Time & Perspective Quote by Pedro Almodovar

Almodovar is doing that sly, almost courtly thing artists do when they refuse a compliment without quite rejecting it: he acknowledges the “change” in his films, but he won’t let critics pin it neatly to a narrative of self-improvement. The line is modest on the surface and quietly defiant underneath. He admits the pivot “from The Flower of My Secret on” as a fact - something visible in the work, not a PR strategy - then undercuts the tidy explanation journalists love: maturity as a straight line toward seriousness.

The subtext is a defense of messiness. Almodovar’s early reputation was built on transgression, bright provocation, and the post-Franco rush of the Movida. By the mid-90s, his films don’t abandon excess; they reorganize it. The emotions deepen, the women become less like archetypes to be scandalized or adored and more like people carrying history in their bodies. If critics want to call that “maturity,” he lets them - but “very generously” is doing razor work. It suggests the compliment is also a trap, a way to imply the earlier films were juvenile, disposable, or merely loud.

His “I did not intend” matters, too. It frames the shift as organic, even involuntary: the artist changing because life changes, because Spain changes, because the obsessions that once needed neon now demand shadows. He’s claiming authorship over the evolution while refusing the moral hierarchy baked into the word “mature.” In Almodovar’s universe, seriousness isn’t a destination; it’s another costume, worn when the story requires it.