Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
2.
Primary Texts: Film
Pedro
Almodóvar. Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
(1988)
Key Terms (tags): film, period,
Supporting References:
http://go.galegroup.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX3406800606&v=2.1&u=sunysb&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w
“Pedro Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a hilarious, offbeat and witty farce, follows the attempts of Pepa, a television actress forcefully played by Carmen Maura, to confront her estranged betrayer, an aging Lothario of a voice-over actor, who is unable to stay faithful even to his mistress. Pepa's progress can be tracked by the film's music: it begins with seductive mariachi music, a paean to love and romance, switches to mock-heroic sounds, and ends with a bitter-sweet song about broken hearts. The comedy comes from several factors: the increasing absurdity of the unravelling situation; the quasi-feminist outlook on female-male relationships; and a truly brilliant reversal of manners and expectations.
“Although some action takes place at Pepa's studio, at the home of her lover's wife, in a lawyer's office, and in a wildly decorated taxi driven by a bleached blond driver, the main action, like that of a French bedroom farce, occurs in a single setting: Pepa's luxurious, but rapidly disintegrating, penthouse apartment. As she becomes more and more disturbed about her relationship to Ivan, Pepa tosses his possessions and pictures about, sets her bed on fire, throws a telephone and telephone answering machine through a window, frees chickens and ducks encaged on her balcony, and makes a dangerous, barbiturate-spiked gazpacho which guests splash on carpet and couch. At the same time, the number of people in the apartment grows rapidly as disparate actions become entangled around Pepa and her unhappy romance. Candela, who finds herself part of a Shiite terrorist conspiracy, seeks refuge from the police. Ivan's son, Carlos, and his possessive girlfriend, Marisa, come looking for an apartment to rent. Ivan's wife, crazed with jealousy, comes for a confrontation with the woman she thinks is running away with her husband. A telephone repairman and two policemen investigating an anonymous call about terrorists join the party. Downstairs, Ivan and his new girlfriend try to quietly remove his suitcase from the concierge's cubicle, only to find themselves thwarted, their car accidentally bombarded by flying objects from Pepa's apartment. What makes all this chaos doubly hilarious is the calm with which it is received: this is the way normal life works.
“As in a Buñuel film, unlikely coincidences and chance encounters bring together seemingly perfect strangers—all of whom engage in intense conversations about life and love and all of whom ultimately have some interest in an evening flight to Stockholm. And as in Buñuel serious concerns are treated with a light, witty, irreverent touch. Almodovar addresses questions of insanity, parental rejection of children, marital infidelity, the breakup of marriage and family, the use and abuse of barbiturates, suicide, Shiite terrorists blowing up airplanes full of innocent passengers, lawyers who betray their clients' interest for personal gain, feminism and so on. Typical is a television advertisement for detergents: Pepa plays a typical mother, proud of her detergent which removes even the hard-to-get stains of blood and guts left on her serial-murderer son's shirts.
“All of Almodovar's women are frustrated by the childish self-absorption of the men with whom they are involved. Ivan has literally driven his wife crazy. Son Carlos—a chip off the old blockhead— finds himself immediately attracted to his father's mistress, Pepa, but at the same time physically drawn to Candela, while his virginal girlfriend is passed out in a gazpacho-induced drug stupor on the patio. Candela thought her affair with a Shiite romantic, but, when he bought home his fellow terrorists, she discovered she was a safe house, not an object of affection. Pepa has had a comfortable, long-term affair with Ivan, a handsome womanizing weakling whose sexual impulses lead him to betrayal after betrayal. While continuing to mouth sweet-nothings to Pepa, he is running away with his wife's lawyer, Paulina (who helped him win his wife's case against him), and Paulina herself finds Ivan murmuring sweet nothings to Pepa at the airport on his way to Stockholm with Paulina. The initial shots of Ivan sum up the male as butterfly: he glides past beautiful woman after beautiful woman and to each murmurs words of flattery, romance and love; he wants them all and turns readily from one attraction to the next as his eyes lead him on. At the end Ivan's wife finds solace in insanity and institutionalization; Candela plunges into a new affair with Carlos—a younger Ivan; Paulina is left wondering whether she really wants this man she has betrayed her professional ethics for; Lucia has found a dream of seduction more satisfying than her real-life fiancé; and Pepa has undergone a catharsis and is ready to begin her life anew. The last scene has Pepa and Lucia exchanging female confidences, one of which is that Pepa is carrying Ivan's child; the cycle continues.
“Feminist concerns, however, take a backseat to comedy. Almodovar, again like Buñuel but with his own distinctive touch, piles surreal detail on surreal detail, all presented with a completely straight face. Pepa's balcony is her "Noah's Ark," with various animals installed two by two (no one finds this odd in downtown Madrid, which itself is a fakey set). The taxi driver who continually picks her up by absurdly happy accident has shockingly bleached-blond hair and an impressive variety of dry goods for sale in the backseat; when he fails to provide eye drops for her on one trip he apologetically restocks for the next taxi ride. Pepa flirts immediately and unapologetically with her lover's grown son; he unashamedly flirts back in front of his girlfriend and a strange young woman he will almost immediately make a pass at. Pepa's apartment manager is a Jehovah's Witness who apologizes profusely for not being able to lie; she wishes she could. The climatic chase scene with an aging woman on the back of an aging Harley Davidson motorcycle potting shots at the taxi cum boutique is handled straight. Post-Franco Spain is a funny place, says Almodovar.
“Women on the Verge is the kind of comedy that loses much in translation into critical prose, but which rewards the viewer with a hilarious experience. It is also a refreshingly sane take on male-female relations, as Almodovar's women are brought to the brink by their childishly narcissistic men, only to recover their sanity on the verge of disaster.”
- "Almodóvar, Pedro." Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. : Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference. 2003. Date Accessed 30 Aug. 2013
“Almodóvar,
Pedro (1951– ). Spanish film director, renowned for his
outrageous but technically skilled treatment of contemporary mores.
“Chronicling the heady amorality of
post-Franco
Spain, Almodóvar's films are doubly distinctive for their
preoccupation with the bizarre and their parody of the ultra-glossy
1950s studio style typical of Twentieth Century-Fox. Their titles
alone indicate something of the style – for example Law of
Desire (1987) and High Heels (1991). The enfant
terrible of Spanish cinema was born at Calzada de Calatrava, La
Mancha. Working variously as a telephone company employee, actor,
cartoonist, writer, and rock musician, Almodóvar initially used his
own meagre personal savings to fund his first short films. As a
sideline he wrote the ‘confessions’ of a fictional porn star,
Patty Diphusa.
“By 1980 he was able to make his
first full-length feature, a comedy combining sex and slapstick
entitled Pepi, Lucy, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap. His
panorama of forty-eight hours in the sex lives of middle-class women
of Madrid, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988),
broke all box-office records in Spain and was nominated for an
Academy Award for best foreign language film. It was also nominated
as best foreign film by New York Critics and won the best screenplay
prize at Venice. Assured of his international reputation, Almodóvar
went on to portray the story of an actress who falls in love with the
sex-mad psychotic who kidnaps her in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
(1990). His subsequent films include the melodrama Kika
(1994) and Live Flesh (1997), based – very loosely – on
the novel by the crime writer Ruth Rendell.”
Document
URL
http://go.galegroup.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX3406801019&v=2.1&u=sunysb&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w
http://go.galegroup.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX3406801019&v=2.1&u=sunysb&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w
This source focuses
on the director and not on the information sheet object text.
“Pedro Almodóvar is more than the most successful Spanish film
export since Carlos Saura. At home, the production of Almodóvar's
films, their premiers, and the works themselves are surrounded by
scandal, and the Spanish popular press examines what the director
eats, the qualities he looks for in a lover, and his weight
fluctuations in a fashion normally reserved for movie stars and
European royalty. Abroad, the films have surprised those with set
notions of what Spanish camera is or should be; Almodóvar's
uncompromising incorporation of elements specific to a gay culture
into mainstream forms with wide crossover appeal has been held up as
a model for other gay directors to emulate. The films and Almodóvar's
creation of a carefully cultivated persona in the press have meshed
into "Almodóvar," a singular trademark. "Almodóvar"
makes the man and the movies interchangeable even as it overshadows
both. The term now embodies, and waves the flag for, the "New
Spain" as it would like to see itself: democratic, permissive,
prosperous, international, irreverent, and totally different from
what it was in the Franco years.
“Almodóvar's career
can be usefully divided into three stages: a marginal underground
period in the 1970s, during which he personally funded and controlled
every aspect of the shoestring-budgeted, generally short films, and
which culminated in Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas de montón,
his feature film debut; the early to mid-1980s, during which he was
still writing and directing his increasingly costly though still
low-budget films, but for other producers and with varying degrees of
state subsidization; and, from The Law of Desire in 1986, a
period in which he reverted to producing his own films, which now
benefitted from substantial budgets (by Spanish standards), top
technicians, and maximum state subsidies. Though critical reaction to
his work has varied, each of his films has enjoyed increasing
financialPage 16 | Top
of Article success until Women on the Verge
of a Nervous Breakdown, which became 1989's highest-grossing
foreign film in North America and the most successful Spanish film
ever in Spain.
“Almodóvar's oeuvre makes a good
argument for the auteur theory. One can trace to his first films
themes and strategies that he would explore in different forms, with
varying degrees of success but with increasing technical expertise,
throughout the rest of his career. Almodóvar's films posit the
absolute autonomy of the individual. From Pepi to Tie Me
up! Tie Me Down! the central characters in his films (mostly
women) either act as if there are no social restrictions, or are
conscious of the price of transgression but willing to pay it if such
actions lead to, or contain, pleasure.
“In Almodóvar's films, the various
paths to pleasure lead to a destination and fulfillment (Matador),
a dead end and disappointment (Dark Hideout, Women on the Verge),
or an endlessly winding path and continuous displacement (The Law
of Desire), but never resignation. To explore these varied roads
Almodóvar has over the years accumulated a rep company of actors
(including Antonio Banderas, who graduated to Hollywoood stardom).
When in an Almodóvar film, no matter how absurd the situation their
characters might find themselves in, all the actors are directed to a
style that relies on understatement and has often been called
"naturalist" or "realist." For example, when in
The Law of Desire Tina tells her brother that "she"
had previously been a "he" and had run off to Morocco to
have a love affair with their father, Carmen Maura acts it in a style
considerably subtler than that used by, for example, June Allyson to
tell us she really shouldn't have broken that date with Peter
Lawford. This style of acting is partly what enables Almodóvar's
often outrageous characters to be so emotionally compelling.
“Almodóvar borrows indiscriminately
from film history. A case in point is What Have I Done to Deserve
This? which contains direct reference to, or echoes of,
neo-realism, the caper film, Carrie, Buñuel, Wilder, Warhol,
and Waters. Moreover, by his second period, beginning with Dark
Hideout, it became clear that Almodóvar's preferred mode of
cinema was the melodramatic. It is a mode that cuts across genre,
equally capable of conveying the tragic and the comic, eminently
emotional, adept at arousing intense audience identification, and
capable of communicating complex psychological processes no matter
what the character's gender or sexual orientation.
“Almodóvar's signature, and a unique
contribution to the movies, is the synthesis of the melodramatic mode
with a clash of quotations. This combination allows Almodóvar both a
quasi-classical Hollywood narrative structure (which facilitates
audience identification) and a very self-conscious narration (which
normally produces an alienation effect). This results in dialectical
moments in which the absurd can be imbued with emotional resonance
(the mother selling her son to the dentist in What Have I Done);
the emotional can be checked with cheek without disrupting
identification (superimposing a character's crying eyes with the
wheels of a car in The Law); and camp can be imbued with depth
without losing its wit (the transference of emotions that occurs when
we see Pepa dubbing Joan Crawford's dialogue from Johnny Guitar
in Women on the Verge). At his best (What Have I Done to
Deserve This?, The Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown), Almodóvar drills a heart into the postmodern
and fills it with an operatic range of feeling.
“Although Almodóvar's movies have
garnered increasingly heady praise in the 1990s, one senses the
critical establishment is consciously trying to legitimize him in
their eyes. Why is it that when a comedy expert grows more "serious,"
he is, perforce, taken more seriously? Fortunately, Almodóvar's
mature works remain vibrant, unpretentious melodramas (unlike Woody
Allen, whose art films seem like Xerox copies of the masters he
slavishly imitates). Although Almodóvar has been chastised for
trying to have his soap opera and send it up, too, he accomplished
just that impossibility with earlier works like Law of Desire.
As arrestingly sentimental as All about My Mother is, and as
disturbingly mournful as Live Flesh is, they lack the kick of
less-acclaimed works like High Heels, an unabashed glimpse
into the soul of Lana Turner. Whereas Almodóvar once passionately
embraced the Hollywoodness of Douglas Sirk's women pictures, his most
recent movies merely buss those stylized conventions on the cheek.
Why is there such a frenzy to commend the new-improved maverick,
simply because he now uses humor only as a diversionary tactic,
instead of an integral part of his canon? Despite reservations about
the shift in his approach, one admires Almodóvar's unabated insight
into role-playing, his debunking of machismo, his celebration of
tackiness, and his unsurpassed skill with actresses. If something
joyful seems missing from latter-day Almodóvar, something has also
been gained in his collaboration with actress Marisa Paredes, a
gravely beautiful dynamo, whom the director uses to suggest the
melancholy behind emotional extravagance. If films like The Flower
of My Secret are high-wire acts between pathos and humor, then
Paredes helps him keep his balance. Even if one reminisces about
Almodóvar's teamwork with efervescent comediennes like Carmen Maura
and Victoria Abril, one is relieved that he hasn't become the Spanish
John Waters, a filmmaker whose rebelliousness now seems quaint.
Exploring his gay sensibility, Almodóvar appeals to straight
audiences, who share his appetite for the resurrection and
re-invigoration of old movie cliches. In overlooked works like Kika,
characters literally die for love, and this slick director
understands that classic escapism has undying appeal for a reason.
The genius of Almodóvar lies in succumbing to the absurdity of
Hollywood romanticism, while recognizing it as an impossible ideal.
After enduring bloodless Oscar-winners and critically correct
masterpieces, the audience rushes to Almodóvar's movies because they
act like a tonic.”
- a
Comments