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Freshly up on 3QuarksDaily, my latest Humanists<\/a> film column on Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s’s The Flower of My Secret<\/em>:<\/p>\n Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s overarching project, spanning three decades and counting, makes the most sense to me as the redemption of the soap-operatic. I see it in his films\u2019 bright colors; in their plots driven by the sturm und drang of love, death, and betrayal; and in their besieged women who balance a certain noble endurance with a hint of trashiness. (Over time, the noble endurance has taken the edge over the trashiness.) Watching the entire Almod\u00f3var canon, my brain files each movie as one episode of a single, melodramatic story, albeit a complicated, ever-shifting one which begins in extremity and will surely end in relative mildness. While the filmmaker doesn\u2019t encourage this way of thinking \u2014 characters from one film don\u2019t seem acquainted with characters from the others, though my, what notes they\u2019d have to compare \u2014 neither does he discourage it. Formal, thematic, visual, and even verbal echoes resonate across his pictures, and in The Flower of My Secret<\/em>, a few of them crash right up against each other.<\/p>\n Almod\u00f3var builds the film around Leocadia Macias, known to her public \u2014 and to her public, only \u2014 as romance novelist Amanda Gris. Frustrated by a emerging dissatisfaction with her literarily unchallenging racket, a military-strategist husband who\u2019s grown both emotionally and geographically distant, and the unquenchable aphrodisiac side-effects of one of her medications, Leo lets Amanda Gris\u2019 novels go bleak. Bleak in a way, in fact, that meets the standards of Pedro Almod\u00f3var pictures, although Leo\u2019s sensibility, as reflected in an article she anonymously publishes against Amanda Gris\u2019 latest opus, may have permanently taken this turn toward the Almod\u00f3varian. Her life then takes its own swerve in the same direction.<\/p>\n Man thievery, drug addiction, crime, attempted suicide, family squabbles, a retreat to the village, difficulties with the maid, sudden revelations of artistic potential: Almod\u00f3var\u2019s followers, among whom I count myself, have come to expect all these developments from him and more. This film delivers them without doubt or hesitation, but some smell in it a whiff of the bitterness of an auteur chafing against his reputation. \u201cWe have the materials here for a comedy, but not the willingness,\u201d Roger Ebert writes<\/a>, \u201cand gradually the awful suspicion dawns that Almod\u00f3var himself, like Leo, is tired of his success and despairs that his producers will ever let him do something \u2018serious.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n