1. Two Men at a Lectern

A young man comes into a bedroom and a voice tells him what to do. The voice is male, older, unhurried, and it comes from somewhere behind the camera. Take off your clothes. Go to the mirror. Kiss yourself on the mouth, and imagine that the mouth is mine. The young man does each thing as it is asked of him, a little stiffly, the way a person follows instructions he has agreed to in advance without knowing exactly what they would be. He rubs himself against his reflection. He lies face down on the bed. Don’t look at me, the voice says; behave as if you were alone. Then the voice asks him to ask for something. It wants him to say, aloud, that he wants to be fucked. He hesitates. This, apparently, was not in the agreement. The voice repeats the request with the patience of a man who knows he will get what he wants, and the young man says it, and says it again, louder, until the sentence sounds almost as if it belonged to him.

Then Law of Desire cuts, and the cut is a very good joke, and also something colder than a joke. We are in a recording studio. Two middle-aged men in shirtsleeves stand side by side at a lectern with scripts in their hands, watching a screen we cannot see. One of them is supplying the voice of the unseen director. The other, heavier, mustached, is supplying the boy: his gasps, his reluctance, his surrender. They pant on cue. They turn their pages at the same moment. They are at work. When we return to the bedroom the young man is alone, and on the night table there is a stack of banknotes, which he counts. A title comes up over him: FIN. Applause. We have been watching the last scene of a film by a director named Pablo Quintero, and its premiere audience is already on its feet.

In something under four minutes, Almodóvar has pulled apart everything a film ordinarily welds together. The body we look at and the voice we hear belong to different people. The person who wants and the person who speaks the wanting are different people. The sentence at the center of the scene has been written by one man, demanded by a second, mouthed by a third, and voiced by a fourth, who is reading it off a sheet of paper in a room where nobody is naked. Desire is present, overwhelmingly so; the scene is erotic before it is funny and remains erotic afterward. But desire here has no single owner. It passes along a line of intermediaries, each of whom is doing a job, and it arrives at its destination only when someone in the premiere audience, a young man named Antonio with the face of Antonio Banderas at twenty-six, walks out of the screening, locks himself in a toilet stall, and repeats the sentence to himself. He means it. He is the first person in the chain who does. The line was fabricated four times over, and it has found the one listener for whom it is simply true.

I begin here because the scene is a working model of something that happens in nearly every film Almodóvar has made, from the Super 8 reels he screened in Madrid bars in the middle of the 1970s to Amarga Navidad, released in Spain in March 2026. In these films, strong feeling seldom travels in a straight line from the person who has it to the person it concerns. It goes around. It is handed to a singer on a record, to an actress on a stage, to a letter signed by someone else, to an answering machine, to a nurse, to a novel published under a false name, to a film being shot inside the film. The Spanish word for what a performer does when she moves her lips to a recording is the English word playback, and Almodóvar’s characters are forever doing it: a Mother Superior mouthing a bolero to the nightclub singer she loves, a judge in a wig mouthing the hit of the woman he is investigating, a cowboy mouthing a Portuguese fado in the voice of a Brazilian man. But the lip-synced song is only the most visible instance of a much larger habit. People in these films come to their own emotions by way of someone else’s voice, and they reach each other, when they reach each other at all, through a third party standing in the next room.

This could be mistaken for a taste for artifice, and for a long time it was. The early reviews, admiring and hostile alike, spoke of pastiche, of quotation, of a magpie sensibility decorating itself with boleros and Hollywood. What the lectern scene shows is borrowing as the films’ explanation of how feeling works, and the explanation has a specific history behind it.

In April 1941 the Franco government issued an order, modeled on Mussolini’s, requiring that every foreign film shown in Spain be dubbed into Castilian. The formal obligation lapsed after a few years; the practice never did. It gave the censors a second chance at every imported picture, since a line that could not be cut could be rewritten in the recording booth. The best-known case is Mogambo, ...