"Women on the Verge of Breaking" (1988) is a formulaic film that uses cans to contain emotions like Andy Warhol used soup cans to contain food – it is a camp satire, in each "breakdown" we see a woman crying in a melodramatic situation, it mocks every TV soap opera, and even touches on laundry detergent commercials.
"Woman on the verge of collapse" (1988)
The plot is a perfect web of clichés, and the film is peppered with posters from old classics. This year, it easily stole the spotlight from Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).
"The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988)
The women in Pedro's films were all the rage, appearing to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, screaming and pushing against each other in a fit of silly excitement. As Noel Coward muttered: This movie is refreshing.
"Woman on the verge of collapse" (1988)
Almodóvar’s humor is sarcastic. He nicknamed "The Last Temptation" as "The Last Show Off," and when asked what award he wanted to win, he replied: "If ("Women on the Verge of Collapse") won the top prize, then the Minister of Culture might ban it." It eventually won the award for best screenplay. The film was spared worldwide condemnation, and bureaucrats may have ignored Almodóvar.
His seven feature-length films to date are all anti-clerical, refuting dogmas of all kinds: religion, feminism, fascism, gay liberalism, etc., and they, like Bette Davis’ queen, chase the fools out of the bars. Political ideas are too crude, literal, and orderly to account for our passions.
Almodóvar (left)
Almodóvar is afraid of oppression by the government and the church, and of Franco and Opus De (right-wing Catholics popular in Spain and Italy), but he is also afraid of groups that think solely in terms of gender roles and social norms, and of course "well-intentioned" radicals who overthrow the above two. As he told an audience in Venice: "The important thing is to know who your enemy is."
Complaining to a woman at the New York Film Festival about his political ambivalence, he put it in a more idiosyncratic way: "I don't like any radicals, and I don't like telephones. Passion has its own irrational rules, just like apathy. It can push people to lofty heights, or dangerous extremes. Society is obsessed with controlling passion because it is unbalanced. But for the individual, it is undoubtedly the only dynamic that gives life meaning."
"Speak to Her" (2002)
Almodóvar focuses on the kind of lush drama found in studio movies and TV melodrama, a story in which he can freely display desire, betrayal and forgiveness. He would reframe these plots in a campy style and turn them into a rave party, complete with psychedelic sets, a grand dream sequence, and everyone dressed up to kill each other.
"Laws of Desire" (1987)
His characters – nuns, scoundrels, fighters, abandoned women, naive young men – all carry a certain irony. Their emotions are very typical, and the way they are presented in the film is very light and ironic.
"Woman on the verge of collapse" (1988)
Almodovar’s choreography in the film is as exquisite as Mark Morris’s choreography. Almodóvar used the sarcastic attitudes fostered by the gay ghetto—such as Jewish humor—as a wise means of escaping society's hatred and using this perception to perceive the world at large.
"Laws of Desire" (1987)
“Camp allows you to look at the human condition with irony,” Almodovar says. “It’s a lot more interesting to take camp out of the context of homosexuality and use it to talk about anything, but if you’re going to do that, you have to show how much you love it and enjoy it, otherwise you look like you’re making fun of it. In the world of camp, you sympathize with other people’s lack of power, like those who Pain in sentimental songs. The pain is vulgar, but that awareness is about irony, not criticism. If you use camp as an intellectual, you can never take it out of its original context. If you want to use it in the outside world, you have to create a campy carnival. Either way, you have it, or you don't."
"Love in High Heels" (1991)
Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Luis Bunuel can be considered Almodovar's mentors – he calls them his "holy trinity". They were not known for their camp overtones, but they taught him how to reconcile opposing sides, how to create absurd juxtapositions that were always ironic. Hitchcock popularized images of "high art" to a wide audience and made "the unbelievable believable."
Almodovar
Wilder takes a painful, realistic story and turns it into a comedy. Of the three, Buñuel is the closest to Camp, especially in his Mexican period work, where he transformed abysmal scripts and actors into complex ingredients for moving films. Almodóvar also noted that he injected dreams and surreal fantasies into everyday scenes, "he didn't even change the lighting effects."
He said privately, "When you start fantasizing about being a director, you fantasize about actors, not directors. The awareness of being a director comes later. My dream would be Bette Davis—I loved the intensity of her character, her autonomy—or It's Katharine Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. Contemporary actors don't give me that impression. They were part of a studio system that was terrible for those who worked in it, but it created some extraordinary actors who were able to transcend their own lives."
"My Mysterious Flower" (1995)
"The actor's 'race' has now changed, even on a physical level. The actor has become like a normal person, but a normal person cannot be Rita Hayworth. In a film like Matador, a fable, a fantasy, I wanted some great actors to serve as the basis for the entire film. I should have cast the young Ava Gardner as the heroine."
"Matador" (1986)
“I wanted to be a woman in situations where my emotions became extreme,” Almodovar explains of the genesis of “Women on the Verge of Breaking” (what else is new?) “So I thought of the short story “The Voice of Man” by Jean Cocteau, which is just It just told the story of a woman waiting by the phone. So I started writing, and my own life became involved in this story. I remember there was a day when I was sitting by the phone, waiting for someone to call, ready to rush out of the house.”
"Woman on the verge of collapse" (1988)
