society. Whether The Holy Mother likes it or not.

The End

©Pedro Almodóvar
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