Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios

Pedro Almodóvar (1988)

Pedro Almodóvar’s film aesthetic developed rapidly.  Compare Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown with What Have I Done to Deserve This?, another farcical black comedy that he made only four years earlier.  Carmen Maura stars in both (as she did in nearly all Almodóvar’s features up to and including Women on the Verge).  Maura’s character in What Have I Done to Deserve This? is a working-class skivvy and housewife, living with her husband, their two sons and the husband’s mother in a cramped, shabby flat in a block close to a Madrid motorway.  Pepa, the Maura protagonist of Women on the Verge, is an actress, working in TV, commercials and, especially, voice-dubbing; her home, in an upmarket area of the Spanish capital, is a penthouse apartment.  You’d expect the later film to be stylish in ways the earlier one couldn’t be but the differences between them run deeper.  As well as often looking rough and scuzzy, What Have I Done to Deserve This? is a haphazard piece of writing – even though that indiscipline is part of what makes the result so unpredictably entertaining.  Women on the Verge is, in all respects, expertly – exultantly – designed; and is generally accepted as one of its writer-director’s finest works.  Returning to the film about twenty years since I last saw it, though, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected (or as much as I remember liking What Have I Done to Deserve This?).

In 1988, Almodóvar’s smartening up of his visuals must have been exhilarating to behold.  Even though he has consistently spoiled audiences in that department ever since, the opening titles sequence of Women on the Verge – fashion and make-up imagery, suggesting layouts from high-end women’s magazines – is still very satisfying to watch:  the images are crisply composed, artfully arranged and effortlessly witty.  The vivid colour co-ordination of the opening titles is carried through into the narrative proper:  this was the first time that Almodóvar worked with the cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, a master lighter.  Yet the film’s visual qualities are as good as it gets.  The plot takes off from the unexplained departure of Pepa’s lover and fellow voice artist, Iván (Fernando Guillén), and comprises, essentially, Pepa’s attempts to find out why and to where he’s disappeared.  This entails a series of events and encounters that, for all their improbability, are so smoothly engineered that they rarely surprise. 

Carmen Maura’s high-speed movement and delivery are a feat, and she’s well supported by a host of Almodóvar stablemates of the era (including Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano, Chus Lampreave and Rossy de Palma, with her extraordinary Picasso-lady profile).  Almodóvar handles the farce mechanics and tempo very surely.  You can feel his pleasure in orchestrating the cast and his delight in the exuberantly artificial décor:  the performances and the sets alike are highly stylised.  According to Paul Julian Smith, Almodóvar termed this film ‘high comedy’, which may be what I resist:  at this altitude, the comic air you breathe is rather thin, making for comedy more accomplished than it is funny.  This could be down simply to the passage of time – to Almodóvar’s humour having become so familiar over the years – but I found his next film, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), funnier than ever when I saw it again, as recently as 2021.  As noted in my review of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Paul Julian Smith’s biography of the film-maker is called Desire Unlimited:  The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar.   In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, desire feels limited by style.

4 March 2025