Pedro Almodovar, Rounding Out Cruz's, Um, Career

This, fans, is from her director.

At the end of the "Volver" screening, there was a classic Cannes moment. The audience burst into applause, bravo, bravo. A camera panned in for close-ups of Almodovar and Cruz, shown now on the big screen, and both began to weep. She, tears running down her cheeks. He, his eyes welling, then brimming over. He wiped a drop from her face. The audience began to clap in cadence. It went on and on.

In the tradition of Cannes, there followed a party, this one on the beach, in the tented Habitat for Humanity-like insta-housing. They served pig from a pig leg shaved onto your plate. There were crater-size skillets filled with paella, which disappeared almost immediately. The champagne flowed; the Europeans have elbows. There's Samuel L. Jackson, who was everywhere, and he posed for photographs, though he was not in the film. The crew and cast of Spanish ladies swept in with Almodovar, who plopped down at a table by the sea and said, "My God, what a night." He looked, even for such a veteran, slightly overwhelmed.

On Monday afternoon, he reappeared for the media at a luncheon at the Carlton Hotel, along with Cruz.

There was sexy chat about Cruz: "She's so obedient," Almodovar said through a translator. "I have to take care. She'll do anything I ask." And lovey chat about Cruz: He said he'd surrender the Palme d'Or if Cruz could win best actress. "She's ready," he said, "for more intelligent, deeper roles."

Cruz appeared, clad in a sand-colored Western-style dress, looking lovely, chewing gum. She said Almodovar told her he wanted her to become sexy, but more maternal, with hips, and speak in a lower register, and move and act not from the shoulders but from her rear, and for that purpose they devised and applied a fake butt, rounder, bigger. "To find the maternal," Cruz said, "the earth energy." Or as Almodovar put it: "the same fake bottom that Dustin Hoffman had in 'Tootsie.' "

Critics are saying it is the best role of Cruz's career. She's saying Almodovar has changed her life: "My life has more color because of him." That is the kind of thing that actresses say at Cannes.

Almodovar confesses the same. He tells us that, as we probably knew, he's gay, and that his last heterosexual love affair was in 1984. "But with Penelope, I felt again desire. I was completely hooked on her body." He says: "I was horny." That's very Cannes, too.