La flor de mi secreto (Almodóvar, 1995): Literature as seduction

Abstract

The multiple references to writing in Pedro Almodovar’s La flor de mi secreto (1995) have arguably made this film his most literary. Reading and writing function as the structural axis of the movie because they define the existence of the main character - Leo/Amanda Gris. But beyond the constant literary allusions, what makes the “literarity” of this film is, on the one hand, the construction of the protagonist according to literary models and on the other the exploration of her subjectivity through her writing. Leo as a character is created as a replica of the tormented writers that she admires. In their stereotypical tradition, she is an alcoholic, addicted to sleeping pills, suicidal, obsessed with her loneliness and installed in her writing as a survival space. Furthermore, the spectator accesses her subjectivity through her career as a writer because her melodramatic life gets entangled with her novels. Almodóvar projects his literary ghosts in La flor de mi secreto and in the process, subverts the parameters of literature, the canon, the gender and genre categories and the question of authorship. He also resists a stable definition of literature as art by inserting it in a filmic text, favoring a complex intertextuality which contributes to dissolving the frontiers between high and low culture and to opening a common ground for the arts.