avik-basu1889 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' moves on at a rapid pace right from the beginning. Almodóvar keeps the film moving along while cooking up hilarious chaos all the way through. The screenplay for the film has a very play-like quality to it. The events of the film take place within a few hours of the same day. The characters are all very closely linked and a number of scenes play out in the presence of the majority of the characters in the same room.The film is a bit of a study of the female psychology and female sensibilities. There are three major female characters in the film - Pepa, Lucia and Candela. Lucia and Candela are two stereotypes and they both display weakness and inability to cope in the face of trouble. Pepa is the major well rounded character who juxtaposes those two characters and manages to show a full range of emotions and have an arc over the course of the film. She goes through the emotional spectrum ranging from feeling vulnerable and sad to feeling liberated, strong and determined, she learns a thing or two about herself in the process and comes out of the whole scenario as a different person.Almodóvar consistently keeps a very humorous tone running throughout the film, but there are also moments of great surrealism like the black-and-white dream sequence or the scene with the fire or even the poetic scene where Pepa and Ivan communicate spiritually through the dubbing of a movie scene. Almodóvar also uses the vibrancy of colours(especially red and blue) to express themes and moods. This film was made towards the beginning of his career, but his distinctive directorial touches were already noticeable. Carmen Maura is brilliant as Pepa. She gives us a living, breathing, character who has her vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but who also has the ability to deal with these weaknesses and take control of her life, help her friends and start afresh. 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' is not as breathtaking as some of the subsequent films in Almodóvar's body of work, however, it is still a really solid piece of work that explores the complexities of a character. Recommended.

SnoopyStyle TV actress Pepa Marcos is depressed after her boyfriend Iván disappears. The apartment is filled with animals. She accidentally sets the bed on fire. She puts sleeping pills in her gazpacho. Her distressed friend Candela shows up. Iván's son Carlos (Antonio Banderas) also shows up with girlfriend Marisa who are apartment hunting. Carlos' mother is crazy Lucía. Candela tries to jump off the balcony. She had an affair with an Arab who turned out to be a terrorist and she fears the police. It's a series of chaotic intertwining characters. It's a lot of wacky crazy chaos. It's a little hard to follow at times. It has some fun. It's got the Pedro Almodóvar style. I'm sure that I missed half of the jokes due to the language barrier. Still, it's wacky fun.

jpschapira I don't think Pedro Almodóvar used to make better films than the ones he makes now; I believe he's always crafted very good movies. But maybe some elements or characteristics of his older pieces are not as present in his actual work, "Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios" made me aware of this. For example, the day that the women of this film experience is unlikely to occur in an Almodóvar work today.Mostly I mean the level of craziness and the absurd. His last film, "Volver", finds a lot of women living 'at the verge of a nervous breakdown' (as the title of this movie translates in English), and although they are about to loose their minds at times, they don't find the same taxi driver three times when they stop a cab in different parts of a big city on a same day… That's delirious!But what's even more delirious is that Almodóvar's writing, with a perfect eye for understanding the female conscience, seems completely real but is cut off by situations like the one I've just mentioned; and that's a beautiful contrast. It's like watching a middle shot of Pepa (Carmen Maura) talking on the phone that suddenly changes to a close-up of her fast walking red high heels; it's like hearing things a woman in a difficult situation would think, but listening to the woman saying them out loud. I don't know if Almodóvar would want to explain what "Mujeres…" is about; maybe he'd prefer that you watch it without reading anything about it. I could just tell you it involves a woman (Pepa) having an affair with a man that left his sick wife and his nerdy son, who's involved with an ugly desperate woman that goes with him to visit an apartment to buy and the apartment is Pepa's, who at the moment is being visited by a girlfriend who's scared because her ex-boyfriend turned out to be a terrorist…Don't say that you would have preferred I hadn't told you anything.This is one of Almodóvar's first works, but don't forget this is the man who afterwards made semi-autobiographical pictures with risky images and character dramas with ruthless and pathetic characters. As a director, Almodóvar makes all his films look practically the same (the cinematography of the ever efficient Jose Luis Alcaine), although here the score is from a thrilling (Bernardo Bonezzi), before Alberto Iglesias started collaborating with Pedro. Which takes us to the differentiating factor in an Almodóvar film: the screenplay, in this movie as always highlighted by the classic credits "screenplay and direction". Better than anything else, we find Almodóvar the writer, capable of creating (in this piece) wonderful characters speaking all the same time in a small room where you can understand everything and you don't stop laughing.And therefore the performances shine; here by means of a unique and impossible to replace Carmen Maura, a beautifully over the top Julieta Serrano, a hilarious María Barranco and an unrecognizable Antonio Banderas, who shows here that he was probably something like an actor during a time of his life; Almodóvar allowed me to see that.

nycritic MUJERES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE NERVIOS is, from its classic opening title sequence in which Lola Beltran belts out her powerhouse ranchera ballad "Soy infeliz" to a montage of pictures taken from women's fashion catalogues to its appropriate closing with La Lupe (a gay icon herself in Latin America) singing her diatribe, "Puro Teatro", a perfect parenthesis that encapsulates a gay man's wet dream: the assortment of strong femininity, filmed to the beat of a potboiler, seen through the eyes of Douglas Sirk, and the heart and essence of farce taken to its limits. Seeing Almodovar's comedic masterpiece is not enough: it has to be savored like the fine wine it's become as it approaches its twentieth year from when it first exploded into theatres and rocked Spanish cinema to its core. Quite frankly, this is the greatest screwball comedy ever filmed, and for a genre created in the United States, this one trumps even Preston Sturges in sheer craziness that just builds upon momentum until it veers out of control.As a matter of fact, television audiences who follow the satirical "Desperate Housewives" should make an effort to see Almodovar's WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN and appreciate the genius run amok during the approximate 90 minutes it takes to tell its frantic story. It's the only real way to appreciate what goes on ABC's hit show. From the moment our heroine, Pepa (Carmen Maura, in a role that has defined her career) awakens from her slumber and frantically runs to the phone to get that hungrily awaited phone call from Ivan (Fernando Guillen) who has abandoned her and faints in the middle of dubbing Joan Crawford as Vienna in JOHNNY GUITAR, as she crosses paths with the scared Candela (Maria Barranco), the lunatic Lucia (Julietta Serrano), anal Marisa (Rossy de Palma), and feminist Paulina (Kiti Manver) during the course of two days, we're in the same league as the five women of "Housewives." They might even serve as parenthetical bookmarks due to the twin nature of women in the throes of despair pushed to the extreme. This is, as a matter of fact, what THE WOMEN would have looked like had it been filmed fifty years later. Less stagy than Cukor's film but no less effective even when it pokes good fun at artifice, camp, and itself, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN is smart, witty, ferociously funny and oddly touching -- a tough thing to do in comedies. It marked the movie which brought Pedro Almodovar to international fame, such that MATADOR was re-released in order to bring its equally bizarre story to the public who had discovered a wunderkind in the avant-garde director. For years, plans for an American remake floated about and actresses names were on a continuous shuffle. Thankfully, the idea has not come through and audiences can enjoy this very Spanish, very quirky movie in its original form and see why the term "Almodovarian" exists in cinema today. This is what started it all, proper.