What Have I Done to Deserve This?

What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) takes place in a Madrid apartment block. Gloria cleans houses, keeps going on amphetamines, and looks after a taxi driver husband and two sons. Everyone in the family wants something from her and nobody gives anything back. It is one of Almodóvar's early films and carries the destructiveness of that period. A neighbour is a prostitute, the older son deals drugs, the younger is handed over to a dentist, and the grandmother keeps a lizard. None of it is explained in detail; it all flows past as ordinary life. That is exactly where the tone sits: domestic violence and poverty are dealt with, not with neorealist gravity but as black comedy. Gloria's anger accumulates throughout and nobody notices. Carmen Maura plays Gloria. She was Almodóvar's regular at the time, and their collaboration ran through to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It was among the first of his films to draw international attention, and is taken as the cinematic expression of the cultural explosion in post Franco Spain, the movida madrileña. It runs 102 minutes. Good for: early Almodóvar, black comedy, and portraits of women. Less good for: the humour is very dark and the shifts between subjects are abrupt; child abuse passes inside a joke and plays badly now. The plot is scattered and many subplots are left unresolved.