A note on Pedro Almodóvar's use of color and what it reveals about his relationship with melodrama.

Almodóvar began his career as a figure in Madrid's countercultural La Movida movement, making low-budget, transgressive films with a camp sensibility that was understood as a reaction against Franco's Spain. By the time of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) he had developed an aesthetic that was identifiably his: saturated primary colors, bold production design, female protagonists in extremis.

What distinguishes Almodóvar from directors who use melodrama ironically is that he uses it genuinely. His films are not commenting on the excess of melodrama from a superior position. They inhabit the excess. When his characters suffer, the suffering is real and the colors around them are not ironic commentary on that suffering — they're an expression of the emotional temperature of the world the characters live in.

All About My Mother is the film where this sensibility achieved its greatest expression. The three generations of women, the theater, the performance of gender, the suffering that is survived — all of it is rendered with a sincerity that most directors achieve by stripping away style. Almodóvar achieves it by adding more.