Pedro Almodovar

Mind you, even as “Broken Embraces” openly channels such influences as Fellini’s “8 1/2,” Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” and Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity,” it’s very far from a dry film-school exercise. This is Almodóvar, after all, in whose hands the most extreme forms of melodrama become high art. “Broken Embraces” features a blind movie director with a double identity, a beautiful woman shoved down a spiral staircase by her scheming husband, hidden secrets within films and photographs, two different films-within-the-film (one of them a hilarious tribute to “Women on the Verge,” Almodóvar’s first international hit) and a self-loathing gay character so unappealing that only a gay filmmaker could get away with having created him.

Once again Almodóvar has cast Penélope Cruz, the star of his worldwide smash “Volver,” in a principal role. In becoming the muse of Almodóvar’s late career, Cruz seems to have discovered new range as an actress, while suddenly lending global star power to his pictures. Lena, Cruz’s character in “Broken Embraces,” is a more cryptic figure, the lost love of a middle-aged director and screenwriter who used to be called Mateo Blanco but has renamed himself Harry Caine (played by the suave Catalan actor Lluís Homar). While that name sounds like a figure from American pop culture — a mixture of Harry Lime, the Orson Welles character in “The Third Man,” and crime novelist James M. Cain, perhaps? — it’s partly just a puckish Almodóvar joke. (Say it fast.)

When the story begins in 21st-century Madrid, all we know is that Harry is blind and Lena is dead, and that Harry’s assistant Judit (Almodóvar regular Blanca Portillo) burns with long-unrequited love for him — and may know more about the byzantine back story to the tragedy than she’s letting on. Piece by piece and outrageous detail by outrageous detail, Almodóvar puts the scrambled chronology and gorgeous scenery of this story together, in a visually spectacular, sweepingly romantic and thematically ambitious film that is also, as he says, a “declaration of love” for cinema, which he describes as “not only a profession but also an irrational passion.”

I got the chance to discuss that passion with Almodóvar over coffee during his recent visit for the New York Film Festival premiere of “Broken Embraces.” Warm, expansive and utterly charming, he jumped back and forth between Spanish and English in a way I wish I could replicate on the page, leaving me and his interpreter scrambling to catch up.

Visiting New York always makes him think of his youth under the dictatorship, he said. “You know, all the biggest influences for young people at that moment were happening in New York and London. So for me New York has this romantic idea, it’s where the ideas come from. We were hooked on John Waters — well, John Waters is not New York. But Andy Warhol and the Factory, all the underground directors.

“And you can’t imagine how important the music was to us. I had a group at that time, but it was no big deal, there were lots of other groups who were better. A group like the New York Dolls, or the English New Wave — you can’t imagine how important that was to us. I don’t get the same feeling when I go to London today. For a Spanish boy in the ’70s, London meant freedom. But I don’t have that feeling in London anymore. London is just another place to visit. New York for me still feels like a place of fantasy.”

How much culture from outside, from New York or London, reached you during those years? Were people able to smuggle in records and books and films?

It came in a very surreptitious way. One found a way, especially during those last five years. When the dictator was older, it started seeping in, from Paris and London. Andy Warhol’s Factory films came to us from London. During the last five years of the dictator’s life, we started to be a part of Europe. I remember that in the Spanish Cinematheque, for example, we could see films that were forbidden to run commercially.

You know, it seems as if “Volver” was about the places that shaped you — La Mancha in Castile, where you were born, and Madrid, where you grew up. And this movie seems to be about the culture, and especially the films, that made you who you are.

It’s true that “Volver” is very much tied to my childhood memories of the region, of my mother, of the neighbors, of the place. Those stories in the film were all stories that I heard. I heard ghost stories, I heard stories about rape. I got to feel the female solidarity that was all around me.

In this particular film, yes, it’s very much about my relationship to cinema, my love for cinema. It’s about cinema’s capacity to be healing, in many ways, and to present a world that is a little less imperfect. If life is imperfect, cinema makes it just a little less imperfect. Given the fact that the main character [Caine/Blanco] is a film director, through him I’m expressing my admiration for film and filmmakers. For example, when the character says, “I want to hear Jeanne Moreau’s voice,” I’m speaking for myself. On the one hand he’s blind, but of course hers is one of the greatest voices in cinema.

When a younger character starts to list the names of all the DVDs on Harry’s shelves — Fellini, Bergman, Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin — well, of course there are many more directors that I love, but those are the ones that mean the most, those are the ones I’ve been watching on DVD.

This movie also feels sometimes like one of those symbolic American melodramas from the ’40s or ’50s. Like a Douglas Sirk movie, maybe. You’ve got a main character who is blind, a beautiful woman who’s in a wheelchair, a spiral staircase, all these elements.

Douglas Sirk is a director I very much admire, and I love that period of American drama. But I think a film like “High Heels” is more in line with the spectacular and lavish drama of Douglas Sirk. In this film the pain is much more palpable, and it’s a film that is less welcoming of tears, because of its hardness.

Now, there’s this puzzling fact that the main character has two names. He’s Mateo Blanco and he’s Harry Caine. One of the simplest ways of looking at that is he’s got a Spanish name and an American name. And as a filmmaker, maybe you’ve got a European side and an American side.

[Laughter.] I don’t know, it’s curious to discover that. I like the name Harry Caine. If you just pronounce it all together, it means huracán. I like that, for a director’s name. It was more, maybe, about creating this kind of Orson Welles character, even though the rich guy, Martel [husband of the Penélope Cruz character], is more like a Welles character. But there’s some sense there, some flavor, that that’s the way Orson Welles worked.

You know, there have been lots of films about filmmaking, films about directors. You definitely refer to several of them! But I’m not sure anyone’s ever used the making-of — the documentary about the film, that shows up later on the DVD — as a major plot device before.

Yeah, I’ve fantasized about this for years, about making a film that would just be the making-of, a fiction about a fiction. If you push the genre of the making-of a little further, you enter the terrain of voyeurism, of stealing images and stealing a particular intimacy. It enters a very secretive terrain. I’ve always fantasized that it would be through the making-of that you would discover some other story, the real story that is being told. That’s what I pulled into this movie, that motif.

Then there’s the damaged young gay man who shoots the making-of, and who becomes an important figure in the plot in several different ways. He bears a strong resemblance to the main character in Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” which is like the voyeur-thriller of all time.

Yes, they talk about that in the movie, in fact. The difference is that he doesn’t want to hurt the director. He just wants to know more, to see more, to be present in his life. He likes the director very much, I’m talking about, he physically likes him.

Yes! I think you made that clear.

If I look back to my films and all the different references I have to other films, it is true that Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” comes up with some frequency. It’s not always very explicit, sometimes I only realize it in retrospect. What it is about “Peeping Tom” is this desire to capture an extreme sensation. In my film that is actually death itself, but it doesn’t have to be that. The desire to steal, to capture, an extremely strong sensation. In “Kika” you have it maybe even more explicitly. All reality shows have a little “Peeping Tom” in them, and those were what I wanted to denounce in “Kika.”

There’s a case in Brazil — maybe you’ve heard about this — about a man, a politician, who had a news show. It was known for always arriving before anyone else at the scene of a crime. Of course it turned out that he was actually organizing the crimes, organizing murders. That’s why he was always the first one there!

Another film that influenced me very much is Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” That idea that a photograph — not necessarily a moving image — can reveal particular kinds of secrets, things that the naked eye cannot see.

I can only hope we’re going to see more of “Chicas y maletas” (“Girls and Suitcases”), the unfinished film that Harry and Lena were making. It’s really fun!

There is a lot more of “Chicas y maletas”! I could not refuse it. It was so funny when we were doing it, and I kept writing more and more things. At the end, I knew I couldn’t put so much footage into the real movie, because, you know, it was unbalanced. There’s at least 10 minutes more, and it’s a very funny piece.

Those will be on the DVD, and there were two or three sequences that I cut from the main film that were very good too. There’s one scene I really like that’s in a restaurant for blind people, where everything happens in the most incredible blackness or darkness that you can imagine. Have you heard about this? They started in Berlin. I’ve never experienced that kind of darkness, there’s no light that comes through. It’s as if you were in a void.

These restaurants were actually started by blind people, partly to educate their family members about their experiences. Now there’s one in Paris and it’s become a hot place to go. It’s not just for blind people, it’s for regular people who want to have a new experience. The theory is that all your other senses become more acute when you have no vision. So there’s a take — you can hardly see it — where a girl is giving a man a blow job in this restaurant.

You know, the one film by another director that we actually see in “Broken Embraces” is clearly important, and it could hardly be more different from your own film. On their last night together, Mateo and Lena are watching Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” on television, a very spare and restrained film, shot in black-and-white.

Well, there’s an emotional relationship between the two films. You know, I don’t only like directors who are as flamboyant as I am, or as my films can sometimes be. “Journey to Italy” is a film I love, and the scene I show is a scene that always moves me very much, and in my film it moves Lena, my character, in the same way.

We see a moment where Rossellini captures a couple that was petrified at Pompeii, in the lava of Vesuvius. And the tour guide says, “This is a love that has been immortalized for eternity.” This affects Ingrid Bergman’s character very much because she recognizes that her relationship with the George Sanders character is not like that. It’s awful, it’s the opposite. She’s overcome with emotion and she turns away. On the other side of the screen, Penélope’s character is also very much moved by this scene, and wonders whether the love she shares with Lluís Homar’s character will survive through eternity. This is something that is inside her, but obviously she doesn’t say it. For me it was a voice-over that we don’t hear.

She does the opposite, holds on to her lover, and Lluis Homar does yet another thing. He stands up and takes a photograph of their embrace. He’s trying to immortalize their embrace in his own way.

You know, it’s delightful to sit here and talk about film with you. But you and I are old enough to remember when a new film by Bergman or Fellini — or maybe an early film by Almodóvar — was a major cultural event. People had to go see it, discuss it, argue about it. But there are so many other distractions these days, and I wonder whether cinema still matters in the same way.

I do get the sense that it’s not as important as it used to be. I think there are of course people like ourselves who are very much excited and moved by the discovery of new film. But in general, and speaking especially about younger audiences, I don’t think that film really has the same kind of significance.

If you think of Antonioni’s films, like “La Notte” or “L’Eclisse” — if they were released today, would they even find a market? Would they find an audience? It would be impossible to find that kind of reception and reaction. I just don’t know, we’ll have to see. As long as there’s a cinephile that is still willing to see those kinds of films, then those films will still mean something.

“Broken Embraces” opens Nov. 20 in New York and Dec. 11 in Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow. 

Sporting perfect hair, a Gaultier wardrobe and the Anglo-sounding name of Dr. Robert Ledgard  — Almodóvar loves character names that seem to belong to Rock Hudson in some half-forgotten Douglas Sirk picture — Banderas is perfecting a super-strong genetically engineered form of human skin, and using it on Vera (Elena Anaya), a mysterious beauty he has locked in the basement. Despite their sadomasochistic relationship (which is worse than you imagine), Vera seems to have fallen in love with Ledgard, and the coldblooded doctor has begun to reciprocate. That’s when Zeca (Roberto Álamo), the thuggish son of Ledgard’s housekeeper (Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes), arrives on the scene — and appears to recognize Vera as his former lover, although she can’t remember him. That triggers a series of violent events and, more important, begins to unzip the interlocking past histories of all these characters.

“The Skin I Live In” is likely to be a controversial film for Almodóvar fans. It’s as stylish and kinky as you could want, but compared to his recent female-centric melodramas (“Broken Embraces,” “Volver,” “All About My Mother”), this is a chilly genre exercise that casts his obsession with gender and sexuality in a harsh new light. It contains a genuinely violent and upsetting rape scene, which Almodóvar discussed in a meeting with a handful of critics at Cannes last spring. Before you read on, I have to caution you that this interview veers very quickly into spoiler territory. I’ve edited the conversation a little, but there’s no way to remove that element entirely, and the subject is so interesting I think some readers will be OK with the revelations. I don’t think it ruins the effect of the film if you know a little more about where Vera came from, or the depths of Dr. Ledgard’s depraved scheme — and I can assure you there are several important plot elements that are not disclosed here.

Almodóvar is an impressive but often maddening conversationalist, who’s delighted to talk at great length about the philosophical themes and artistic influences in his work, weaving back and forth between Spanish and English (with a few bits of French), interrupting his interpreter and repeatedly contradicting his interlocutors and himself. This discussion took place around a table in a crowded hotel bar, the day after the Cannes premiere of “The Skin I Live In.”

Pedro, can you discuss your interest in switching genders? You’ve used the idea of a sex change before, but not quite like this.

I think that in addition to it being something of a general dream that people have — the idea of seeing yourself as the opposite sex — there is the question of challenging God. If you are transsexual, then you are issuing a challenge to God, who created you in the wrong body. It’s a way of reaffirming your own identity. When transsexuals take the step of becoming what they feel they are inside, they are defying God and reaffirming their own identity. In “The Skin I Live In,” one of the most important elements is this element of identity. I don’t mean sexual identity, I mean identity as such. The doctor in the film operates the most atrocious changes on someone’s body, but in doing so he never touches what you might call the inner soul, the inner spirit, what makes us truly human. In this film I treat transsexuality in a completely different way from in my earlier films. In this film it’s the most atrocious punishment, whereas in my previous films it’s a way of reaffirming your true identity.

But doesn’t Vera, Elena Anaya’s character, find peace in her new body?

I think the first step to surviving adverse conditions, and Vera’s conditions are truly awful, is to accept reality as it stands. This adaptation to survival needs is not an immediate process. Vera’s first reaction to finding herself in a new body is very clearly expressed in the scene with the dresses. When, as a new woman, she is presented with these very feminine frocks, her reaction is almost animalistic. She tears at them. I told Elena Anaya to play this scene in a very feline manner, to leap on the bed like a tiger or a cat and rip the dresses as though she were ripping the hide of an animal. That is her first reaction to this imposed new sex.

But the second step, because this character is a born survivor, is to accept reality. And then the third step is to wait, to wait for any tiny chance to escape that may open. She achieves this through doing yoga, through copying the images of Louise Bourgeois, and these elements are essential to her survival. Then, when Vera frees herself through violence — but it’s a violence that has been imposed on her by circumstances — there is a very eloquent scene, a close-up in which you can see that she didn’t want to kill anyone, she is disgusted. Then, when she returns home as Vera, she sees the girl whom she liked when she was Vincent, and she still finds this girl attractive. In her mother’s shop, which is full of these feminine symbols — the dresses up on the walls, which are like ghosts of women — she still feels herself as Vincent, even though she’s deep inside this new body. So there’s a kind of epilogue to the film, in which Vincent as Vera makes love to Cristina, the girl he always liked. This is the closest thing to a happy ending, with a new body that you never wanted.

Do you consider this a horror movie? You seem to be saying different things at different times about that.

I really don’t know how to define the movie. If we promote the film as a horror movie, maybe people will be disappointed. I didn’t agree with one review I read, where there was a big confusion about the words “gender” and “genre.” In Spanish, we have the same word for these things. To talk about male and female, we say genero, and to talk about thrillers, suspense or comedy, we also say genero. He mixed up those ideas, and it was all a big mistake. I don’t think it’s a horror movie, no. I’m not trying to deliver big scares. I’m trying to go into your mind with an image that can horrify you. I didn’t want blood or scary moments, but the whole thing should be scary, perhaps in a subliminal way. I always have problems defining my movies in terms of genre, because I mix a lot of them. This is how I’ve done it since I began making movies. This movie also has some very noir moments — that’s a genre that I like — but you cannot say this is a noir movie. This is an obscure movie about sexual identity and about survival and also about an abuse of power. You can’t understand it on every level, it can be a metaphor for almost anything. You can watch the movie in many ways, but you can’t look at it as a typical horror movie, because it isn’t.

But surely we are justified in comparing this movie to James Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein,” which seems very much like a film you would admire.

No, no, yes, yes, of course. That is included. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was writing, but it’s obvious. When I saw Elena Anaya, with these marks and scars all over her body, it’s impossible not to think about Frankenstein. Frankenstein arrives in my movie in a natural way, like a cultural myth. I didn’t want to avoid it. When I’m writing, I’m completely free. I did not try to make a new Frankenstein, just to make my own movie. But Elena really is a new type of Frankenstein monster. And, yes, of course, James Whale and Frankenstein is in my movie. Another friend mentioned “Les jeux sans visage” ["Eyes Without a Face"] of Georges Franju, an auteur I like very much, I film I remember watching when I was a child.

What role does the art of Louise Bourgeois play in this film? Why is it so important?

I wrote this script over many years. I made five movies during the 2000s, and after finishing every one I went back to this script. I was never satisfied with the results. I knew about Louise Bourgeois, of course, but then I saw her work in a big exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, and I thought it was so perfect, I was so moved. There were all these figures she had made with her own clothes, and I thought that was perfect for Vera. That deep emotion that she receives from the work of Bourgeois helps her a lot. Her worst enemy is the passage of time. So yoga is very good because it isolates you completely in your breath. To breathe is to live. That’s why she writes so many times on the wall, Respiro. “I breathe.” It’s like saying I’m still alive. The magic of yoga is that in concentrating yourself on the breath, you are in that present and you don’t feel anything. She has to fight against the passage of time. So I can say that I am very sad that Louise Bourgeois died a year ago, because this is a big tribute to her work.

Do you do yoga? You talk about it so passionately.

No, no, no. I can be passionate about, I don’t know, Alfred Hitchcock, and I didn’t know him. If I knew him, I am pretty sure I would not have liked him personally! I would have found him fascinating, but sometimes you don’t have to know the person, if you like the work.

You have two actors of different sexes playing the same character. That’s a pretty unusual casting and directing challenge.

Yeah, and they also have to look similar. Antonio’s character has changed her body, but he cannot change the bones. They have to have similar faces, and they have to be exactly the same height. It was very difficult to find the right actors. I was looking at more androgynous women, and I found some actresses who looked like men and were also very beautiful. Elena was not as tall as I wanted, but in the auditions she was much better than anyone else. I decided that she was the perfect actress to give the emotion and strength that I wanted. So the challenge was, yes, to find an actor exactly as tall as Elena. I think I saw hundreds of Spanish actors, and I was also looking outside Spain. The character is very difficult; no one can live this situation. This is not merely an unusual situation, it is a completely unique situation. You need a very good actor to play that, you cannot make any comparison with anything real. Fortunately, we found Jan Cornet, who is very new as an actor, and I think he’s great.

Can you still remember meeting Antonio Banderas for the first time?

Oh yes, I remember very well. It was in the early ’80s, I think 1981. I was looking for a Shiite terrorist. [Laughter.] All you needed was dark hair, which is very easy to find in Spain. There is a moment where he’s walking in the street and meets the protagonist, who likes boys. All he had to do was look at him nicely, with desire in his eyes. And he was so perfect! He was perfect for that period, to act and perform all the characters I wrote. His eyes were burning with real passion, and that was the male character I wrote in the ’80s.

Now, you know, after 20 years he has become — not quite a new person, but he has developed. He has a family and he lives in L.A., so obviously it’s something completely different from when I first met him. When he decided to come back to Spain to shoot with me, there was one condition I didn’t have to tell him. He should be in the same position in the work, he has to forget that he’s been a big success in the United States for 20 years. What I wanted was the same Antonio, playing a very different character. I have to say he was very generous. He said, “Pedrito, just tell me what you want me to do.” He put himself in my hands, and that’s what I needed.

How has Antonio changed in 20 years?

To talk about his changes is to judge him, and I don’t want to judge him. On one hand, he keeps the same person that I loved, and who I loved to work with, so let’s say that our relationship is based on that part of him. Of course he has many levels in his personality, and there is a big emptiness of 20 years. But we don’t talk about that, and it’s very easy for us to go back 20 years. I don’t need to talk about his changes. He’s older! He’s 50! Many things have happened to him.

There is a very disturbing rape scene in this movie, which reminded me of the one in “Kika.”

First I want to say that gender violence is one of the major problems in our country. Every year lots of women die at the hands of their husbands or their partners. So it’s a social problem that the government needs to resolve. We need to provide more help to women. It’s probably part of the genetic makeup of certain Latino men. Maybe we need to use transgenics on them to change this terrible tendency!

In my cinema there are a series of rapes in different circumstances, and they’re treated differently as well. The rape of Kika, like the rape of Vera, are terrible events, but they happen to two extremely strong women who have decided that they’re going to survive whatever happens to them, including the rape. At the moment, during the rape, when the victims try to talk to their rapists, it creates a kind of comic effect. Some people are outraged that there’s a comic aspect to those rape scenes, but I think you have to take it as it is. I’m not joking about rape at all, but sometimes in the course of the most terrible events, when somebody has decided that they’re going to survive, they may say or do things that appear comic to the spectator.

The difference between the rape of Kika and the rape of Vera is that Vera is being raped in an entirely new body and a new identity and a new sex, so it kind of multiplies the horror of what’s happening. There’s a line in the movie that really moves me, when Elena Anaya says, with this horrified expression, “Yes, I love it. This is driving me crazy with pleasure.” As she says that, she turns her face away so the rapist can’t see it.

Can you talk about the scientific aspect of the movie? Did you do some research on that side of things? Was that important to you?

Yeah, because during the writing of the script I thought it was science fiction, but in six years everything had changed. After the discovery of the human genome, the part of the movie that was science fiction has become real. Now what Antonio Banderas does in the movie could possibly be done. In fact, you can transfer genetic information from a cell that is not of your species into a human cell. You truly can blend the toughness of a pig’s skin into human skin. It’s being done with animals, with plants, with tissues. And what’s happening today is that the scientific community is putting on the brakes. They’re afraid of what might happen with humans.

When I talk to doctors about this, they are sure that someone is doing this, or something like this, and the problem goes way beyond a moral problem. We are on the edge of a crisis, an abyss. We don’t know exactly what the future will be. I don’t know whether we are going to see ourselves as human in quite the same way. From the moment in which you can intervene on an à la carte basis, and decide the exact characteristics of a new individual who’s going to be born, not only do you have the capability to eradicate deadly diseases — no more cancer, no more AIDS, nothing of that kind — you also have absolute control over that person’s identity.

That will totally change the meaning of humanity and it will also change the meaning of creation. What will become of all the religions that are founded on the idea of worshiping a God who created humanity? What will happen to all the religious culture that surrounds those belief systems? All of that will be wiped out in one go, and we’ll have a totally new concept of humanity. I’d love to be around to see it, but I don’t think I will live that long. Perhaps you will see it.

In a funny way this film is about the distinction between body and spirit, which comes from St. Augustine. Is this the first movie of yours that the Catholic Church might support?

You think so? I don’t think so. They are terrified of anything to do with sex. They want to do it, but they don’t want to talk about it. [Laughter.] You know, I was educated by priests, like most Spaniards, but I have forgotten all of that. The Catholic Church is not even a ghost for me. I don’t have to fight against that. They don’t have any influence in my life or over my mind. But I am only speaking about the church, not about spirituality, which is something completely different. If there is a message in this movie, it is that there is something that is belongs to you, that is untouchable, that no one can have access to. I’m a very spiritual person, just not in the religious sense. I actually don’t think that the spirit as such matters to the church, or to religions. Spirit is not something you can understand in dogmatic terms.

“The Skin I Live In” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

At least Moore’s film was a hit; the last American narrative feature to win the Palme was Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” a year earlier, a minimal and dark Columbine-inspired drama that found very little audience in the United States. Fox Searchlight will release Malick’s film in American theaters this week, and couldn’t have asked for a bigger or better publicity push. “Tree of Life” will presumably now be discussed as a factor in the Academy Awards race, but no film has won both the Palme d’Or and the best-picture Oscar since Delbert Mann’s “Marty” in 1955.

Malick has apparently left Cannes, but even when he was in town he declined to address the press or appear on the red carpet. Journalists here have grumbled all week about the precedent this sets, since filmmakers attending the festival are customarily expected to put in a certain amount of face time with both the press and the public. There’s a sense in which this long, long awaited project — originally scheduled to premiere here last year — is a special case on many levels. At any rate, I don’t think Malick or his production partners are terribly concerned about that tonight.

“Tree of Life” producers Bill Pohlad and Dede Gardner accepted the Palme d’Or in Malick’s stead, and Pohlad addressed the subject of the director’s absence at the ensuing press conference. “I’m not saying it’s an easy question to answer,” he said. “But Terry personally is a very humble guy and a very sincere guy. He wants the work to speak for himself and stay in his private life, and not have it be about the ego of it or the celebrity of it.” Gardner added that Malick’s only words to the press were to express his gratitude to his wife and his parents.

It was left to the Palme d’Or jury’s normally taciturn president, Robert De Niro, to expand a bit on the group decision. He did so ambiguously, not even trying to pretend that the final verdict was unanimous. Clearly there was some backstage disagreement, but exactly what its substance was we can only speculate. “Most of us felt very clearly that it was the movie,” De Niro said. “It had the size, the importance, the intention — whatever you want to call it. It seemed to fit the prize. Of course there are other movies that are very good, and it was a very difficult decision. At the end of the day you need to make certain compromises. Most of us thought it was a terrific film.”

Speaking broadly, critics’ opinions here seemed divided between “The Tree of Life,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” and Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist” — and none of those films went home empty-handed. Kirsten Dunst won the jury’s best-actress award for her role in the apocalyptic family drama “Melancholia,” and on stage she made an indirect reference to the trouble her director got in for his bizarre comments about Hitler and the Nazis.

“What a week it’s been!” Dunst exclaimed, before thanking von Trier “for giving me an opportunity to be so brave in this film.” Mention of the exiled director’s name brought brief applause, perhaps a sign that his festival ban has already provoked the European instinct to root for the underdog. Dunst, however, declined to appear at the post-awards press conference, no doubt eager to put the whole thing behind her.

One reporter at the press conference asked French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a jury member known to admire von Trier’s work, how much the group had discussed “Melancholia” and the worldwide media furor surrounding the Danish director. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of his best films,” Assayas responded. “I think it’s a great film. I think we all join in condemning the press conference of Lars von Trier, but if you ask me about the film I think it’s beautifully acted and it’s a great work of art.”

Refn, who at first seemed to be the other Danish director at this festival, took home the best-director prize for his exciting heist film with Ryan Gosling, “Drive” — and richly deserved it. Big international box office is expected for this Euro-American art-action hybrid, and Refn and Gosling told the press conference that they’ve already begun kicking around possibilities for a sequel. Arguably the young Dane was a little too impeccably cool on stage in the Lumière, pretending to tweet on his iPhone — or really doing it — and thanking the jury for its “good taste.”

Jean Dujardin, the bluff and handsome French comedian who anchors Hazanavicius’ joyous neo-silent “The Artist,” playing a 1920s Hollywood star in the Douglas Fairbanks mode, captured the best-actor award. He’s a hilarious charmer who has called himself “the poor man’s Sean Connery,” and at this point only his limited English is holding him back from massive international stardom.

The festival’s second-place award, the Grand Prix, was split between two highly deserving films with limited commercial prospects, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s “The Kid With a Bike” and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.” The Dardenne brothers have never brought a film to Cannes without winning an award, and have captured the Palme d’Or twice (for “Rosetta” and “The Child”). So this isn’t a huge surprise, but “The Kid With a Bike” is a terrific, intimate film about a ferocious, fatherless teenage boy and his accidental relationship with the stranger who takes him in.

As for “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” it’s a slow and demanding film that was poorly served by being screened at the tail end of the Cannes competition, and was judged unfairly by many in the press. It might almost be described as an episode of “CSI” written by Chekhov and filmed on the desolate steppes of rural central Turkey, which takes two and a half hours to reach its ambiguous destination. It’s just as good, and just as challenging, as that sounds, and it’s gratifying to see that the jury had the patience for it. I can only hope some American distributor with modest means and modest aims will follow suit.

The third-place Prix du Jury went to “Polisse,” a Parisian ensemble cop drama by one-named French actress and director Maïwenn, which I did not see (but should eventually get niche-market American release). Best screenplay was awarded to Israeli director Joseph Cedar’s ingenious academic-world tragicomedy “Footnote,” which feels more and more like a sneaky international hit waiting to happen.

Two longtime Cannes bridesmaids and European art-house favorites, Pedro Almodóvar and Aki Kaurismäki, were spurned once again. In the case of Kaurismäki’s winsome and delightful French immigration fable, “Le Havre,” that’s something of a surprise. Almodóvar tried to blend elements of science fiction and thriller with the gender-studies melodrama in his dark Frankenstein parable, “The Skin I Live In,” and I guess the jury shared the view that the results are mixed. Lynne Ramsay’s explosive “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” also shut out, will be a much-debated film later this year, and Tilda Swinton’s amazing performance certainly could have won an acting award. But Kirsten Dunst may have benefited from the jury’s apparent desire to reward “Melancholia” without directly mentioning Lars von Trier.

With that, another year closes at Cannes — but this was no ordinary year, and no ordinary Cannes. It says something about the breadth and quality of the 2011 lineup that those three films, each a rich, strange and distinctive viewing experience, had almost become afterthoughts by festival’s end. Cannes becomes exhausting long before it’s over, and I’m grateful to be going home, along with all the other journalists, executives, publicity flacks, filmmakers and dealmakers, so this overgrown beach village can settle into its summer stupor. But amid all the customary dumb hype and decadent glamour — not to mention the Cirque von Trier — the film industry threw itself an extraordinary 10-day party to celebrate a remarkable artistic resurgence.

They don’t sell popcorn at Cannes (in fact, you can’t bring any food or drink into the auditorium), which is too bad, because “The Skin I Live In” delivers more of an old-school moviegoing experience than anything else here this year. It’s recognizably an Almodóvar film from the first frames, when we see a mysterious beauty we’ll later know as Vera (Elena Anaya) striking yoga poses while wearing an odd, flesh-colored body stocking. But “The Skin I Live In” is genre-movie Pedro, Hitchcock-en-español Pedro, a fair bit icier and less emotional than the female-centric melodramas he’s made recently with Penélope Cruz. Another one-time Almodóvar muse, Antonio Banderas, who starred in “Matador” and “Law of Desire” way back when, has returned to the fold, this time playing Dr. Robert Ledgard, a sinister surgeon with a sleek Jean-Paul Gaultier wardrobe who has Vera locked in the basement.

We won’t find out exactly who or what Vera is for some time, and I promise not to drop any major clues. But she’s clearly the object of a Frankensteinian obsession, and the subject of experiments that Ledgard — Almodóvar loves these pseudo-American names, which always sound borrowed from film noir or Douglas Sirk melodrama — is performing with his super-strong, genetically engineered artificial skin. Despite their sadomasochistic relationship, or perhaps because of it, Vera seems to have fallen in love with Ledgard, and it seems that the coldblooded mad scientist has begun to reciprocate. That’s when Zeca (Roberto Álamo), the thuggish son of Ledgard’s housekeeper (Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes), arrives on the scene — and appears to recognize Vera as his former lover, although she can’t remember him. That triggers a series of violent events and, more important, begins to unzip the past histories of all these characters.

If I were actually going to write a plot synopsis for “The Skin I Live In,” I’d have to draw you a diagram, with arrows leading from 2012 (the film’s present tense) back to 2000 and then to 2006 and back home again, with various stops in between. Whether it’s a result of growing older or of his continuing fascination with Hollywood mysteries, Almodóvar has taken to using nested back-and-forth chronologies in almost every film, to illustrate how the ghosts in our past drive our actions in the future. Ledgard thinks of himself as a rational genius, a man of science, but he’s blind to the fact that his misguided effort to build a new woman, as if from scratch, is the doomed legacy of unresolved traumas. (None of that comes close to any kind of spoiler, I promise.)

As I suggested earlier, I found “The Skin I Live In” a little short of emotional power, compared to, say, “Volver” and “Broken Embraces” and “All About My Mother.” Banderas’ character is elegantly portrayed but never remotely sympathetic, and Anaya, a dark-eyed, fragile beauty, is playing a woman who literally doesn’t know who she is. A slim and handsome young actor named Jan Cornet is very good in a supporting role that I simply can’t say anything about. (I promised!) All that said, this is one of Almodóvar’s most cleverly plotted films; there was considerable oohing and ahhing — along with some well-placed laughs — in the Lumière as the full dimensions of Ledgard’s diabolical scheme were laid bare. It’s less a film you’ll fall in love with than a film you’ll tell your friends they absolutely must see, and that should be enough to make it a hit around the world. 

As is customary, this year’s Cannes lineup features the world premieres of enormous Hollywood productions aimed at an audience in the hundreds of millions, intimate personal films that may almost literally never be seen again, and nearly everything in between. Early on Saturday morning, the horde of journalists will pack into the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the legendary main auditorium here, to see “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” with Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz, a movie we could have seen at home with less glitz but a great deal more comfort. A couple of days later we’ll do it again for Terrence Malick’s long-awaited “The Tree of Life,” with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn (which was initially expected at Cannes last year).

Those two films may well be the biggest news events of the next week — but in all honesty it isn’t those movies that make Cannes so great. It’s the fact that I can see those movies and also see, say, the newest film from little-known Japanese director Naomi Kawase (a personal fave) or “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” the debut of young Canadian director Sean Durkin. There seems almost no end to the potential riches on the Riviera beachfront this spring; picking just 10 films to spotlight in advance has been tough. (There, I’ve gone and jinxed it.) I’ve selected five movies with reasonably high star quotients, name directors and obvious audience appeal, and five more that are just as exciting (to me, anyway) but are flying a bit more under the radar, at least from the perspective of ordinary American moviegoers.

Of course this is all guesswork. Here’s what we actually know, so far: 1) It might sound lame to open Cannes with a 21st-century Woody Allen movie. OK, it actually is lame, but one of the most inexplicable things about Europe is how much people here love them some Woody. I guess it’s part of the love-hate relationship with America that plays such an enormous role in this continent’s cultural life, but even in those terms it doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, good, bad or indifferent, the Woodman’s cinematic postcard to the French capital will be a huge deal here. 2) Some things proclaimed here as masterpieces will be ignored by the world, while other things mocked by the Cannes critics will make zillions. 3) When you hear about a movie here that provokes booing and widespread walkouts? Seek it out and see it, when you get the chance; it’s probably good. 4) I will spend almost two weeks in a beach resort adjacent to one of the world’s great food and wine regions, and will dine largely on sandwiches and pizza and come home without a tan. The suffering! It’s hard to bear sometimes.

BIG NAMES

The Tree of Life A personal, family-based film that stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn and is also, somehow, about the evolutionary history of life on earth. A beautiful if utterly inscrutable trailer. A legendary director (Malick, still best known for “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven”) viewed by some as a visionary master and by others as a pretentious ass, whose filmmaking career appears half-paralyzed by indecision and procrastination. These are the mysterious ingredients of “Tree of Life,” which is almost guaranteed to be a major debate topic here.

Melancholia Any Lars von Trier film is guaranteed to be a media circus at Cannes, and whether you like the guy or hate him, give him credit: He gets people to pay attention to small-audience art-house movies, and that’s not easy. “Melancholia” appears to be an odd, Trier-ian blend of the country-house wedding movie with a “Donnie Darko”-style story about the end of the world, and presumably won’t horrify and galvanize audiences quite the way “Antichrist” did two years ago. No genital mutilation! A box-office plus but a P.R. minus! An intriguing transatlantic ensemble includes Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling.

Drive Take cult director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose last two movies (“Bronson” and “Valhalla Rising”) established him as a prodigious, visionary, almost uncontrolled talent while barely making a nickel. Add rising star Ryan Gosling of “Half Nelson” and “Blue Valentine.” Mix with an implausibly large budget and some fast cars and you have an action-adventure movie that’s almost certainly the most unlikely competition entry at Cannes this year, and an object of worldwide yearning by film geeks. There doesn’t seem to be an embeddable online trailer yet, but here are the first two minutes. Sold!

The Skin I Live In Longtime art-house fave Pedro Almodóvar returns to Cannes without recent muse Penélope Cruz — but with Antonio Banderas, star of several of his groundbreaking ’80s flicks. Banderas plays a plastic surgeon with a bizarre Frankensteinian obsession in what’s described as a 1940s-flavored horror melodrama. Despite numerous premieres here, Almodóvar has still never won the Palme d’Or, and yes, that’s a hint and a hunch.

Restless Gus Van Sant’s latest is an intriguing-looking outsider love story, starring Mia Wasikowska as a cancer patient and Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) as an alienated young man whose best friend is a WWII Japanese ghost. But is it a commercial Van Sant movie in the “Good Will Hunting”/”Finding Forrester” vein, or a Euro-friendly art-house oddity in the “Elephant”/”Paranoid Park” vein? Either way, it’s the opener in Un Certain Regard, Cannes’ slightly artier second-string competition, which is often where the most exciting films are found. And Van Sant is a contender for the Jerry Lewis-Woody Allen awards, which convey the undying loyalty of European culture-vultures upon American filmmakers who are all but forgotten at home. (Other recent nominees: Jim Jarmusch, James Gray, Abel Ferrara, Lodge Kerrigan.)

MIDSIZE AND BELOW

We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s taken a long time for Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (“Morvern Callar”) to bring Lionel Shriver’s acclaimed novel about a troubled teen and the aftermath of a school shooting to the screen, but Ramsay has a rep as Britain’s undiscovered secret and expectations are huge. Indie heroes Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly — an unlikely but irresistible pairing — star as the estranged parents of the titular Kevin (Ezra Miller).

Hara-Kiri: The Death of a Samurai Coming hard on the heels of ultra-prolific Japanese genre maniac Takashi Miike’s samurai opus “13 Assassins” comes his next samurai movie — and it’s the first 3-D film ever included in the Cannes competition! (To be clear: Other 3-D films have been shown at Cannes in non-competition slots, including the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” entry this year.)

This Must Be the Place Hardly anyone in America saw Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s dazzling “Il Divo,” an Oliver Stone-meets-Scorsese political phantasmagoria that was one of the genuine cinematic breakthroughs of recent years. Now Sorrentino turns to English-language film with this eagerly anticipated fable about an aging rock star (Sean Penn) who’s hunting for a Nazi war criminal. We definitely haven’t seen that movie before. Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch and Harry Dean Stanton co-star.

Oslo, August 31st Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” is one of the terrific undiscovered movies of the last decade, an exhilarating comic fable about art and life that splits the difference between Godard and, say, “High Fidelity” with tremendous cinematic craft, an irrepressible sense of humor and genuine heart. (Fun fact: Trier is indeed a cousin of Lars von Trier.) Trier’s new film “Oslo, August 31st” — that’s when and where the main character intends to kill himself — screens in the lower-wattage Certain Regard competition, and I will happily skip other things to catch it.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia He has a subzero commercial profile in the United States, but Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (“Climates,” “Three Monkeys”) has developed a modest but intense international following for his brooding, Bergmanesque urban dramas. (Which are never officially even a little bit about such “Turkish” questions as the role of Islam or the ambiguous, intercontinental status of his country, by the way, but may indirectly wind up being about those things after all.) If this story about a doctor living on the rural steppes (I’m guessing it’s meant to recall Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”) is the masterpiece Ceylan hasn’t quite made yet — well, OK, no, it won’t change much of anything. But people in Cannes and in Turkey will sure be excited, and you’ll be able to watch the movie on VOD in like six months.

Araki has described his ultra-indie mid-’90s films, like “Nowhere” and “The Doom Generation,” as being episodes of “Beverly Hills 90210″ on acid. Improbably enough, he has circled back to that early-hipster aesthetic, reclaiming it for a decade of sexting and reality TV and borderline-obscene teen soaps, and it’s almost completely delightful. For all its cheerful, all-directional raunch, “Kaboom” is far more wholesome than MTV’s suddenly notorious “Skins.” Smith (Thomas Dekker), Araki’s dirty-angel polysexual hero, is searching for true love amid the eroticized, desolate landscape of his unnamed Southern California college campus, and at least part of him understands that all the hot surfer guys and demented lesbian witches and creepy late-night intruders in animal masks are just obstacles on his pathway toward Mr. and/or Ms. Right.

“Kaboom” is a deliberately unstable fusion of every teen-oriented prime-time soap you can remember from the last 15 years, and others you can’t, with more than a dash of creepy, hidden-reality paranoia out of David Lynch or David Cronenberg thrown in. Araki and cinematographer Sandra Valde-Hansen foreground the actors, in bright light and primary colors, and make the dorm rooms and cafes and nightclubs behind them seem dim and distant, like dream-world locations. The balance of absurdity and delicacy, of trashy and sweet and downright disturbing, is not quite like anything else I’ve ever seen. (OK, here’s a parallel, in idiosyncratic ambition if not in tone: “Brick,” the Hammett-goes-to-high-school indie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)

Smith wonders whether his ultra-straight surfer roommate, Thor (Chris Zylka), may be hiding something. After all, Thor has a closet full of color-coordinated flip-flops! Even Smith’s smartass lesbian friend Stella (Haley Bennett) pretends to be impressed: “Next to putting a dick in your mouth with Lady Gaga in the background, that’s about the gayest thing in the world.” As for Stella, Thor observes that she’s hot, “in an edgy, bitter, lez kind of way.” (And isn’t that the hottest version of hotness?) She yearns to hook up with the sinister, faintly Euro Lorelei (Roxane Mesquida), a witch with a vintage Mustang, despite Smith’s all-too-prescient warning that the mythical Lorelei bewitched sailors and lured them to their deaths. ZOMG!

I should add that everybody relates to Smith as being gay — and there is that hunky hot-tub repair guy he keeps meeting on the beach — but he himself says his sexual major is “undeclared,” and he does some powerful bedroom cooking with London (Juno Temple), who is waiflike and androgynous but undeniably female. And what the heck does all this post-adolescent sexual drama have to do with the mysterious disappearance of a strung-out redhead (Nicole LaLiberte), or with Smith’s troubling dreams about a locked door and a Dumpster and the father he’s never met? Oh, trust me, you’ll find out, in a reckless, good-humored denouement that makes no sense at all.

Across 20-odd years and 11 feature films, the closest Araki’s ever gotten to a hit was with his compulsively outrageous “The Living End” in 1992 and then with the far more sober “Mysterious Skin” a dozen years later, two movies that pretty much bookended the movement known as New Queer Cinema (a term coined in ’92 by my former alt-weekly colleague B. Ruby Rich). If discussions about that movement sometimes bogged down in academic theory-speak that made them seem dogmatic and medicinal, the better films — like Todd Haynes’ “Poison,” or Tom Kalin’s “Swoon,” or Isaac Julien’s “Young Soul Rebels” — were daring and maddening and fun to watch, in varying combinations. As the shock value of showing LGBT-whatever characters on-screen having sex, doing drugs, being unsaintly fashion-victim scalawags and finding other ways to épater the brainwashed bourgeoisie faded, the NQC bandwagon began to spin its wheels.

While filmmakers like Haynes or Pedro Almodóvar have completely transcended those labels — and Kalin and Julien have migrated to making documentaries and/or experimental art films — Araki never quite found his second act. Maybe he’s been out there on the indie fringes so long that he’s ready to be part of a new new wave (and if you want to call it “post-queer cinema” or “mumblequeer” or whatever, that’s on you, buddy). The Jim Carrey-Ewan McGregor film “I Love You Phillip Morris” is pretty much an updated NQC movie made with stars, and with a sympathetic general audience in view. Like such newcomers as French-Canadian wonder boy Xavier Dolan (who has made two features at age 21), Araki has lost interest in shocking heteros for its own sake, or in drawing in-group vs. out-group circles of sexual hipness.

“Kaboom” is a psychedelic reverie that celebrates a world where the fluid nature of human sexuality — i.e., the very basis of “queerness,” which seemed so revolutionary and confrontational in the days of Araki’s HIV-renegade odyssey, “The Living End” — has become a semi-acceptable element of pop culture, and even a cliché. It’s by far the funniest and warmest movie Araki has ever made, with much less juvenile angst and much more command of his craft. Do I wish he didn’t drive it totally off the rails in the last few minutes, toward an anarchic and literally explosive conclusion? (This is one of those movies where the title might be considered a spoiler.) Oh sure, maybe. But not that much. Reagan-era punk nihilism isn’t a pose for Gregg Araki; it’s where he feels most at home (with his Godzilla figurines in dresses). Somewhere inside, not all that deep down, I feel the same way.

“Kaboom” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and also available on-demand, via IFC In Theaters, from many cable and satellite providers. Wider national release will follow.