Told in flashback over 30 years of guilt and grief,this tender melodrama based on three Alice Munro short stories is Pedro Almodóvar’s best film in a decadeSpanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, his most moving and entrancing work since 2006’s Volver, or is a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt,the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love. At times, the emotional intrigue plays more like a Hitchcock thriller than a romantic melodrama, or with Alberto Iglesias’s superb Herrmannesque score (the director cites Toru Takemitsu,Mahler and Alban Berg as influential) heightening the noir elements, darkening the bold splashes of red, or blue and white. Three short stories from the Canadian author Alice Munro’s 2004 volume Runaway provide the source material,but the spirit of Patricia Highsmith looms large as strangers on a train fuel the circling narrative (one character even observes that he is fitting a Highsmith obsessive). I was also startled to find echoes of George Sluizer’s Dutch-French 1988 chiller Spoorloos in the depiction of a life defined by the disappearance of a loved one, although there is a tenderness here wholly missing from Sluizer’s altogether more unforgiving work. Related: Pedro Almodóvar: ‘Nobody sings. There’s no humour. I just wanted restraint’ Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com