Pedro Almodovar has come along at just the right time. No other phenomenally interesting new film director has emerged during the last decade, so the critical establishment and the discriminating public have embraced his work with gratitude, notably his latest, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Almodovar's work is quirky and insouciant, and he's steeped in both film lore and the cultural iconography of the past--particularly the late fifties and early sixties--an era he adores. His sensibilities are not only camp, they're clever; and they're also unapologetically gay. This does not mean they are not utterly accessible to mass audiences in his own country and abroad.
Almodovar has been the breath of mischievous air in post-Franco Spain--a comer, representing a country from which not much has been heard cinematically since Luis Bunuel. The North American cognoscenti have a soft spot in their big collective heart for a relative underdog whose culture seemingly leans to the exotic. Therefore it comes as no surprise that Almodovar's work, as substantial and delightful as it is, tends perhaps to be somewhat overrated. The patrician film-going public wants a new film hero, and Almadovar has been elected.
Brisk Farce
A bright-as-a-penny farce that moves with briskness and brio, Women on the Verge of a nervous Breakdown is Almodovar's best film, which isn't to say his most interesting. The earlier and flawed Dark Habits, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Matador, and Law of Desire, with their fantasies of erotic violence, are far more fascinating. They are also more disturbing: In them, sex and death are constant bedfellows, a reminder of the age of AIDS.
In Women, which is sexy but airy, Almodovar allows the audience its benign fantasy of sexual playfulness, which is so palatable it has become his first big North American hit. Not only has Almodovar come along at the right time, he has also come by with the right news: "Relax. It's all right. The idea of sex isn't so dangerous."
Women is structured like a classic farce. Pepa (Carmen Maura) has been dropped by womanizer Ivan (Fernando Guillen), a married man with whom she has carried on a lengthy affair. Ivan's mentally disturbed wife Lucia (Julieta Serrano) thinks Pepa is going away with Ivan, and Pepa assumes Ivan has gone back to Lucia. Ivan and Lucia's son Carlos (Antonio Banderas) comes to Pepa's apartment, coincidentally, with his fiancée, Marisa (Rossy Von Donna), to answer Pepa's ad, as does Pepa's distraught friend Candela (Maria Barranco) who has become romantically involved with Shiite terrorists who are going to hijack a flight to Stockholm.
In an effort to help her friend, Pepa goes to a feminist lawyer, Paulina Morales (Kiti Manver), who it later turns out is the woman Ivan has been seeing and who is going away with him--on the same flight to Stockholm. As might be expected, everyone except Ivan and the feminist lawyer turns up at Pepa's apartment, including two policemen who have traced Carlos' helpful call about the terrorists and a telephone repairman who has come to fix the phone Pepa has thrown through the window in a rage. The demented Lucia holds everyone at gunpoint, before racing to the airport (commandeering a startled motorcyclist) to shoot Ivan and his lady love, with Pepa in hot
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