Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios
About the film The 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown centers on Pepa, our protagonist, in the aftermath of the abandonment of her lover, Ivan. It demonstrates across three generations of women the post-Franco identity being forged by the constraints in a modern society newly free of its longstanding, highly patriarchal dictatorship. The film reflects on this through the interpersonal relationships it portrays across these three generations of women, specifically how their ability to be in relationships and understand each other is affected by one man, Ivan. In this, Ivan becomes The Man. Men and women are decidedly portrayed by Almodóvar to function both symbolically and to criticize an embedded system of power, and to work within what actually happens when the power structures of both a country and a relationship change, bend, and shift. In the film, we as the viewers witness Pepa’s torrent of emotions and reactive decisions, which propels the plot. Lucía, Candela, Carlos, and the feminist lawyer, the characters who exist both outside and inside Pepa and Ivan’s relationship, are all essential to the entanglement of influence Ivan himself has
created. Pepa is heartbroken and devastated about Ivan leaving her, and ultimately resolves to kill herself by lacing a batch of gazpacho with dozens of sleeping pills. Pepa discovers she is pregnant and before she can go through with her decision to end her life, the chaos of the movie ensues when Candela seeks her friend’s help. She then navigates trying to track Ivan down and meet with him to tell him she is pregnant before he leaves town with, we learn, another woman. All of the characters seem to submit to their own kind of neurosis or hysteria over love, love that begins and love that ends. All of the women are driven in terms of the development of their individual threads of the plot and in terms of their descent into Almodóvar’s brand of madness by their love interests. Lucía becomes the archetype of the deranged and vengeful ex-wife, driven by her revenge seeking mission against both Ivan and Pepa. Candela is taken advantage of by a Shiite terrorist, who seduces her, then uses her apartment to harbor his accomplices, causing her to flee from the police, then into the arms of Carlos. The feminist lawyer, unnamed, becomes distraught at the entanglements of Ivan’s life, seeking only to remove herself and her new lover from the chaos. Carlos and Ivan serve as a lineage of cowardly, womanizing men who drive the plot and drive the madness, but don’t actually serve as interesting and active characters. There is a whole cast of whimsical and fascinating minor characters, who in many ways seem insignificant, but serve to create the world of the film in the same way Almodóvar builds it through his sets and wardrobes - we have the doorwoman in Pepa’s building, the taxi driver, and the receptionist at Pepa’s work. It’s almost impossible to create a timeline of events for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The compressed timeline along with the constant wardrobe changes and disorienting and chaotic moments that Almodóvar breaks down create a hazy semblance of a story.
Internationally renowned director Pedro Almodóvar was born in the
Pedro Almodóvar
small town of La Mancha, the same La Mancha of the iconic Don Quixote. Almodóvar himself has become a prolific Spanish cultural icon. Almodóvar came from a working class family - his parents were mule drivers. The originality of his films is attributed by many to his origins. Almodóvar, while making many films that are typically located in the urban centers of Spain, particularly in terms of his involvement in La Movida, he never forgets his rural beginnings. It is clear that his early life was shaped by women. In his films, Spanish grandmothers and mothers are crucial secondary characters who are essential in every single one of Almodóvar’s story lines. The message in this becomes crucial in the wake of the Spanish transition to democracy, and that seems to be that older women are better at adapting to change and the new challenges of the era of modernity than their Spanish male counterparts. In fact, Almodóvar’s own mother appeared in his films many times, including Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Beyond Almodóvar’s rural, working class beginnings, which he held on to in his career, his career actually began when he dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and moved to Madrid. He had moved to Madrid hoping to attend the Spanish national film school, however the film school had been recently closed by Franco in a last grab for power. He was offered his first job at Telefonica as an administrative assistant when he was 17. After purchasing his own super-8 camera and making his own short films, Almodóvar quickly became highly active and is considered a crucial founding figure in the countercultural movement in the Madrid “La Movida” scene. He wrote articles and stories in magazines such as Star and El Víbora, both of which
were essential literature at the time of La Movida, founded in the late 70s, and were widely considered to be alternative, and often controversial, comics. He later went on to become the primary figure and guiding hand of Spain’s alternative film scene during the 1980s, forming his own film production company with his, brother Agustín called El Deseo. In her essay for the Criterion Collection, Spanish journalist and writer Elvira Lindo writes that his early films characterized La Movida, and immortalized it in cinema, the plots all dealing with “… love, desire, vice, betrayal, homosexuality, crossdressing, and new kinds of families united by love rather than the catholic Church, in a way that had never been done before.” Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón is both first feature-length film and his film which extensively explored the Madrid punk scene of the early 80s. After the release of his first films, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was what actually won him international notoriety, and an Academy Award nomination for best foreign-language film. He later won an Academy Award for best foreignlanguage film with Todo sobre mi madre and was given the honor of best director at the Cannes film festival. Almodóvar says his script for Women on the Verge was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice. Elvira Lindo writes that Almodóvar is viewed by the Spanish as something very much theirs - she believes he is seen almost as a family member. His films contain very specific local references and build the local worlds of Spain, while resonating with audiences internationally. However, he is understood and viewed differently outside of Spain, to audiences in other countries. His characters inhabit a specific way of speaking, an expressiveness, that characterizes the Mediterranean through a combination of rural and urban language. Women on the Verge was directed and written by Almodóvar and produced by his brother Agustín. Agustín produced every film that Pedro directed through El Deseo, which has become one of the largest film production companies in Spain.
THE CHARACTERS
“… and (Almodóvar) didn’t judge his characters. His position, rather than simply accepting what had previously been seen as immoral, was explicitly amoral - a playful and understanding gaze directed at impulsive fauna, especially women, who in his films are driven purely by emotion, casting logic and prudence aside…” - Elvira Lindo
THE CHARACTERS Carmen Maura as… PEPA Pepa is our protagonist, representative of Spain’s new modern woman. She enjoys an incredible degree of upward mobility she has, as Virginia Woolf would say, money and a room of her own. She is clearly intelligent, tough, strong-willed, and has great emotional depths. Her status as a successful, modern Spanish woman puts her character in an interesting place historically in the postFranco era as well as experimentally. Pepa serves as one of the first archetypes of the modern working woman in Spain, her job at the dubbing studio, her loss of love, and the exploration of the implication of these things makes her a nuanced type of female character that Almodóvar pioneered. She creates problems and solves them, self-sabotages and shows incredible empathy - she is obviously complicated and in all her complexities feels like a whole and real person.
Giulietta Serrano as… LUCÍA Lucía in many ways fulfills a stereotype within the film’s fabric. She takes on the role of the deranged, scorned, vengeful ex-wife, almost a Medea-like character. She is an antagonist towards Pepa, as they play their game of phone tag, and Lucía seeks to enact retribution against the woman she believes stole her husband from her. She is both a tragic and comedic character, sporting lampshades for hats and her iconic wig that she wears on the fateful motorcycle ride. But we see too in Lucía a woman whose life has been ruined by her own mental instability and by love. She represents the most traditional lifestyle of the three main female characters; she settled down, got married, had a child, and still can’t achieve happiness. She also represents an ungrounded past - embodied in her wardrobe which seems to be plucked from a 60s fashion magazine.
THE CHARACTERS María Barranco as… CANDELA Candela’s disposition serves as a clear and pronounced foil to Pepa’s. While Pepa is shown to have both emotional extremes and depth of feeling while being incredible tough and strongwilled in the face of her situation, Candela cracks under pressure, always in a way that is comedically timed. Almodóvar is perhaps the least generous when it comes to crafting Candela’s character - she comes off as weak and incapable, passive and clueless. The complexity of her character presents itself in both her sexuality and in her selfawareness. She even proclaims how naïve she is, which presents a high degree of self-awareness that is unexpected from her. Her brief dalliance with Carlos as well as her weekend-long affair with the Shiite terrorist crafts her as a sexuallyliberated young woman in modern Spain. Yet, like Pepa and Lucía, even in her chosen lifestyle, her agentive actions don’t bring her happiness, and in fact cause her trouble more than anything.
Fernando Guillénas as… IVAN Ivan serves as a presence, the catalyst for the series of events that unfold, all the neurosis present in the film. In fact, we rarely see him, the most screen time he gets is at the very beginning of the film, when we witness him romancing a series of woman, promising love, fidelity, and romance to each of them, and then at the very end, when Pepa ultimately confronts him, and saves his life. In between these scenes he moves through the film’s world as though he was a ghost. He is shown to be suave, emotionally literate, masterfully manipulative, and above all else self-involved and dismissive. The most satisfaction we get as viewers regarding Ivan during the film is when he ducks in the telephone booth when he sees Lucía approaching, seeing him, for once, looking ridiculous and emasculated.
THE CHARACTERS
Antonio Banderas as… CARLOS Carlos isn’t allotted the same complexity of feeling and personality that the women of the film are. Like Ivan, he is unfaithful, and even his mother remarks upon seeing him with a woman who isn’t his fiancé: “…just like his father, isn’t he?" Unlike Ivan, however, he isn’t subtle, or masterfully manipulative, and is actually quite boring and useless. In this character, however, Almodóvar flips a well-established script. Rather than having a cast of strong, interesting male characters and female characters who are simply love interests, sex appeal for the male gaze, or so incapable and useless they create problems, Almodóvar crafts the exact opposite. Carlos is handsome, but boring, and his stupidity gets Candela and the rest of the women in trouble. More than anything he becomes a part of the masterfully and carefully crafted set of the film, making him something of an accessory.
Rossy de Palma as… MARISA While Marisa seems to only serve as another extension of Almodóvar’s elaborate set, her place in the world of the film is actually more interesting beneath the surface. She seems first to be a rude, snobbish, and entitled woman. She disapproves of Pepa’s apartment, damning it as ”not a home”which she seems to desire more than the beautiful view and the spaciousness of Pepa’s place. After insulting Pepa’s home and drinking her gazpacho, Marisa falls into a deep sleep, then when she wakes up claims she is no longer a virgin. Her relationship with Carlos is in many ways parallel to Pepa and Ivan’s allowing Almodóvar to articulate the perpetuity of the unbalanced dynamic across another generation.
REPRESENTATIONS OF HYSTERIA, LOVE, AND NEUROSIS
The emotional range of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is like a vast horizon - stretching far in every direction in a fine, thin line that becomes all you can see. During the film, there is a depth of pain, anger, frustration, indignation, profound sadness and loneliness, resign, apathy, almost every emotion on the reactive spectrum that deals with heartbreak and abandonment. Almodóvar’s characters are truly driven by their emotion, almost exclusively. They are incredibly capable and he casts an understanding and generous gaze on them, but they ultimately are selfindulgent, especially when it comes to their emotions. The complexity of the emotional range of the film comes in when considering the role of madness. The title of the film assigns the fragile position of each of the women in the film, placing them literally on that fine, thin line; placing them in every figurative and literal way on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Almodóvar indulges himself in how he manifests and scripts the established trope of the hysterical woman. Each of the women is neurotic; across every generation neurosis reigns. In all three of the women there are delusions, hysterical attacks, suspensions of logic, sexual indulgence, and the fear that they are going crazy. The emotions of the women are portrayed as justified, but in many ways over the top, primarily for the effect of the drama of the film. However, while I find this a progressive film, especially a radically progressive film for the post-Franco period it falls short for me in its inability to reconcile madness with emotional depth. The film to me feels hopeless in many ways, especially in the way men and women can relate on an interpersonal scale. The traditional woman, the modern woman, and the progressive woman can’t find happiness or fulfillment in the traditional family, in the coexistence of success and love, and in sexual liberation. The result is madness, the result is a hysteria born from the constraints of a patriarchal society that doesn’t seem to permit any of those modes of being.
SOY INFELIZ… In considering diegetic and non-diegetic sound in Women on the Verge, the most iconic song emerges: Lola Beltran’s Soy Infeliz. There is a reason the song is what introduces the film in its title sequence. The song both introduces and permeates the film’s world as a crucial component of diegetic sound. The song becomes an age-old croon of unhappiness, of loss of love, and the profound feeling of abandonment that plagues the three women. However, this gets turned on its head when Pepa, upon hearing Carlos and Candela play the record, throws it out of her window, to the street below where it becomes a weapon that hits the feminist lawyer in the back of her head. Beyond this, Women on the Verge is in many ways a meta-meditation of the film industry, and specifically the dubbing industry. We see non-diegetic sound in the making when we see Pepa and Ivan at work. This becomes a way for Almodóvar to both present the inner workings of the Spanish film industry on screen and a way for the inauthenticity of Ivan’s words, the artificiality of their relationship to be represented in a tangible way. The scene in which Pepa hears Ivan speaking to her through their work, saying all the things she in many ways wanted or needed him to say, is incredibly meta and still representative of diegetic sound. In terms of non-diegetic sound, the rapid and successive drum beats selected to play while Pepa makes her way to Lucía, who has just fled her apartment create a sense of urgency and comic ridiculousness. It picks back up on the drive to the airport when they confront her and she begins to shoot at them from the back of the motorcycle.
MOTIFS, THEMES, AND SYMBOLS
RED
Red has long been considered the color of madness, insanity, violence, anger, and aggression as well as the color of sensuality, sex, love, and passion. The binary of red as a symbolic color reflects the extremities of its representation in arts across mediums. Red permeates, saturates, and truly defines Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The film is concerned with madness, anger, passion, sex, and love, all historically represented through the color red.
Red colors the entirety of the film’s world, especially Pepa’s apartment. The state of her home deteriorates alongside her mental state, as red becomes more and more featured in every shot. The boldness of Pepa as a chracter, her fits of rage and passion, and the throes of her emotions are embodied in the red she wears. Her apartment is peppered with red objects, her phone being the focal red object and a vessel she pours all of her anger, frustration, and confessional love. Pepa constantly destroys, disconnects, and takes her anger out on the red phone.
CLOCKS, ANSWERING MACHINES, & PHONES The clocks in Women on the Verge tick with a melodic urgency as Pepa, dormant, lets time pass her by. Almodóvar cleverly hones in on the sensation that time runs out for women. The urgency and desperation of the film is propelled by the same rhythmic ticking of the clocks that surround Pepa’s bed. The clocks parallel the countdown of the start of the film Ivan is dubbing, making clear their distinctively different situations and reactions to the end of their relationship. Pepa herself, we come to understand is a ticking time bomb. The sleeping pills seem to necessitate all of the clocks that surround her, but in a more surreal way they populate her mind and her interior life. The answering machine and phone are objects that bear the brunt of Pepa’s frustration and anger at Ivan. His abandonment of her and their consequential disconnect is emphasized through the fragmented way that they communicate through leaving messages. Their communication is anything but clear and the method of talking makes everything impersonal and unkind. There is something to be said as well for the incredibly modern mode of communication to be made so central in the film.
Gazpacho is a crucial part of traditional Spanish cuisine culture and is central to the film. In their anticipated and dramatic encounter, Pepa tells Lucía Ivan loved her recipe for gazpacho. In this it becomes a euphemism, and functions similarly to the symbol of the bed. The substance through which Pepa decides to end her life is the same substance through which she once conveyed love to Ivan. What once was symbolic of their love, then becomes symbolic of grief and destruction. Beyond this, it is the sensual power of the gazpacho that causes Marisa to wake up from her slumber and declare herself no longer a virgin. A saying attached to gazpacho is that “de gazpacho no hay empacho” meaning “you can never get too much of a good thing (too much gazpacho).” Pepa then using the gazpacho to convey love suggests an overwhelming amount of love, sensuality, and for her to then thwart the police that arrive to her apartment is her in a way utilizing her position as a Spanish woman, using a traditional domestic meal that once was used to convey love and sensuality to orchestrate a situation to her advantage is an incredibly radical thing.
THE MOST MEMORABLE SCENE
For me, the most memorable scene of Women on the Verge is the burning of Pepa’s bed. Her watching its destruction, silent, tears in her eyes while she tenderly holds her cigarette was the most profound moment, as well as some of the most incredible acting from Carmen Maura during the film. The proclivity towards destruction that Pepa shows culminates into the destruction of such a large, tangible, and symbolic object. The carelessness with which she tosses aside the matches and box of cigarettes is prefaced by her thought that she shouldn’t smoke. That was the exact moment upon watching that I understood she was pregnant. The small clue, followed by the massive act of destruction (that is an accident, but perhaps not really) sets the stage for how the rest of the events of the film will unfold. As she watches the bed burn, she wears a red overshirt and holds a flower that slowly wilts in the presence of the burning bed. The flower is a phallic object, coupled with the sensuality of the bed. Its destruction is understood to be the end of intimacy, the bed symbolizing Ivan and Pepa’s love. The sheer dramatics of the scene along with Carmen Maura’s incredible acting and the potency of the symbolism is in my opinion what makes this scene so extravagant and essential to the project of Women on the Verge.
LA MOVIDA
Almodóvar was highly active in the La Movida scene and is one of its pioneers (he is pictured above in the pink eyeshadow and blouse). After “The Transition” a relaxation of censorship changed modes of expression and countless post-Franco transgressions of sexuality, gender, and expression flourished in Madrid. La Movida coined the idioms of the city: “Madrid me mata” (Madrid kills me) and “Madrid nunca duerme” (Madrid never sleeps). Women on the Verge embodies both of these idioms in the feverish dream of the film that almost kills Pepa.
What was considered to be a hedonistic countercultural wave, due to the rampant use of recreational drugs, was actually crucial for a new freedom of expression embodied in the wardrobes of the women of the film. Perhaps the liberty at which Pepa gets her sleeping pills is a sly reference to the drug use of the era. But beyond this, the wardrobes of the women are crucial to the film and orient it in its time, a remarkable historical and cultural indicator of La Movida and the Spain of the 80s.
In fact, the power heels and the business dress become iconically representative of the modern working woman and became a wardrobe of empowerment and agency. The wardrobes also become representative of Spain rapidly trying to catch up with the lifestyle enjoyed by other countries in the West. Almodóvar is truly considered to be the creator of the best cinematic representation of this era, and all its messiness, freedom, complexity, and joy.
Elvira Lindo attests to this : “I’ve written on more than one occasion that Pedro Almodóvar changed the way I dressed. The way we dressed. Especially the women, who went from being good leftist girls in the uniform of jeans and plaid shirts to wearing miniskirts and dramatic makeup and dyeing our hair. I see myself now in photos from back then and realize I was wearing the costume of that time more than I knew; something in me had been transformed when I immersed myself in Almodóvar’s universe.”
“Creo que no lo voy a alquilar… Me encantan las vistas.” Women on the Verge is truly a magnificent film - the cityscape, the wardrobes, the dazzling characters all come together to create the complex world of post-Franco urban Spain in the 1980s. Almodóvar’s women represent a sexual and expressive freedom that makes them as though they are full, complete, and real people, with their own interesting and valuable interior lives. To have a cast of strong and fascinating women is radical, and obviously still progressive in contemporary film. The thing is - these women are ultimately Almodóvar’s women, not the women of a female director. The film carries a distinct Spanish quality of balancing melodrama and playfulness, but for me as a progressive story it falls short. In crafting a new identity for the new, modern Spanish woman Almodóvar still deems her life centered on men. The film doesn’t pass the Bechdel test - while the cast is primarily women, they primarily talk about men, their problems involve men, and they both seek them out and despise them, falling in and out of love. Their lives are ruled by men and it would be naïve to think their lives weren’t - they still live in a highly patriarchal society. However, there is a certain hopelessness that permeates the film, that for me makes it fall short in its rhetoric about the modern Spanish woman. Lucía, Candela, and Pepa all live incredibly different lifestyles, but none of them can find or achieve happiness. While the end is optimistic, with Pepa finally looking happy and peaceful, confessing to Marisa that she is pregnant, and then firmly deciding that she will not sublet her apartment because she loves the views, we understand she is accepting her life-style as it exists, that she can find contentment in the money and room of her own. We understand she will choose to have her child, living as a single mother. But overall, it does not seem that any of these women can shake themselves free of heartbreak, dissatisfaction, and grief. In an iconic exchange when Pepa, the policemen, and Lucía are in the living room, Lucía says to the policemen: “Why don’t you leave us alone? Pepa and I have more important things to discuss” and one of the policemen answers: “Men right?” to which Lucía replies “Is there anything more important than that?” While the conversation is clearly written with irony and clever intention on Almodóvar’s part, I think it encapsulates the struggle of conceiving of what is important to the new Spanish woman. In this we see what has changed, what is actively changing, and what ultimately will not change. The figure of The Man is not made irrelevant in this film, in fact he is everything. The questions that remain are how women are supposed to achieve happiness in such a tumultuous upset of personal identity and national identity. My questions then for Almodóvar would be: “How as a male director do you feel you can represent the complexities and redefinition of womanhood post-Franco?” “Do you feel that national identity and personal identity can coexist or will always be at odds?” and finally “Why focus on women and their emotional worlds when choosing to interrogate Spanish national identity after the death of Franco?”
Film File 1 Carly Roberts Doctor Nordlund Spanish Film History due 03/13/19
sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao4pKJxhZQQ https://www.criterion.com/current/ posts/4434-laughing-and-crying-withcarmen-maura https://www.criterion.com/current/ posts/4438-women-on-the-verge-of-anervous-breakdown-a-sweet-new-style https://www.criterion.com/films/ 29101-women-on-the-verge-of-anervous-breakdown https://www.britannica.com/ biography/Pedro-Almodovar