Pedro Almodovar
L'Indiscreto Fascino Del Peccato

With "Volver," Almodóvar has returned, as the translation of the title itself suggests. Not that he had left us for that long. His penultimate feature film, "La mala educación," dates back to 2004 ("Volver" is from 2006). Pedro indeed intends to draw the viewer's attention to his return to the feminine universe he had abandoned to make room for the tormented stories that intertwine, forming the already mentioned "La mala educación." In fact, the vast majority of the public will remember the Spanish director for films like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," "Kika," "High Heels," or for the controversial (an adjective exceedingly overused in matters of Almodóvar) debut "Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom." Among the films that have a female microcosm as a starting point is also the subject of this review, "The Indiscreet Charm of Sin," a 1983 work.

It is necessary to summarize the plot briefly: the main character is Yolanda, a nightclub singer moving against the backdrop of a degraded Madrid, the same one Almodóvar had proposed in his second work "Labyrinth of Passion" (The similarities between the latter and the reviewed film are various). Yolanda is inadvertently the cause of her boyfriend's death, who died of an overdose (She had brought him the drugs) and in fear that her act might have serious consequences she decides to look for a place to hide. She remembers two of her admirer nuns who, during a visit to her dressing room, left their contact details in case she ever needed any kind of support. The woman then goes to the convent of the Redentoras Humiliadas. Anyone who has seen the film and was stunned to see two nuns asking for an autograph from a promiscuous cabaret performer would have been completely at a loss witnessing the activities the nuns engage in. They give themselves names that are an understatement to call ambiguous (Example: Sister Beatenbyall, Sister Viper, etc...) they deal and use heroin, read and publish pornographic novels under false names, they raise a tiger, they do not resist carnal temptations. The Mother Superior indeed secretly falls in love with their guest and shows a morbid attachment to her. The film ends with a shot of the Mother Superior who releases her tears after discovering that Yolanda has left to hide in the house of a wealthy woman who had offered her protection.

Almodóvar has clearly wanted to manipulate reality by offering us a distorted view, more precisely disordered and disjointed through the tools of the paradoxical and the grotesque. However, the director provides no preface that would let the observer believe that the world he recreated is a reality completely different from the one we all live in. There are no premises that allow the hypothesis of the presence of a dreamy, insane element to justify the obvious incongruities that lie between the figure and role of the nuns and their way of acting. The abnormality concerning real conventions is presented as normal. Almodóvar's detractors elaborated extensively on this aspect, misunderstanding the film's message: they claimed that the main purpose was to provide a positive view of perversion, that Almodóvar had done nothing more than produce a gratuitous and excessive indictment of the ecclesiastical system. Hence the inevitable censorship.

Yet if one tries to look beyond the simple plot and rash judgments, it seems possible to glimpse in "The Indiscreet Charm of Sin" the most radical representation of Christian faith and the will to spread it. The mortification of the body and the humiliation of one's ego before a higher entity is the founding basis of religious thought in general. Consequently, it would be unnatural, according to Almodóvar, for someone who fully adheres to ecclesiastical life to place themselves a step above the mass of sinners, especially if their objective is to bring them back to the "right path." If you do not know sin, you cannot combat it, and if you have never had any contact with earthly love, you cannot fully understand heavenly love. It seems fitting (though with the necessary differences) to recall the words of the famous Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz regarding the works of the Marquis Donatien Alphonse François De Sade "...is not an indictment, but a utopia. A reverse utopia" for which the connection between ecstasy and pain, the transport towards the divine through sensuality are the only means available to man to realize his most spontaneous, natural, and therefore most just aspect: instinct, understood in the most worthy sense of the term.

The negative aspects of the film are based on the technical side. Being among his early works (it is the third), "The Indiscreet Charm of Sin" certainly cannot stand out for its technical mastery, and in addition, the Italian edition not only heavily distorts the work due to brutal censorship but also forces one to listen to it in the original language with subtitles since the dialogues have been tampered with lexical tricks aimed at "sugarcoating," so to speak, and according to some reports, even the names of the nuns would have a greater (if not completely different) intensity and effect in the original language. Moreover, the film can often appear inconclusive or wandering in search of a point to make due to the unjust re-editing once again carried out by the Italian censorship. The final scene concerning the painful cry of the Mother Superior is instead a concession by Almodóvar to melodrama, with which he had shown an affinity in his first work but that in the aforementioned film appears as a sudden change of course.

Overall "The Indiscreet Charm of Sin" is an enjoyable and interesting film for those who loved Pedro's undisputed originality and is also a good starting point for those not acquainted with his cinema.