Spaincomedy1988 color 89 min.
Director: Pedro Almodovar
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1499L

Spain and screwball comedy were hardly compatible entities . . . until Pedro Almodóvar. Fiercely original, darkly funny, and pungently controversial, Almodóvar revolutionized the Spanish cinema with movies like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. His seventh feature, it was not only the biggest Spanish box-office success at home, but an international hit, receiving the Best Screenplay Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film.

The Preston Sturges of Madrid, Almodóvar admits to being influenced by American comedies of the '50s (like those with Doris Day), and specified that the visual style of Women on the Verge . . . is connected to How to Marry a Millionaire. The opening credit sequence cheerfully sets the film's stylized tone, with women in magazine ads that date back thirty years.

Into this colorful artifice enters Carmen Maura as Pepa -- a younger and classier version of the oppressed heroine she played in Almodóvar's What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1985) -- who is being dumped by her boyfriend, Ivan. That they are both soap-opera actors allows for hilarious scenes of Ivan dubbing a Joan Crawford weepie (Johnny Guitar), or Pepa dubbing a wedding scene that ends with the priest giving the bride a condom, "because you can never be sure, even with your husband."

Pepa obsessively and vainly tries to get to Ivan, while wacky coincidences lead her to Ivan's ex-mistress, his son Carlos (Antonio Banderas) and Carlos' fiancée. Whether Pepa is serving gazpacho spiked with sleeping pills or racing to the airport in a "mambo taxi" (stocked with magazines and a mini-bar), Maura blends comic timing, sexiness, and self-possession.

Almodóvar explained that Women on the Verge . . . was inspired by Jean Cocteau's dramatic monologue The Human Voice, in which a woman talks on the phone to her invisible (and inaudible) lover. But he added two dozen characters, turning a heroine's loneliness into high-spirited farce. "Women have become a special genre for me," he confessed, "like Westerns or science fiction."

And his portrait of Pepa -- menaced by phones and answering machines -- includes a satire of communication technology: "It is a lie that human beings communicate with each other over the phone," Almodóvar exclaimed. "The telephone only serves to show our fellow man the lack of interest we have in them. And automatic answering services were invented as an aid to liars.

"My advice to anyone who spends their time sitting by the phone, waiting in vain for a call, is to throw the thing out the window. It's better than hanging yourself by the cord. In that respect, Women . . . is a positive and optimistic movie."

This advice comes from a man who spent ten years working for the phone company.

-- Annette Insdorf
Annette Insdorf, author of François Truffaut and Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, directs undergraduate film studies at Columbia University.

Cast

Pepa: Carmen Maura
Carlos: Antonio Banderas
Lucía: Julieta Serrano
Candela: María Barranco
Marisa: Rossy de Palma
Cabdriver: Guillermo Montesinos
Paulina: Kiti Manver
with Chus Lampreave, Yayo Calvo, Loles León, Angel de Andrés-López, and the participation of Fernando Guillén

Credits

Costumes by José M.ª de Cossío
Sound by Guilles Ortión
Production manager Ester García
Edited by José Salcedo
Music by Bernardo Bonezzi
Director of photography José Luis Alcaine
Associate producer Antonio Lloréns
Executive producer Agustín Almodóvar
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Transfer

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. This new digital transfer was created from a pristine 35mm low-contrast print. The sound was created from a 35mm full coat 3-track magnetic master.
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