The octet comprising "Viva Pedro," which will breeze through the Ritz over the next five weeks, is drawn from two distinct periods, three from the late 1980s, when Almodovar was dubiously dubbed the John Waters of Spain, and, following a seven-year lacuna, his five most recent films, each of which has been condescendingly hailed as evidence of "newfound maturity."

MOTHER LODE: From All About My Mother (1999), one of eight films in the "Viva Pedro" collection.

The Waters comparison has always been especially wrongheaded, based wholly on the two directors' homosexuality and love of gaudy kitsch. The camp tag fits in the case of Waters, who delights in his gallery of grotesques for their own sakes. Almodovar could more appropriately be called a drag filmmaker, whose films' disguises express struggles with identity through oversized personae. The director's early stock company consisted in large part of faces who wouldn't normally be found at the business end of a camera, just shy of Waters' gargoyles but corralled to play damaged souls whose addictions and compulsions erupt into a heightened reality. The juxtaposition recalls Luis Bunuel's use of neorealist trappings to ground the more surrealist dimensions of his work. Almodovar's work might reasonably be seen as Bunuel films dolled up in wig and heels to lip-synch a Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex romp on a seedy nightclub stage.

Perhaps the closest parallel would be to Douglas Sirk, whose simultaneous immersion in and ironic distance from his overripe material is the model for Almodovar's own approach. Where Sirk used the lush hues of Technicolor to embody his character's romantic swoons, so Almodovar's bold palette advertises the crisscrossing desires of his assembled fetishists. It's no accident that his characters so often collide directly with Hollywood melodrama; the dying-to-be-doomed lovers of Matador (1986) draw together against the backdrop of King Vidor and David Selznick's shootout-from-the-heart western Duel in the Sun , while Carmen Maura in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) dubs the voice of Queen of Queens Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar , acting a scene that mirrors her own personal drama.

Women , the film that cemented Almodovar's stardom and remained the highest-grossing film in Spanish history for a decade after its release, is aptly chosen to open the retrospective. It is in a sense a burlesque of Almodovar's themes, synopsizing the broad comedies of bad taste and l'amour fou that came before and presaging the more restrained dramatic treatments to come. It applies the rapid-fire dialogue and pile-up of mistaken identities of screwball comedy to a story involving infidelity, insanity and terrorism. The opening minutes are a disconcerting mash-up of levels of reality, lurching from Maura's apartment, decorated like a theater set, to her black-and-white dream, to slowly waking reality, finally shifting to the dubbing room where the disjunction between life and expression is made concrete. Later, Almodovar paraphrases Rear Window as Maura peers into a succession of apartments and finds not murder but loneliness — her own, reflected back. As confusion mounts through the course of the film and the absurdity accumulates, Maura slowly gathers herself as the eye of the storm, forging her own identity from the frantic remains left by her philandering lover.

The remaining early films, Matador and The Law of Desire (1987), both feature characters joined and ultimately destroyed by consuming desires. (Both also cast Antonio Banderas as an emasculated naif, strange today in light of his long service as poster-boy for machismo.) For a director so often identified with his gayness, Almodovar's characters during this period displayed a shifting, amorphous sexuality, far less concerned with gender roles than with narcissistic fetishes.

Throughout his career Almodovar has concentrated on strong female characters, the autobiographical elements he transferred onto his heroines constituting a form of surrogate drag. In the late 1990s, he began using not only more male leads but more defined sexualities. He also began to confront political reality in a way his earlier work never attempted, All About My Mother (1999) evoking a degraded modern Spain far removed from his soundstage Madrid. Bad Education (2004) in particular steers Gael Garcia Bernal's semi-femme fatale through a noir 1980s, constructed in layers of reality, fiction and memory, that seems a direct counterpoint to his own impassioned fantasias of the time. Still, the questions of identity, as defined and manipulated by sexuality and desire, remain consistent.

Revisiting Almodovar's past in anticipation of his latest, Volver , the only question remaining is what guise he will assume next. And the only certainty is that the same eyes will peer out from beneath it.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)