(Madrid) Women’s filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar has the reputation of being faithful to a handful of actresses playing his heroines, but his muse of yesterday and tomorrow is Madrid. Until October 20, the city pays tribute to this romantic relationship through the exhibition Madrid, chica Almodóvar.

“The story of Pedro Almodóvar and Madrid is a story of mutual love. Pedro Almodóvar is Pedro Almodóvar thanks to Madrid, they are inseparable”, explains to AFP the curator of the exhibition, Pedro Sánchez, author of Todo sobre mi Madrid (All about my Madrid). Walk in Almodóvar’s Madrid, allusion to All About My Mother (1999).

“He gave back to Madrid everything she had given him, and more, as her muse. Madrid appears in all of Almodóvar’s films. She is the real “almodóvar chica” (the Almodóvar girl), much more than Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura or Marisa Pérez,” he continues while wandering through the exhibition.

To welcome him, he only saw the Conde Duque cultural center: it is in front of its facade that Carmen Maura asks a municipal employee cleaning the street to sprinkle her with water in The Law of Desire (1987). The unforgettable night scene immortalized the actress in her orange dress, suffocated by the heat of the city in summer.

“Many foreigners know Madrid or Spanish culture through its films. Like we go to the Trevi Fountain in Rome or the Amélie bar in Paris, we have a first contact with Madrid with its cinematography,” explains Mr. Sánchez.

Through 200 photos from Almodóvar’s 23 films or personal archives, we discover the relationship between the artist from Castile-la-Mancha and the capital.  

One panel shows a study detailing the percentage of action set in Madrid in all its cinematography: from 6% (La piel que habito, 2011) to 100% for seven films.

“I have never felt like a foreigner here,” the filmmaker likes to say, who “shares with his favorite city a transgressive, eclectic, critical, open, cheerful, cosmopolitan and friendly personality,” according to Pedro Sánchez.

This adopted son of Madrid, today the most international Spanish filmmaker, did not come from a good family, unlike most other Spanish artists of Movida, the period of socio-cultural liberation which followed the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 and the advent of democracy.

“He also says that being a filmmaker in Spain is like being a bullfighter in Japan,” laughs the curator.  

Fleeing the Madrid of postcards, he does not hesitate to place his camera in the more popular neighborhoods, with their less obvious beauty, like Vallecas or Concepción.

While a map of Madrid reproduces the 272 locations counted in his films, the exhibition also notes the places obsessing the artist: taxis, hardware stores, cemeteries or pharmacies which dot his work.  

Just as Jacques Demy had Rochefort repainted for his “Demoiselles,” Almodóvar sometimes resorted to artifice to beautify Madrid.

“The colors are very important and completely fictitious. This comes from his memory of Francoist Spain, in black and white. His way of getting revenge, according to him, is to flood his films with color,” explains Mr. Sánchez.

The visitor can thus see the backdrops used to reproduce Pepa’s terrace with panoramic views of all of Madrid in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), because it would never have supported the weight of the filming equipment.  

“It’s an idyllic Madrid” that we see in Parallel Mothers (2021) or Julieta (2016), where the heroines have huge Madrid apartments despite an average standard of living.

The Almodovarian aesthetic goes so far as to recreate masterpieces by Magritte, Rothko, Velasquez, Dali, Titian, Hopper… in the shots of his films, as deciphered in a video.

The filmmaker put a lot of himself into his settings: “Almodóvar’s houses, we didn’t see them in magazines like some filmmakers, but in his films,” says Pedro Sánchez, who recalls that Pain and Glory (2019 ) reproduces his current apartment in Madrid, with some of his own armchairs.

“This is my life,” the filmmaker reportedly said when he visited the exhibition, before the public and far from the cameras.