Marisa Paredes tribute

 A short tribute from a grateful trans person to Spanish actress Marisa Paredes who died yesterday.

You've heard of Bond girls; she was an Almodovar girl, appearing in six of the films directed by Pedro Almodovar, which really made her an international star, and it's that relationship that I inevitably focus on, and you'll see why. Bond girls are all much alike but Almodovar girls are stressed housewives, repressed Catholics or actresses/writers/socialites whose surface sparkle hides squalor and secrets. Paredes played all of these types equally well.

You may not have heard of either actress or director. But to myself as a trans woman - and to may other in the LGBTQ community - I don't think any other film director has spoken to me more forcefully than Almodovar. 

Trans characters appear alongside her in two films, All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre), "a magnificent tapestry of femininity" (Rotten Tomatoes), which stars Paredes as a stage actress and which has two trans characters, one we warm to (Lola) and one we don't (Agrado). There's the very different, almost Frankensteinian The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) where, let's just say (the motives are complex), a modern-day mad scientist (played by Antonio Banderas), for whom Paredes is housekeeper, conducts forced feminisation (and then some) on a young man (with the sort of perfect results, albeit on an unwilling subject, that most of us would, ahem, kill for). In a third film, High Heels (Tacos lejanos), Paredes plays a singer who sees the act of a drag artist who impersonates her.

I think the main appeal for me is that in an Almodovar film, although being trans, queer or an outsider is accepted even if acknowledged as odd, the whole setup is odd, so it all evens out! Take Dark Habits (Entre tinieblas), for example, set in a convent where the nuns look after 'fallen women' but are all oddballs, including one who plays the bongos to entertain her pet tiger. Paredes is an LSD-addled ascetic who once murdered someone and cooks to assuage her guilt. Hollywood this isn't.

As a leading exponent, and in some ways the very voice and face of Spain's modern civic consciousness that moved remarkably in the late '70s and '80s from the repression of Francoist fascism to a country with a democratic constitution where people can now freely explore and express their outlook, their reality and their sexuality, Paredes has to be thanked. She and her sidekick Almodovar have certainly spoken powerfully to me. And not just through her work with him but, for instance, by appearing in Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni's film Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella) in which a man protects his son from the realities of life in a concentration camp.

Rest in peace.

English Wiki article on the actress including filmography here.

English Wiki article on Pedro Almodovar here.

(I've mentioned two Almodovar films with trans characters. There are more but the main other one is Bad Education (La mala educacion).)

Sue x