ALMODOVAR ON THE VERGE

By David Leavitt: David Leavitt Was the Visiting Foreign Writer At the Institute of Catalan Letters, In Barcelona, Spain, Last Fall and Winter. His New Collection of Stories, A Place I'Ve Never Been,Will Be Published Next September.

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WALL OR NO WALL, FEBRUARY IN BERLIN means Film Festival. In front of the Zoo Palast Theater, near the center of the western part of the city, a giant cube has been erected, thrusting 30 feet into the air and painted on all four sides with scenes from ''Atame!'' (in English, ''Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!''), the official Spanish entry in the festival competition and the eighth film by the director Pedro Almodovar. Though billboards advertising movies abound this week in Berlin, nothing approaches the cube for massiveness or provocation. On one side a gargantuan masked bodybuilder wearing a leather doublet stares out in challenge; on another a battered young man holds his hand over the mouth of a bewildered young woman; on still another the same young woman, dressed in a slight, clingy shift, poses sensuously, catlike, on all fours.

This bright, chilly afternoon, Pedro Almodovar is on his way to see the Berlin wall. Victoria Abril and Antonio Banderas, the actors whose magnified faces stare out from one side of the cube, accompany him, as does his brother Agustin, the producer of ''Atame!'' and a clutch of enthusiastic German autograph-seekers. As he signs autographs, Almodovar's jovial, moon-shaped face radiates calm and good humor. Only the cigarette he perpetually lifts to his mouth suggests any hint of anxiety he might be feeling about the following afternoon's premiere. He seems a model of the longtime star, the man of the world for whom throngs of fans are a fixture of everyday life. Yet when he arrives at the cube, his expression changes. He laughs, and points, like a child who has just been given an amazing toy.

While Agustin Almodovar takes pictures, Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril hoist themselves up onto the cube to pose by their portraits; soon their director joins them. The three stand arm in arm, smiling and mugging. The pleasure Almodovar seems to be taking in the cube surprises me. Less than a month earlier, at the Madrid premiere of ''Atame!'', I'd watched him make his way through a shoving horde of photographers with the seasoned ennui of someone to whom the rituals of spectacular fame have become banal. Today he seems younger, less inured. It's as if, outside the heated spotlight of Madrid media attention, he has had a rare chance to contemplate just how extraordinary his professional ascent has been.

In only 10 years, Pedro Almodovar has gone from working for the Spanish telephone company and making underground Super 8 millimeter shorts to being hailed as the most important director in Spain, regularly compared with Luis Bunuel and occasionally with the painter Velazquez. At 38, Almodovar is Spain's undisputed cinematic darling; he is a star the way few American directors are stars - only Steven Spielberg comes to mind. The epitome of La Movida - the creative explosion that started in Madrid with the death of Franco, and has yet to slow down - he is routinely called upon to pose for magazine covers. It's a far cry from the days when he made movies on a shoestring and got decked out in black leather semi-drag to sing rock-and-roll songs with his friend Fabio, better known as Fanny McNamara.

Three years ago, ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,'' an effervescent comedy with a plot as difficult to map as the route chosen by a Madrid taxi driver, established his reputation on an international scale, becoming the biggest box-office hit in Spanish history and earning a sackful of prizes worldwide, including an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. Though somewhat more stylish than his earlier movies, ''Women on the Verge . . .'' exemplified the classic Almodovarean technique of blending kitsch, melodrama, fantasy and salacious humor into a nimble and assured exploration of human feeling: Gabriel Garcia Marquez crossed with John Waters crossed with Virginia Woolf. Almodovar knows how to create female characters that are finely nuanced and surprisingly complex. Like Hitchcock, he is also a master at depicting the life of objects: typewriters, blenders, answering machines. And then there are touches that show no influence, that belong only to Almodovar, such as the moment in which one of the ''Women on the Verge'' turns on the television news and finds it being read not, as usual, by a perky young woman, but by Almodovar's elderly mother, Francisca Caballero.

''Atame!'', which opens on May 4 in New York, may be his most controversial film yet. The story of a mental-hospital patient who kidnaps a porno- and horror-film actress in order to persuade her to fall in love with him, it begins as a hostage melodrama, then, after a series of thoroughly unpredictable turns, unfolds into a bizarre kind of love story. From the Hitchcockian opening to the Capraesque finale, the film never stops surprising, moving with fluid momentum toward a tear-jerker ending that verges on the comic but - at least the night I saw it - left most viewers in tears.

For Almodovar, ''Atame!'' represents the climax of what has been a decidedly unconventional career. Often scatological and sexually graphic, his early films were underground hits, popular with students and the denizens of after-hours clubs. It wasn't until the early 1980's that they began to attract the attention of the film-festival crowd, both at home and abroad. (His 1985 film ''What Have I Done to Deserve This?'' arrived in New York courtesy of the New Directors/New Films Festival, and was an instant word-of-mouth success.) With ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,'' Almodovar hit pay dirt. Suddenly the bad boy of the Movida was his country's most profitable cultural export.

PEDRO ALMODOVAR GREWJU up in a small village in La Mancha, that famous plain of Don Quixote's windmills. As a teen-ager, he moved to Madrid, where for 10 years he made his living working for the telephone company. It was a time of extraordinary cultural upheaval in Madrid, and Almodovar (pronounced ahl-moh-DOH-vahr) was at the center of it all, writing X-rated comics and ''foto-novelas,'' and singing. His involvement with the theater group Los Goliardos led him into film - Super-8 shorts that in 1980 gave way to his first feature, ''Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap.'' It was an appropriately underground film - Almodovar proudly calls it ''my dirtiest movie'' - more reminiscent of Warhol than of Hitchcock. He followed it two years later with ''Labyrinth of Passion,'' an intricately plotted comic book of a movie that featured among its characters the son and ex-wife of someone very much like the Shah of Iran, and a Laundromat owner who routinely rapes his daughter in the mistaken belief that she is his wife. The first Almodovar film I ever saw was his fourth, ''What Have I Done to Deserve This?'', about a speed-addicted Madrid cleaning woman who sells her son to a lecherous dentist and helps out her neighbor, a bubbly prostitute, when she needs to borrow a whip. Absurdism, yes; but Gloria, as played by Carmen Maura, is also a bewildered human voice calling out in frustration from the huge and depressing housing projects that circle Madrid. I remember feeling, as I left the theater, an exhilarated sense of discovery. Almodovar, it seemed to me, was the genius not just of Madrid, but of every large city.

''Even though I invent the stories I tell,'' he says, ''I put in a lot of details that belong to everyday life, which is why you could always argue that Madrid is one of the key elements in my films. I'm fascinated by the human fauna, by the life of the city, in which there is so much which is so modern, and at the same time lives are being lived as if it were still the 1950's, and things that look like they belong in the post-nuclear world.''

Almodovar is a burly, heavyset man with thick, black hair. He has a distinct fondness for Western American string ties. Like most Spaniards, he smokes a lot and waves his cigarette around in rhythm with his conversation. What surprises me the most when I meet him in Madrid just before the premiere of ''Atame!'', is how much less outrageous he is than his films. Even the setting of our interview - the expansive cafe at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, with its battered leather sofas and marble floors - seems designed to cast the director in a new light: not Almodovar the risque denizen of after-hours, but Almodovar the cultural figure, the intellectual, the artist. There is nothing remotely hortera about this cafe. Hortera is a Spanish word often used in connection with Almodovar's films; a cousin to ''kitsch,'' it's more easily exemplified than defined. (A good example is Placido Domingo and Julio Iglesias singing pop songs together.) It is the hortera side of life that his movies often celebrate; yet particularly in his later work, the most hortera details often carry the heaviest emotional weight - in the final scene of ''Atame!'', for instance, where an obscure, middlebrow Spanish song called ''Resistire'' (''I Will Survive'') provokes an intense emotional response.

In an essay about ''Atame!'', Almodovar explained the genesis of the film as coming out of dual impulses: on the one hand, the practical need to re-use the very expensive set he'd built for ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown''; and on the other a persistent affection, shared with his brother Agustin, for women-in-prison genre movies - movies with titles like ''Caged Heat,'' made with ''a good portion of meat, large doses of humor and not very much money.'' Always fascinated by the intentional artificiality of movie sets, he originally conceived a film in which three psychopaths, having escaped from prison, set up residence on the set of a ''grade Z terror movie'' that has just finished filming; to their surprise, the cast and crew return for a party, and the psychopaths are obliged to take the entire movie hostage. ''I love genre movies,'' says Almodovar, ''but at the same time I can't respect the rules of genre, so I often change genres in my own way. Normally I begin with something very kitsch, but as I develop my ideas they tend to take on more gravity. If you can see through that kitsch story of the movie set held hostage, you can see 'Atame!' '' For Almodovar, ''Atame!'' is a story about ''passion with conscience, passion digested with intelligence, which seems like a contradiction.'' The film's heroine, Marina (played with incandescent warmth by Victoria Abril), is a former prostitute and recovering heroin addict who has finally managed to make the leap from porno videos into just the sort of movie Almodovar and his brother wanted to parody. She is kidnapped by Ricky (Antonio Banderas), a patient in a mental hospital who, during a brief escape, once paid her for sex, and has been obsessed with her ever since. As the film progresses, kidnapper and hostage enact a bizarre parody of marriage - breakfasts in bed, arguments in the bathroom, a trip to the doctor (handcuffed, and with Ricky flashing a knife). When Marina tries to escape, Ricky ties her up, though tenderly. (He shops for the softest rope he can find.) ''The moment when Marina says 'tie me up,' '' says Almodovar, is ''the moment when she realizes she cannot live without love; at the same time she sees that she's accepting with love a whole lot of things she doesn't desire - the knowledge that Ricky's a little crazy and that the world they're going to live in together is a hostile one - but that are insolubly united with her passion for him. She cannot live without this passion, but at the same time she has to accept everything that goes with it. She doesn't say 'I love you'; she says, 'tie me up.' ''

Almodovar is an inveterate explainer; ferociously perfectionistic, he allows for no loose ends in his films, and is quick to offer a rationale for even the tiniest of details. The casting of his elderly mother as a newscaster in ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,'' for instance, was not for him merely a joke about the tendency of newscasters to be young and pretty, but was rather part of an elaborate scheme to create, for the film, a sort of idealized Madrid, ''a city in which even an old lady from a tiny village can end up getting a job as a newscaster.'' Such eloquent explanations usually make me suspicious of an artist, because they go so much against the grain of spontaneity, which is at the heart of creation; in Almodovar's case, however, one senses that the actual process by which he writes and films is less orchestrated and more accidental than his rationales might suggest.

Take, for example, the scene in his eloquent 1985 comedy ''What Have I Done to Deserve This?'' in which the heroine goes into a pharmacy to ask for No-Doz. The pharmacist, an enormous walrus of a woman with peroxided blond hair and huge, slitlike eyes, was in fact an actual pharmacist whom Almodovar happened upon while scouting locations. ''As soon as I saw her,'' Almodovar says, ''I knew I had to have her play the role.'' No wonder the chilly contempt with which she refuses to give Gloria the pills seems so real: it is real.

''Intuition'' is a word Almodovar uses a lot when describing what the film-making process is like for him. ''If I speak about the lives of psychiatrists or soldiers - not lives I know - I inform myself, and then create the fiction around what I've learned. Through intuition you can get in touch with all the elements of other human beings. The only unique things that we have are our own experiences, our own lives, which we live in ways that no other can be lived; but seen from outside, people are the same all over the world.''

Almodovar's special intuitive gift for seeing into the lives of women is ''a grace which God gave me,'' and something few male directors share. (He mentions Bergman.) Scenes in which women try on clothes together, put on make-up together, cook together abound in his films, and are usually marked by an affectionate tenderness that his contrasting tendency toward bawdy humor only throws into relief. When I ask him about George Cukor's famous comedy ''The Women,'' however, in which the men are literally absent, he hesitates to make too immediate a comparison. ''I love 'The Women,' and I love Cukor, but for me it's a film that has a very gay sensibility, a gay style. When I speak of women, I don't feel there's any gay sensibility implied. This isn't to say that I'm not gay, or that I don't think 'The Women' is a wonderful film, only that I take a different approach.''

For Almodovar, the notion that gay men have a greater capacity to see into the lives of women than straight men is ''ridiculous.'' Any artist can portray a life different from his own, he says, if he simply ''treats the subject naturally, and has enough documentation.'' Though he makes no bones about his own homosexuality, moreover, he has made only one film, ''Law of Desire,'' that deals directly with homosexual love relationships, and while the jealous triangle in which its three male protagonists find themselves locked is as compellingly and erotically portrayed as anything else in his work, one never has the sense that the characters' homosexuality in and of itself is the main subject. The only ''law'' that concerns the film's hero and his two lovers is desire itself.

Perhaps this is because the characters in the film live, like Almodovar himself, in an atmosphere in which homosexuality is so taken for granted that the choice between making a film with homosexual or heterosexual protagonists becomes a purely artistic one. A few days' stay in Almodovar's Madrid is remarkable for the sheer variety of people one encounters. At the opening-night party for ''Atame!'' the Princess of Lichtenstein is there, as are painters, government ministers and famous drag queens. Some are gay and some are straight; as in ''Law of Desire,'' no one seems to care much one way or the other.

THE LIVES OF WOMEN REMAIN ALMODOVAR'S artistic obsession, even on the occasions when he chooses to bend the rules of gender as well as genre. He himself appears in semi-drag with Fanny McNamara in ''Labyrinth of Passion.'' Carmen Maura, in ''Law of Desire,'' portrays a male-to-female transsexual who, having had the operation at the bequest of her lover/father and then been abandoned by him, swears off men and devotes herself to raising the child of a woman friend, played by a real-life transsexual (and Spanish television star), Bibi Andersen. Being a woman, in Almodovar's movies, is more a state of mind than a state of chromosomes.

To play all the women he invents, Almodovar draws on a loosely shaped company of actors, many of whom reappear throughout his films in radically different roles. The cubist-faced Rossy de Palma, for instance, is cast in ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'' as a kind of innocent who loses her virginity in a dream, and in ''Atame!'' she is a Vespa-riding drug dealer who gives Antonio Banderas - her wide-eyed fiance in the earlier film - a savage beating. Then there is Carmen Maura, the most famous of what the Spanish press calls ''the Almodovar girls.'' Until 1989, Almodovar and Maura were an inseparable team. There was a feud, and a parting of the ways. For months their professional ''divorce'' obsessed the Spanish tabloids. No one was surprised, when he announced plans for ''Atame!'' that he had cast another actress in the lead role - the already highly regarded Victoria Abril, who had long professed her desire to work with him.

It is clear that Almodovar loves his actresses. The mention of each of their names brings a smile to his face and, characteristically, he has explanations for the appeal of each at his finger tips. I ask him who he considers the greatest actress in the world. ''Carmen Maura, of course, was a kind of perfect actress for me,'' he says. His face clouds over, as if in sorrowful contemplation of the break with Maura. What American actresses would he most like to direct? ''Diane Venora, Frances McDormand, Holly Hunter,'' he answers -a list as eclectic as it is interesting. Glenda Jackson is also mentioned as someone ''I would very much enjoy working with,'' as is Robert De Niro. He professes a passion for English and American novels: Jane Bowles's ''Two Serious Ladies'' repeatedly comes up in our conversations. Can it really be so long, then, until he makes a film in English? Well, there is talk of a television short on environmentalism, with Madonna in the role of a siren, as well as an adaptation of the British mystery writer Ruth Rendell's novel ''Live Flesh,'' to be co-written with Christopher Hampton (the adapter of ''Liaisons Dangereuses'').

But nothing is definite. Almodovar is being cautious, after years of struggle, even though he has at his finger tips the money and resources to make pretty much any film he likes. He has no studio executives to answer to; his brother, Agustin, produces his films through El Deseo, the company the two of them own and run together. He often uses his family in his movies: in ''Atame!'' his mother plays Marina's mother. Many people in Spain wonder why Almodovar has resisted the siren call of Hollywood for so long, and while he concedes he'd like very much to make a film in America, he tried but failed to get the rights to Fay Weldon's ''Life and Loves of a She-Devil,'' which ended up being made by Susan Seidelman with less than stellar results -he's also adamant about the necessity of waiting until he finds the right story and the right writer.

Through most of his career, Almodovar says, ''economic constraints have stimulated my creativity. That's part of the game, and one of the most exciting parts: adapting your reality, even money, to be able to create. When you shoot film, almost everything is full of life; the problems are full of life; the things that you can and cannot do are full of life. Far from placing limits on me, they are what excite me.''

For the moment, Almodovar seems content to rely on his own intuition in deciding what his next film will be, and where he'll make it. ''Film,'' he says, ''when it hits you, places you in a relationship with the future and the past. Even though you may be thinking about your own experiences, the inspiration of the scriptwriter combined with your experience leads you, without realizing it, to discover aspects of the future. Not that the film maker's a fortune teller, but for me writing and making films is a way of learning what I'll do next. In 'Atame!', Marina does a scene in the terror film she's making which predicts what will happen to her. It's not just a rehearsal; it's as if she were going to college to learn what was in store for her. And after 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,' a film about breakdown and abandonment and throwing things out the window, I found myself in the same situation in my personal life that I'd described in the film. Fiction for me supposes a period of learning - maybe it's learning how to suffer. Or maybe it's something as simple as learning about yourself.''

THERE IS NOTHINGJU in a writer's life that quite equals what a director has to endure at a film festival. At the news conference after the first Berlin screening of ''Atame!'' I try to imagine myself in the situation Almodovar has just lived through: standing around a lobby concession stand while, next door, in a giant auditorium, critics and publishers from all over the world read my book at the same time. Is it possible not to study the faces of those who walk out early? How terrible the last moments must be, waiting to hear whether the audience will applaud or - heaven forbid - boo. Things have not gone well for Almodovar today. First, technical problems halted the screening of ''Atame!'' midway through, and the audience had to wait a full five minutes before the movie got going again. Then there was the news conference, marred by inadequate and bad translation. Almodovar, flanked by Agustin, Abril, and Banderas, looked dazed by the barrage of criticism being fired at him; he didn't expect his film would make people angry. Some of the objections the critics have voiced are as ludicrous as they are vociferous - one complained that the film has too much ''homosexual imagery'' for a story of heterosexual love; then, when pressed for an example of ''homosexual imagery,'' noted that the hero wears tight jeans. Another asked if a television parody sequence about Germans retiring in Spain had been put in to please the audience in Berlin - a charge that both offended and baffled Almodovar.

After the news conference, Almodovar smokes on the windy sidewalks of Budapester Strasse. He seems annoyed and surprised by what he has heard. Not far off stands the cube, illuminated now, a reflection of how much the Spanish film industry has invested in Almodovar's success. I think of the glitzy gala that followed the Madrid opening: the fur coats and the jazz band and the pieces of ''Atame!'' jewelry on sale in the lobby (among them a heart-shaped pendant stuck with pins). Has Almodovar, I wonder, been overpromoted? Is the cube too big? If he'd made another ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,'' critics would probably have complained that he was resting on his laurels, that he wasn't challenging expectations enough.

Everything Almodovar has achieved, however, he has achieved through risk-taking; he has never been timid or shy. A few weeks later, word trickles back to me in America of ''what Almodovar did at the Goyas,'' Spain's equivalent of the Academy Awards. Carmen Maura, it seems, was the hostess, and Almodovar was presenting an award. They had neither seen nor spoken to each other in over a year. And right there, in front of millions of Spanish television viewers, Almodovar walked up to Maura and handed her a box. So many supposedly indestructible barriers have come down lately, he said, ''I wonder why the barrier between us can't come down.'' Inside the box was a piece of the Berlin wall.