The Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodovar burst onto the international scene in the late 1980s, with the happily transgressive comedies he made with his leading lady and muse, Carmen Maura (What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Almodovar, who fell in love with movies as a young boy in a rural small town, lit off for Madrid as a teenager, with hopes of studying at the national film school, which had just been shut down by order of the military dictator Francisco Franco. In 1974, the twenty-five-year-old Almodovar began making short Super-8 movies, little sex comedies that were shown in what passed for an underground film scene at the time. 
Irreverent, openly gay, and cheerfully provocative, Almodovar was everything that Franco had been determined to stamp out during his forty-year regime. The next year, Franco obligingly died, and Almodovar was off to the races. In 1978, he made his first — maybe the world’s first — Super-8 feature film, titled Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Tim. Although I have never seen it, I will continue to assume that it’s a prophetic behind-the-scenes look at Project Runway until someone persuades me otherwise.
This year, Almodovar released his seventeenth “official” feature film, Broken Embraces. The film, which opens in the U.S. on November 20, is a melodrama in Almodovar’s lush, color-drenched late style, with a movie director hero (Lluís Homar) who once had a great love affair with his beautiful star, played by Penelope Cruz in her fourth go-round with the director (after Live Flesh, All About My Mother, and Volver, his long-delayed reunion with Carmen Maura). It confirms that, at sixty, Almodovar still passionately enjoys what he’s doing as much as any old pro in the business, which, taken with his mastery of steamy emotions, makes him as much of a love expert as anybody around. What wisdom can we glean from his life and work?
1. Getting Off Is the Best Revenge: Almodovar’s early films, which seemed so giddy and light-hearted, were, in their original context, also political as hell in the way they flaunted everything Franco had tried to deny. But Almodovar didn’t see himself as delivering a rebuke to the dead dictator: that would have been giving the rotten son of a bitch too much credit. In a 1987 interview with the New York Times, the director said of Franco, “I refuse even his memory. I start everything I write with the idea ‘What if Franco had never existed?'” That’s really the strongest rebuke you could make to those who would shape the lives of others.
When Almodovar’s stuff first crossed into the States, it seemed to be set in a world where homophobia and AIDS simply didn’t exist, and at the time, this led to allegations that the director was an airhead. But he knew what he was doing, and like a lover who couldn’t care less that his beloved is dirt poor or from the wrong side of the tracks or is fond of karaoke, he knew what was and what wasn’t important to him. And what wasn’t important could take a hike.
2. Don’t Fight Your Feelings: In Law of Desire, the character played by Antonio Banderas falls so hard for the hero after they’ve had a one-night stand that he goes berserk, kills the hero’s true love, then stages a hostage situation so that he can force the guy to give him one last night of bedroom passion before being gunned down by the cops. 
No doubt Almodovar would concede that this is going a little far. The same goes for the murderous lawyer and her embittered lover in Matador, who find mutual bliss in a murder/suicide.
But the sympathy he shows towards characters helpless with romantic longing was a real corrective to movies like Fatal Attraction and a general trend, in the post-sexual-revolution age, against thinking with your heart, let alone any lower organs. Like Tennessee Williams — another gay artist who grew up in a repressive environment — Almodovar knows that sexual and romantic fulfillment can’t be taken for granted when they remain so hard-won for so many. So he honors those who go all the way with it. Even if yielding to your passion turns you into a monster, that may be better than playing it safe.
3. Beauty Is Truth, and Neither Beauty Nor Truth Is Necessarily What the Crowd Thinks It Is: Reviewing Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pauline Kael wrote that its cast of fashionable women all “know they look great”, adding that “that’s not a small thing.” Truer words were never spoken, and part of Almodovar’s greatness lies in both his belief in the power of beauty and his appreciation of the beauty in people who might not first seem attractive.
Almodovar began his career as the bastard child of both underground punk culture and Technicolor romance and fashion magazines. Other filmmakers (such as John Waters) who’ve “appreciated” the subversive, striking impact of weird and even ugly-looking people may have given them star treatment in their movies, but they still presented them as weird and ugly-looking. When Almodovar put unusual-looking people (such as Rossy de Palma, who is invariably described as looking like a Picasso come to life) in his movies, he lavished them with the same kind of attention he’d give a Penelope Cruz, and they really did look beautiful. Which is, of course, how our loved ones want to appear in our eyes.
4. After You’ve Sown Your Wild Oats, It’s Time to Grow Something Else: There are plenty of Almodovar fans who miss the crazy charge of the movies he made during his first decade as a director, and plenty who found those movies ridiculous but admire the more poker-faced melodramas he’s turned out in the ten years since his 1999 comeback film All About My Mother. 
There are also a lot of fans of both his early and late periods. In between, there are the films he made in the early-to-mid 1990s. These have fewer partisans.
There’s a reason for that: Almodovar reached the peak of his early farcical style with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and he seemed ready to move on. But for a long time, he didn’t seem sure what to move on to, and movies like High Heels and Kika feel like calculated outrages by someone who had grown past his wild-child persona but wasn’t secure enough yet to discard it. When he conceded that he’d grown up a little and let his work reflect that, he, and his movies, suddenly became sexy again.
5. Look Back on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Giggle: Some saw the blond, gay movie director who drives Antonio Banderas mad with lust in Law of Desire as Almodovar’s fantasy self-portrait, and the Almodovar of Broken Embraces looks and acts a lot like that character a couple of decades further down the line. As if to clinch it, Embraces includes a scene from the fictional director’s long-ago masterwork, which plays like an excerpt from Women on the Verge…, but at the wrong speed.
Part of the fun of Almodovar’s fantasy self-portrait is how little common ground it shares with the actual Almodovar, whom any number of young filmmakers would love to be. He would apparently like to come across as a handsome dullard with a stately manner who has a mysterious sexual attraction for every man and woman who gazes at him. (Embraces opens with the director, who’s gone blind, performing an instant seduction of a stranger, a beautiful young woman, who’s volunteered to help him cross the street.) The people we love may look very different in their heads than they do to us, even if we wouldn’t change a thing about them. Which is both fine and funny. Just be smart and don’t bust them over it.