Tuesday, April 23, 1996

NEW YORK (AP)-- Spain's most outrageous film director has made a long career of tweaking social norms, populating his comedies with transvestites, neurotic housewives, incompetent terrorists and drug-dealing nuns.

But Pedro Almodovar seems to enjoy nothing so much as challenging perceptions about himself.

Perhaps this is why his 11th film, The Flower Of My Secret, is such a departure from his earlier work. It's a sensitive study of a woman's struggle to overcome the loneliness of a dead marriage. His comic touches are still there, but this movie abandons surreal plot twists and campy characters.

"This movie demonstrates that I'm as free as always, as independent as always -- so independent that I can be serious when I want to," says Almodovar, who made such stylish, kitschy farces as Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown and High Heels.

He and his brother, Augustin, formed their own production company after Spanish critics attacked his 1986 film Matador, which satirized bullfighting. He turned down big-budget offers from Hollywood after Women was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film of 1988.

Almodovar developed his flair for the outrageous as a young boy in Caceres, a village in Spain's bleak Extremadura region. The priests tried to instill a fear of God in him. They also sexually abused him. It was an early lesson in hypocrisy.

Almodovar escaped by watching movies in the local theatre.

He left for Madrid at 16, alone and without money. But it was 1968, and despite the everyday oppression imposed by Francisco Franco, he says it was like being born again.

"Even under the dictatorship it was alive," he says. "I was afraid like everyone was afraid. I was afraid of the police, but for me it was great times."

He got a job with the phone company, joined an avant-garde theatre group, did nightclub parodies as a cross-dressing punk-rocker and wrote steamy "memoirs" for underground magazines. By Franco's death in 1975, Almodovar was a pop-cultural star.

Franco had closed the film school, so Almodovar learned on his own, turning out a succession of steamy sex flicks with a cheap camera.

That eventually led to box office successes, including Dark Habits, What Have I Done To Deserve This? and Law Of Desire, a story of obsessive homosexual love starring Antonio Banderas that became Spain's top-grossing film of 1986.

In Flower, Almodovar found himself returning to themes he'd avoided for years. There are songs from his childhood and scenes from a village not far from where he grew up, where the women still weave beautiful lace by hand. The camera work is beautiful, and the story is genuinely uplifting.

What's next? Banderas, Victoria Abril and other actors in Almodovar's stable have gone on to major studio productions in the United States.

But Almodovar says he has no desire to do a big-budget Hollywood movie, "not at all, never."

To emphasize the point, he says his next film will be "a kind of thriller, very different from this one, with a lot of humor but also very dark, and again in the field of sexual desire."To emphasize the point, he says his next film will be "a kind of thriller, very different from this one, with a lot of humor but also very dark, and again in the field of sexual desire."

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