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Volver
Directed by Pedro Almodovar. Starring Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Blanca Portillo, Yohana Cobo.
How to order Notes on a Scandal
Directed by Richard Eyre. Starring Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Tom Georgeson, Michael Maloney, Joanna Scanlan.
How to order

It's been a while since the end-of-year holiday movie season offered so many queerly inflected films. Sure, last year's Brokeback Mountain was the big gay hit-- although it seems to have receded over the past 12 months into the mists of accepted, slightly forgotten classicdom. But this year there are a host of gay-ish films at year's end. Certainly Dreamgirls is the big show-queen musical, with Jennifer Hudson's bravura rendition of "And I'm Telling You I Ain't Going" making her the reigning diva of the moment. Alan Bennett's wonderful The History Boys weighs in as the "thinking queen's" film of choice, with its smart, witty, introspective musings of the intersections between sex, pedagogy, and cute young men.

B

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ut two of the most interesting films for Christmas release-- Pedro Almodovar's Volver and Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal-- are also the gayest. At first glance, the Almodovar film feels slightly shopworn, almost an imitation of the director's previous themes and obsessions. At the center, of course, is a distressed woman (Penelope Cruz). Already, she's beset with a bad marriage, unhappy child, dysfunctional family, and money problems only to find herself entangled in a murder, a past family scandal, and-- apparently-- a ghostly mother who has come back from the dead. The opening scene is brilliant-- a host of agitated and industrious Spanish women vigorously washing and cleaning the family gravestones in a windswept rural cemetery. But afterwards, the film settles into a comfortable, somewhat predictable narrative that's always entertaining, but never gripping. As its title indicates-- volver is Spanish for "to return"-- all of Almodovar's characters are turning or returning to either confront the past or claim new lives. But at heart Volver is about how humans grapple with death and the possibilities of overcoming grief and pain.

This theme has been a constant in recent Almodovar films-- All About My Mother, Talk to Her, and Bad Education. Volver might be read as a meditation not simply on death, but about AIDS, and specifically a world in which AIDS has lost its lethal grip. Almodovar's genius has been exploring the lavish eccentricities of human emotion-- his operatic style and flamboyant narratives totter on camp, but never avoid hard emotional truths. Cruz's Raimunda has to struggle with the pain of death, but by film's end, death becomes either an illusion or a path to liberation. Almodovar has constructed a Hitchcockian plot-- Volver has the same Vertigo-like twists as Bad Education, as well as a Bernard Herrmannesque score. But the baroque narrative ornamentation masks deeper, more pressing concerns. Actually, viewing Volver as inflected by the AIDS crisis makes it a more interesting film. On its own-- without interpretation-- it feels wan. After its brilliant opening, there's never any of Almodovar's usual reckless verve, and even though always pleasant to watch and beautifully filmed, it feels slight compared to his previous work.

Shock, horror, yawn

Notes on a Scandal, however-- trashy and lowbrow as it is-- crackles with energy and emotion. The story of two interlocking sexual obsessions, the film promises far more than it delivers. The narrative details-- mostly through a first-person voice-over by Judi Dench's character-- the designs of a predatory, slightly delusional lesbian teacher Barbara Covett (Dench) on bright young new faculty member Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett). Barbara is lonely, bitter, and not a little crazy. Sheba is pretty, energetic, clueless, and feels trapped in her marriage to an old man. In her fervid imagination, Barbara conjures-up a potential relationship with Sheba and, when she discovers that the younger woman is having an affair with Andrew Simpson (Steven Connolly), a 15-year-old student at the school, she essentially blackmails him into a continuing intimacy.

The problem is that Patrick Marber's script doesn't realize how rich this material is. While there are moments of authentic tension, too often the plots slips into histrionics and silliness. Barbara veers quickly from being a frustrated woman driven to extreme act by loneliness to being a psychopathic harridan who stalks a nice married lady.

But the real problem resides in the refusal of the film to take seriously Sheba's attraction to the student. We are told that she is obsessed and can't stop herself from the destructive behavior-- after the affair is exposed by Barbara, a barrage of bad things happen-- but we never get inside the character to know what's going on. Sheba's obsession with the boy is presented as inexplicable, but, come on-- she's lonely, he's really cute, and they're both hot for each other. Sure it's a lapse of good judgment on her part, but completely understandable. So just as Barbara's desire for Sheba is reduced to destructive craziness, Sheba's lust for the boy is presented as outside the realm of comprehensibility. Rather then grasping that lust, love, and loneliness understandably cause crisis in people's lives-- sometimes leading to tragedy, sometimes to liberation-- Notes on a Scandal views any sexual behavior that deviates from accepted norms as fundamentally bad and grounds for a horror story. The film is posh, tightly directed, and emotionally gripping, but file it under "regressive junk" rather than the art it pretends to be.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com