The Melodrama Redeemed

Melodrama had become a dirty word. The genre of overwhelming emotion, coincidence, secret parentage, suffering mothers and impossible love — the Hollywood "woman's picture" of Douglas Sirk — was, by the time Almodóvar emerged from post-Franco Spain, widely treated as kitsch: too much feeling, too much color, too much plot, embarrassing in its excess. Almodóvar looked at exactly this discredited form and saw not embarrassment but capacity. His films pile on the melodrama's machinery without apology — the wild coincidences, the lurid secrets, the saturated reds and greens, the heightened performances, the plots that would be absurd if they weren't so deeply felt — because he understood that excess is not the genre's weakness but its power. All About My Mother and Talk to Her move through grief, pregnancy, transgender identity, coma, and miracle with a melodramatic abandon that, instead of cheapening the emotion, makes room for more of it than realism ever could.

The redemption is in who he points the melodrama at. Almodóvar took the form built around the suffering of conventional women and opened it to everyone the conventional world excluded — trans women, sex workers, addicts, nuns with secrets, mothers of every kind, the whole vivid demimonde of people living outside respectability. The melodrama's enormous, non-judgmental capacity for sympathy — its willingness to take anyone's heartbreak with total seriousness — became, in his hands, a radical instrument of inclusion. The genre that Hollywood used to discipline women into suffering nobly, Almodóvar turned into a genre of solidarity, where his characters survive through each other, where female and queer kinship is the thing that endures when the men and the marriages and the plots have done their damage. The excess is compassion at full volume.

This is the move that makes him more than a stylist of bright colors and twisty plots. He grasped that restraint — the realist's good taste, the refusal of "too much" — is itself a kind of exclusion, a way of keeping emotion respectable and therefore small, and that the people he cared about had been kept out of respectable cinema precisely along with the big feelings. So he embraced the vulgar, the lurid, the maximal, on principle: the melodrama is generous where realism is discreet, and generosity was the point. His saturated palette and his outrageous coincidences are not camp decoration but the visual and narrative signature of a cinema that refuses to be embarrassed by feeling, that treats the largest, messiest emotions as the most honest ones.

His influence is the rehabilitation of melodrama and its colors and its excess as a serious artistic resource — the permission, taken up across queer cinema and beyond, to film big feeling in big style without apology. Almodóvar proved that the disreputable genre was disreputable only because of who it had been allowed to be about, and that opened to everyone, filmed with enough love and enough red, the weepie could carry as much truth as any austere masterpiece. He picked up the form the art house sneered at and made it sing the people the art house had left out.

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The line: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown → Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! → All About My Mother → Talk to Her

This line crosses:

• The Parade — the other great cinema of baroque, generous excess, where private feeling is staged as vivid, populated spectacle rather than whispered in realist good taste.
• The Face That Cannot Act — Almodóvar's melodrama lives in the held close-up of a woman's overwhelmed face, the affection-image turned up to its fullest, most unembarrassed volume.

Read through: Frédéric Strauss, Almodóvar on Almodóvar · Marvin D'Lugo, The Films of Pedro Almodóvar.

A note on the argument: Almodóvar's debt to Sirkian melodrama, his saturated style, and his focus on marginalized characters are documented record. The framing of melodrama's excess as compassion — and of realist restraint as itself a form of exclusion — is this essay's reading.