women on the verge of a nervous breakdown (spine 855)

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Directed by: Pedro Almodovar
1988
​Spine #855

Growing up, the prospect of watching Pedro Almodovar’s cosmopolitan farce Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in high school Spanish class was generally regarded as far cooler than watching Gregory Nava’s El Norte… though admittedly not quite as cool as watching Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (but then anything was better than conjugating verbs). Although it’s since been overshadowed by much of the director’s later output (including Oscar winners All About My Mother and Talk to Her), the film still pops with a rapturous zest; it’s not hard to see why it was Almodovar’s international breakthrough.

Pepa (Carmen Maura) is a television actress who isn’t coping particularly well after being spurned by her smooth-talking lover Ivan (Fernando Guillen). Unable to get hold of him, she whips up a batch of gazpacho packed with sleeping pills (the Criterion case indicates she’s planning to kill herself, though the movie suggests the lethal concoction is meant for Ivan). At any rate, it quickly becomes Chekhov’s gazpacho-laced-with-sleeping-pills as Pepa finds herself pulled from one madcap scenario to the next… leaving her entangled with Ivan’s mentally unstable ex Lucia (Julieta Serrano), his estranged son Carlos (Antonio Banderas), Carlos’s snobbish and overbearing fiancee Marisa (Rossy de Palma), a mambo-loving cabbie (Guillermo Montesinos), and her high-strung friend Candela (Maria Barranco), who’s on the run after getting mixed up with a Shiite terrorist cell that may or may not be planning to hijack a flight to Stockholm that Ivan may or may not be booked on with his current lover.

Screwball is a term that tends to suggest a riotous state of comedic bliss. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is more like the cinematic equivalent of champagne bubbles; it’s buoyed by its own classy and uniquely fizzy pep… though it’s not exactly what you’d call laugh-out-loud funny. Rather, it generates a momentum of perpetually spicy amusement. The screwball tag is earned through scenes of comedic misunderstanding and coincidence flowing naturally together, as if by fate, with no obvious trace of screenwriting seams (even though the film happily embraces contrivance - what are the odds Carlos and Marisa would be the couple that wants to tour Pepa’s flat?). Almodovar’s narrative hand remains impressively unobtrusive. 

Carmen Maura (one of several Almodovar muses) is the right kind of actress to occupy the center of a movie like this - the sort of performer who can seamlessly adjust to the tonal parameters of whatever scene she’s in (one moment she’s accidentally setting her mattress on fire and hurling her telephone through the window, the next she’s the confident calm at the eye of the storm… handling cops and hauling Candela in off the literal and figurative ledge). Banderas was pushed as a smoldering hunk at his 90s apex for fairly self-explanatory reasons, but his early work with Almodovar reflected a deft comedic touch. The entire cast, right down to the bit parts (such as the eccentric porter for Pepa’s building), feels carefully considered, and part of an organic whole.        ​

Almodovar is, of course, the sort of filmmaker who couldn’t be visually dull or subdued if he tried. The movie is well-regarded for its vibrant color palette (and Elvira Lindo’s accompanying Criterion essay does a good job outlining how the film’s aesthetic reflected the shifting social and cultural landscape of 1980s Spain - specifically Madrid), but what’s particularly striking is the precision of the shot-making… almost Hitchcockian in its deliberate calibration. There’s a playful suggestion of a suspense-thriller lurking on the periphery, one that gains the occasional foothold (particularly near the climax) but is unable to quell the comedic chaos for long. It would seem the absurdities of life are simply too great to suppress… love, at least in Almodovar’s eyes, just makes everyone act a bit cuckoo.