Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) is about a woman dumped by a message on her answering machine. Pepa is a voice actor. Iván leaves her without saying it to her face; he simply leaves a message that he will come for his suitcase. She tries to find him and cannot. Other people start arriving at the flat. Iván's son comes to view it. Iván's former wife arrives with a gun. Pepa's friend arrives in a panic, having discovered she has unknowingly been housing a terrorist cell. And there is a gazpacho; Pepa has put sleeping pills in it and whoever drinks it goes under. The film is a farce revolving around one flat and one answering machine. The door keeps going, the telephone keeps going, and nobody reaches the person they want. This was the film that took Almodóvar international. He was little known outside Spain until then; it brought him a nomination for the foreign language film Oscar. Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas star. The colour is extremely saturated: a red telephone, a yellow wall, a blue dress. That palette became his signature. Not one male character is any use, and that is deliberate. The taxi driver is the best joke in it; his car contains everything. It runs 89 minutes. Good for: Spanish cinema, farce, and Almodóvar. Less good for: the pace is very fast, there are a lot of characters, and there is an attempted suicide.