Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

I love Pedro Almodovar -- and Madrid -- but Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown feels like a telenovela masquerading as what Volver became in full fruition 20 years later. This movie's beginning reveals some resplendent camerawork and a pervasive clock/time theme but then devolves into what feels less like high art and more like lowbrow comedy. I understand and enjoy its planned wackiness and over-the-top hamminess; I was with it straight through the scene where the male and female leads (Fernando Guillen and Carmen Maura), stars of a popular TV soap opera, record their lines in studio -- separately, because he has already left her, as she is beginning to find out. Their soap opera dialog is as thick as oatmeal. (You know the kind I mean: "Let me look at you." "Here I am. There you are." "Don't tell me you don't love me." "All right then, I won't.") She has huge beautiful orbs a man could get lost in. (Her eyes!) He has begun to play an elusive rigamarole with her (sort of a Lovers' Whackamole), just missing her by phone or in person and leaving messages promising to see her there or then, when he's just avoiding her and planning a trip with another woman. She starts going crazy. Through impossibly improbable coincidences, she meets and has confrontations with his new lover and his former lover -- who has not been right in the head since he left her. Complications arise, involving a young dandy played by Antonio Banderas (who can do no wrong in my book) in his mid-20s, lots of spiked gazpacho, and a police gun or two. I love the mambo taxi driver! The chase scene had to be 25 mph tops (snooze or snicker). Carmen Maura does a wonderful job with her role, and all her sister victims of chauvinism do well enough in theirs, but the script and the pacing were too relaxed to succeed as a wacky action movie -- that is, too much like the telenovela format that this movie was trying to surpass. It works well enough as a 1980s foreign film from Spain but it's not as timeless as Almodovar's later work will prove to be. Watch it in Spanish to improve your vocabulary, since the English subtitles don't translate everything. I tracked down a copy on videocassette through the public library because Netflix hasn't stocked it in months. 3.5 stars.