Pilgrimage to Los Abrazos Rotos

We used Pentecost Sunday¹ to travel to Fribourg in the French speaking part of Switzerland, because there, Pedro Almodóvar's Los Abrazos Rotos is already on show. We went to the afternoon show. So we could go for dinner afterwards and still travel home comfortably by train. One should not stress out on Pentecost.

We both loved the film² and both agreed that it will be hard to wait the almost 3 months until it will open in Zürich to see it again. In the first viewing, I just dive into an Almodóvar and float with it. In at least one of the viewings I blind out the storyline and dialogues an solely concentrate on the set design. Or as Variety puts it: Every richly hued wall is covered with eye-candy artwork, every doorway reps a second level of framing, and there is beauty even in the scattered contents of a drawer or in a pile of torn-up photos.

I saw my first Almodóvar in 1987. This was La ley del deseo and it disturbed me emotionally far more than Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma by Pasolini. I had never seen anything alike. Since then, I'm constantly moaning that Almodóvar is not making more films.

It has been even longer since I've been to Fribourg. It was in Summer 1985, I remember this, because Live Aid was on, just as we left for it, and my bicycle had a defect when we were approaching the town.

We had some difficulties to find a restaurant offering local food. But eventually we succeeded. Toño settled for a plat fribourgeois and I chose steak de cheval.



¹ Pentecost Monday is also a holiday.
² A Irish friend who was born and raised in Spain recently complained that one is treated like a heretic when one says something bad about a film by Almodóvar (she hasn't even seen Volver yet, how dare she?).