ACTRESSES IN THE FAMILY.

It happened by chance: several of the most loved actresses with whom I’ve worked in the past appear in brief but essential roles in my new film. I’m talking about Kiti Manver, Rossy de Palma, Lola Dueñas, Ángela Molina and Chus Lampreave.
It’s been very moving to have them all in front of the camera again, true fairy godmothers as well as accomplished actresses.

Kiti Manver as a high-low class Marbella harpy. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.

Rossy eating the note that Penélope has just left for her husband. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.

Lola Dueñas lip-reading. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.

Ángela Molina in a hospital corridor, heartbroken. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.

The latest one to join us was Chus Lampreave. The day she came to film she converted the shoot into a party. If films were people, Chus would be the grandmother of all my films.

Chus as the concierge in 'Girls and Suitcases', a film that is shot within 'Broken Embraces'. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.

She was the official actress for playing my mother, when my mother sneaked into my stories as a character (“What Have I Done to Deserve this?!” and “The Flower of my Secret”). Chus and my mother got on really well in real life, they were drawn to each other by something unmistakeably Castilian, as well as a natural sense of humor and a total lack of prejudice.
During preproduction on “The Flower of my Secret” we went to my sister’s house for several days to rehearse the scenes that took place in the sitting-dining room and the tiny kitchen. They were all scenes of booming rows between mother and daughter, the roles played by Chus and Rossy de Palma, inspired directly by the rows between my sister and my mother. My mother and my sister were at these rehearsals, sitting in the corner of the dining room. And far from feeling annoyed, or parodied, they found it natural, legitimate and even flattering that I stole those moments of their privacy and exposed them to the eyes of the world. My mother’s naturalness was such that at times she’d correct Chus, adding phrases or explaining to her about the situation they were rehearsing.

It was such a funny situation! Never as on that occasion have I had such a strong sensation of putting a mirror between reality and fiction. On one side of the dining room was the fiction and on the other, six feet away, the reality it was representing. And I was in the middle, a baffled and fascinated witness.

Chus with the lizard she named 'Money'. © Antonio de Benito.

Chus arguing with her daughters in 'The Flower of my Secret'. © Jean Marie Leroy.

Chus Lampreave is something more than a regular in my films. She’s an adorable person who still has a child’s innocence and capacity for surprise, even though her life hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses. She is the closest thing to the idea of an angel. A person who is naturally good. When someone like her crosses your path the best thing is to hold on to her and not let her get away for a long time. I always have a meeting pending with her, to talk, to feel her marvellous optimism and her enthusiasm at the mere fact of seeing each other and telling each other things.

As an actress, she is a case apart. When she was young, she studied art. She was going to be a painter and she was a flamboyant, modern, funny woman. That is how her companions, including the great painter Antonio López, remember her. Surrounded by painters and filmmakers, she never felt any ambition to be an actress, but Berlanga, Jaime de Armiñán and Marco Ferreri insisted so much that she couldn’t refuse. It was Marco Ferreri who “forced” her to make her debut in his masterpiece “El cochecito”. Chus underestimates her talent and that is part of her irresistible charm. When I offered her the role of Mother Street Rat in “Dark Habits”, her only objection was that she thought it too long, too important, and she should only do little, unimportant roles. Exactly the opposite of what any actress would tell you. Chus belongs to an atypical, wonderful race of actors who gesticulate very little. Or who don’t gesticulate at all, but their faces only reflect truth. I’m talking about geniuses like Buster Keaton, Totò, Bill Murray, Pepe Isbert, Robert Mitchum… Fortunately I managed to persuade her to play the role of the secret writer-nun in “Dark Habits”. Since then she is one of the most important emotional references in my life.

Chus trying on a sequinned dress in 'Dark Habits'. © Ana Muller.

GAYS AND STAIRCASES

We’ve finished the ninth week of shooting. These days we are tackling the darkest part of the film. The film touches on many genres. This week, it’s the thriller. I admit that in recent years I’ve had a weakness for this genre. (And for the western, but I wouldn’t know how to come to grips with a western). Throughout my career I’ve moved naturally from the screwball-pop-comedy-with-feelings through melodrama and drama to finally land in “noir”. All of it mixed with music and songs that at times bring my films closer to the musical genre.

I had already experimented with the darker genre in “Live Flesh” and “Bad Education”. The drama and the thriller are twin genres that at times mingle indissolubly. “Leave Her to Heaven”, by John M. Stahl, is the best example of this, or “Clash by Night” (Fritz Lang), the drama of a dissatisfied woman with an honorable husband who adores her and whom she abandons for fresher pastures, a typical provincial drama if it weren’t for the fact that Fritz Lang directed it. Lang, in a stifling way, darkens the intrigue of his anti-heroine (none other than Barbara Stanwyck), a woman who is too restless and intelligent to settle for the happy routine of a provincial housewife. Lang infects everything he touches with fatality. And fatality is one of the defining elements of the “noir” genre.

As for John M. Stahl’s film, “Leave Her to Heaven”, it is pure drama and pure cine noir, all at the same time, with a brilliant, deceptive photography which knocks the spectator out when he discovers that those pastel shades conceal vast amounts of madness and sordidness.

To judge from the first half hour, “Leave Her to Heaven” seems like a spectacular melodrama (a forerunner of Douglas Sirk’s style and aesthetic, but more turbulent), about a beautiful woman obsessed with the death of her father and with the man who replaces him in her affections, that is, her own husband. At first, that devotion for the dead father and the living husband seems not only normal but admirable. Gene Tierney is a passionate model of daughter and wife, until the love for her husband (Cornell Wilde) starts to fill her with a jealousy as unwarranted as it is devastating. Along with “Él” by Luis Buñuel, “Leave Her to Heaven” is the most frightening film that cinema has given us about the evil of jealousy, an absolute demon that converts its victim into a murderous psychopath.

That crystalline beauty, Gene Tierney, ends up killing everyone for whom her husband feels any interest, starting with her young brother-in-law, a charming handicapped boy whom she invites to go for a swim so that he can exercise his arms. There is an amazing image of Tierney, in dark glasses, waiting in a rowing boat until the boy, who is splashing with his arms and calling for help, finally drowns. Her brother-in-law’s death is followed by that of her own child, when she is pregnant by her husband. Her husband shows so much love for the unborn child that Tierney doesn’t hesitate to throw herself down a staircase to kill it.
Well, the best thing is to buy the DVD and watch it. In passing, you can take a look at the entire filmography of Douglas Sirk, an outstanding disciple of Stahl, who a decade later made various remakes of his films (“Magnificent Obsession” and “Imitation of Life”). Great spectacles to enjoy on these summer nights.

THE STAIRCASE

Gene Tierney threw herself headlong down the abyss of the staircase in her delightful house with the far from delightful intention of killing the being she was carrying within her for the simple reason that her husband adored it before it was even born. And the sole idea of competing with that baby drove her crazy. Jealousy, paranoia, insanity. Feelings rarely linked to motherhood.
Murderous jealousy and staircases have featured in golden moments ever since cinema was invented. Today they are particularly in my mind because I’m planning a staircase scene, a very important scene in “Broken Embraces”, with Penélope Cruz and José Luis Gómez, which I’m shooting tomorrow.
Without intending this to be a comprehensive list, I can remember some of the staircase scenes that have had the biggest impact on me. Richard Widmark (“The Kiss of Death” by Henry Hathaway) throwing an old lady, whom he’d previously tied to her wheelchair with a piece of telephone cable, down the stairs just because she refused to tell that lunatic where her son was. Widmark’s laughter as he pushes the wheelchair with the woman immobilized by paralysis and the telephone cable made him one of the most terrifying psychopaths of the genre, at a time when people still didn’t talk about psychopaths in the cinema. Diametrically opposed to Gene Tierney, we had Vivien Leigh who also lost her child in “Gone with the Wind”, falling down a regal red velvet staircase. Seeing Bette Davis next to a staircase is reason enough to start shaking (“Little Foxes”, “The Letter” or “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”).

The staircase has also always been an architectural element that indicates power. It’s impossible to imagine the Amberson family in “The Magnificent Ambersons” by Orson Welles without the presence of those staircases that connected the different levels of family drama. Also mystery hides at the top of a staircase (“Psycho”) or they were used so that the heroines of the black and white comedies of the 40s and 50s could run down them with divine dresses and dreamlike leading men.
Apart from what we could call the gothic staircase, there is also the epic staircase. The latter gave us the best scene with steps ever filmed, the one in “Battleship Potemkin” (that pram jolting down from step to step!). And if we talk about the steps in “Potemkin” we also have to mention the best imitator of that memorable scene, Brian de Palma in “The Untouchables”. I also remember the opera steps in the shootout at the end of “The Godfather III”.
And I’m sure there are many more...

Talking of staircases, there’s a film based on a play that is called precisely that, “Staircase” (Stanley Donen), a story of two old queens, played deliciously by Richard Burton and Rex Harrison.
English actors are so gifted for playing male homosexual characters (gay to a greater or lesser degree). And how different from the Mediterranean queen, taken to the peak of excess and parody in “La cage aux folles” and all its derivations (I’m not saying the latter aren’t funny, I’m only stating their differences).

I can imagine, and believe, any English actor saying to another man that he desires him, without adding anything special to his gestures or his tone of voice. Well, any of them except Sean Connery, Albert Finney and Christopher Lee. I can’t imagine them telling another man they love him.
But as well as Burton and Rex Harrison, what splendid “gays” were played, or could have been played, by Peter Finch, Ian McKellen, Laurence Harvey, Michael Caine, John Hurt, Dirk Bogarde, Terence Stamp, James Fox, Daniel Craig, Peter Ustinov, Michael Chambon, Ralph Fiennes, Anthony Hopkins, Alan Bates, Jeremy Irons, Peter O’Toole, David Niven...

For this kind of character, the Latin actor is favored by “the fire in his eyes” and a lack of prejudice. (I can think of no better example than Antonio Banderas. And I’m not talking about the films we made together, particularly “Law of Desire”). In “Interview with the Vampire” (a confessedly homo-erotic story, in which the vampires have no prejudices, what they’re interested in is blood, and they couldn’t care less about the gender of their “sources”) none of its protagonists “was burning with passion” for another, except Antonio. According to its author, Anne Rice, they all desired but the only one who radiated fire from his eyes was Antonio.
This fire, for cultural reasons, isn’t found in the natural register of British actors (except Ralph Fiennes) but they have everything else, including that inner “something” so hard to define that makes us sense that someone is homosexual, without any external detail betraying this. I say this as a quality, one which American actors, for example, don’t have. (Naturally there are exceptions. Steve Carell in “Little Miss Sunshine” is an example of the contrary, or Jake Gyllenhaal (“Brokeback Mountain”) and Kevin Bacon (“JFK”). None of them adds anything to his appearance and his way of expressing himself in order to play a homosexual character.) They act from within. For me, the most representative presence of the homosexual drive in American cinema is Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain”. Ledger expressed like no one before the unbearable tension of “being or not being” gay. His distressing performance became one of the great declarations by American cinema against the homophobia that dominates American society.
I don’t know why I’m talking about this. Oh, because of the dangerous scene that Penélope Cruz has to fly over in the shoot tomorrow.
In the next instalment, I’ll tell you how it went.

Penélope climbing the staircase of her destiny. © Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda.