Book Review: ‘The Last Dream,’ short stories scattered with the seeds of Pedro Almodovar films

The seeds of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s later cinematic work are scattered throughout the pages of “The Last Dream,” his newly published collection of short writings.

The stories and essays were gathered together by Almodóvar’s longtime assistant, including many pieces he said he forgot about long ago. One, called “The Life and Death of Miguel,” dates back more than a half-century to the period shortly after he graduated from high school.

The screenwriter and director of iconic films like “Volver,” “Everything About My Mother,” and the breakout hit “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” writes that reading these shorter pieces again gave him new insights about himself and his work.

“Everything is in this book,” Almodóvar writes. “In it, I discover that, when I first got to Madrid in the early seventies, I was already the person I would become.”

He said his story “The Visit” was transformed in 2004 into “Bad Education,” a Spanish drama film he wrote and directed about a transgender woman who was sexually molested by a priest at a Roman Catholic boarding school.

In “The Visit,” Almodóvar, a gay man who was educated at a Catholic school in provincial Spain, writes about a student being forced to grope one priest, and then describes another priest who hears confession dressed as a woman.

There is also an homage to his friend and muse Chavela Vargas, a gender bending, Costa Rican-born singer who was beloved in her adopted country of Mexico, as well as in Spain, for her interpretations of traditional ranchera music from a masculine perspective.

But the main piece, the one the book takes its title from, is the star of the pack, as Almodóvar ruminates on his beloved mother’s life and death, her habit of inventing happy details in the family letters she read as a favor to the illiterate neighbor who sought her help.

“My mother would fill in the gaps in the letters, tell the neighbors what they wanted to hear, often things the writers had probably forgotten but would happily have signed their names to,” he wrote.

It seems to be a memory Almodóvar has carried with him while creating his transgressive, sometimes mysterious films.

“These improvisations were a great object lesson to me,” Almodóvar writes. “They set out the difference between fiction and reality, and how reality needs fictions in order to be more complete, more pleasurable, more bearable.”

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Anita Snow, The Associated Press