Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Review Film
Review/Film; 'Women on the Verge,' a Farce by Almodovar
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November 11, 1988
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Section C , Folio
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''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'' was shown as office of this year's New York Motion picture Festival. Following are excerpts from Vincent Canby's review, which appeared in The New York Times on Sept. 23. The film opens today at Cinema Studio 1 and ii, Broadway and 66th Street.
Information technology hasn't been Pepa'south day, or even calendar week. Ivan, her longtime lover and a male person-chauvinist rat, walks out on her, leaving only a bland message on her answering machine. Planning suicide, Pepa spikes a blenderful of garden-fresh gazpacho with sleeping pills, but forgets to drink it.
Pepa's suicide apace takes on the aspects of a dental checkup: it keeps getting sidetracked.
Saying she really shouldn't fume, Pepa lights a cigarette and sets her bed afire. Her best friend, Candela, who has been having a blissful affair with a man she didn't realize was a Shiite terrorist, comes past looking for refuge from the constabulary.
The beginning couple to look at Pepa's flat, which she has put on the marketplace, are Carlos, Ivan's grown son, whom Pepa had never known about, and Marisa, Carlos'south toothy girlfriend. When Pepa seeks legal advice, the lawyer happens to be Ivan'southward newest mistress.
These are only some of the delirious ingredients in this most entertaining, deliberately beneficial new Castilian farce, ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.'' The director is Pedro Almodovar, better known here for his deliberately scandalous dark comedies (''Matador,'' ''Law of Desire'' and ''What Take I Washed to Deserve This?'') in which annihilation goes, provided that it may offend somebody'due south sensibility.
In ''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakup,'' Mr. Almodovar sets out to charm rather than daze. That he succeeds should not come equally a surprise. The common denominator of all Almodovar films, even the ane that winds upward in an ecstatic murder-suicide pact, is their peachy good humour.
''Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'' has much of the cheeringly mad intensity of animated shorts produced in Hollywood earlier the television era. This is exemplified in Carmen Maura's grand performance as Pepa. Miss Maura, who looks a bit like Jeanne Moreau, is to Mr. Almodovar's movie theater what Anna Magnani once was to Roberto Rossellini's.
Miss Maura is wonderful as a woman who merely cannot resist fighting dorsum. The actress has a big, no-nonsense screen personality that perfectly fits Mr. Almodovar'due south raffishly deadpan comic method.
''Women on the Verge'' takes place in its ain, very special farcical universe, where outrageous coincidences are the norm and where logic dictates that a forgotten blenderful of spiked gazpacho will be drunkard past the wrong person. It's also a place where a idiot box anchor is a sweet old grandmother instead of a barely literate sex symbol, and where Pepa, an actress, appears in a commercial for a detergent guaranteed to get the claret out of your killer son'southward shirt and trousers.
Though feminist in its sympathies, ''Women on the Verge'' is far from existence a tract of any sort. The characters Mr. Almodovar has written and directed keep asserting idiosyncrasies that do non permit them, or the film, to be so humorlessly categorized.
The pace sometimes flags, and at that place are scenes in which the comic potential appears to be lost only because the photographic camera is in the wrong place. Farce isn't easy to pull off, but Mr. Almodovar is well on his style to mastering this most difficult of all screen genres.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/11/movies/review-film-women-on-the-verge-a-farce-by-almodovar.html
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