I caught the first film in the Pedro Almodovar retrospective that opened this weekend in Landmark cinemas. Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (women on the verge of a nervous breakdown) came out in 1988, the year I moved from California to Minnesota. I saw it when it opened, and loved it for the wonderful colloquial language and rhythms of the dialogue: totally Spanish but reminiscent of those great Preston Sturges screwball comedies. If you've seen the film Easy Living, scripted by Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, then you'll recognize how Almodovar riffs on the way that actions flow when an exasperated character throws something out the window. In Easy Living, a rich man throws his wife's sable coat out a window, and when it lands on Jean Arthur's head, it sets the crazy plot in motion (my mother loved the automat sequence with Ray Milland).
Some of the things Pepa throws through her window: her telephone, her answering machine,
the record "Soy infeliz" sung by Lola Beltran. She's in a phone booth outside her ex-lover's apartment when his wife throws a suitcase out the window, which is how she discovers that he has a son, played by Antonio Banderas in a great suit and hilarious haircut.
Other things I love about the film: the incredible voices of the main characters who make their living dubbing films and commercials; the mambo taxi, the moment when Rossy de Palma opens the fridge and says "Mmm, gazpacho" not realizing it has been spiked with sleeping pills,
the fab apartment that is the center of the action. I was struck then by the vivid colors and loving attention to clothes (those 80s suits! the shoes!). Back in 1988, the fetishizing of the phone and the answering machine were funny--I bought my very first answering machine in 1987 so I wouldn't miss any calls from schools offering interviews at the MLA! This episode of This American Life on the telephone revisits the years when answering machine messages were recorded on tape.
Posts
