Alberto Iglesias provides the beautiful score, the first of his 13 (to date) collaborations with Almodóvar. Almodóvar revisits his perennial theme of men behaving badly and women struggling to cope, but there are signs he is entering a new, more assured phase of his career. Her marriage is crumbling, she’s hitting the bottle and is tired of churning out cheap romances. Paredes plays a writer suffering a midlife crisis. Unwanted visitors, a vengeful ex-wife, spiked gazpacho and terrorism jostle for position on the farce-o-meter, with the director’s visual instincts demonstrating that, sometimes, colour-coordinated accessories can be as valid an aesthetic choice as any amount of fancy camerawork. Maura stars as Pepa, waiting for her ex-lover to collect his suitcase from their Madrid penthouse (another riff on The Human Voice). The success of this screwball farce elevated Almodóvar from cult figure to arthouse darling. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
Banderas plays a psychic bullfighting student who bungles a sexual assault by fainting.Ĭarmen Maura, Julieta Serrano, Rossy de Palma and Maria Barranco in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
FALLEN LONDON DESTINIES SERIAL
Matador (1986)Īlmodóvar goes full-on kitsch in a preposterous black comedy that begins with a man masturbating to a slasher video, and develops into amour fou between two serial killers: a female lawyer and an ex-matador who both get turned on by the 40s western Duel in the Sun. There’s so much happening it seems churlish to point out that it doesn’t quite gel, but there’s barely a dull moment. The nesting-doll-style plot involves boyhood friendship, an abusive priest and blackmail. Gael García Bernal plays three roles in this multi-layered noir-esque imbroglio of murder and imposture, and also looks fabulous as a trans drag artiste in show-stopping Gaultier sequins. But forget the product placement and enjoy a super canine performance by an Australian shepherd called Dash. It’s essentially a 30-minute monologue by Tilda Swinton, modelling Balenciaga hoop skirts and Chanel bags as she waits in a luxurious apartment for her ex-lover to come back and claim his suitcase. The Human Voice (2020)Īlmodóvar, who had already riffed on Cocteau’s play in Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, made this more direct adaptation, his first film in English, during the pandemic lockdown. Photograph: 77th Venice International Film Festival 13. Maura is wonderful as always, and Chus Lampreave, another Almodóvar regular, is delightful as her eccentric mother-in-law. One pubescent son deals drugs, the other moves in with a paedophile dentist. Maura plays Gloria, a cash-strapped housewife, in Almodóvar’s homage to Italian neorealism set in and around a dingy apartment block.
FALLEN LONDON DESTINIES TV
It’s crude, chaotic and fizzing with the sort of DIY energy familiar from early work by John Waters and Derek Jarman, with many of Almodóvar’s signature touches (pastiche TV ads, matching accessories, director cameos) already in evidence – though the taboo-busting also includes domestic violence presented as a source of humour. Almodóvar plays the host of a penis-measuring contest. Carmen Maura, the director’s 80s muse, plays Pepi, whose revenge on the cop who rapes her involves persuading a punk chanteuse to pee on his wife. Fuck Me Tim!, was never released commercially, but this follow-up, shot on 16mm but blown up to 35mm, became one of the cult hits of La Movida Madrileña, the Madrid-based movement trashing the legacy of Franco in a riot of sex, drugs and gender fluidity. Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980)Īlmodóvar’s 8mm feature debut, Fuck. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy 16. Carmen Maura in Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom.
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