崩溃边缘的女人

Women On The Verge of Nervous Breakdown introduces a drama about female roles in chaos. The director Almodóvar utilized intertextuality to borrow elements from other works. By representing the film like screwball comedy and melodrama, Women on the Verge portrays three different kinds of women and they could be contextualized to explain the social circumstance of Spain in 1980s.

Three female images and their corresponding national identities

1 Lucia

Lucia is the wife of the male protagonist Ivan, who left Lucia many years ago. Since then, Lucia becomes psycho. Her image gives the viewer a feeling of retro and collaging. Her exaggerated wig and vintage suit make her like a woman from 1970s or even before. Lucia appears to be mentally unbalanced but become sober at some point.

This profile shot shows her head in the wind, funny and eye-capturing. Lucia is on the way to airport and plan to kill Ivan. By using this profile shot of her head, it shows Lucia’s impenetrability (Acevedo-Muñoz, 2006). Her mental disorder belies her revenge.

The role of Lucia could be a metaphor of those people who is entangled with past and could not get rid of the influence of history cultural legacy. After the regime in 1975, many cultural practices were repressed in the transitional period. People with old cultural revenge, however, were also trapped by the limitation of past, like Lucia realizes she should be in hospital like she used to.

2 Candela

Candela is the female protagonist Pepa’s friend. She is open to love but become desperate and maniac when she knows that she may in trouble of living with terrorists. At the same time, Candela is still dare to earn herself love by flirting with Ivan’s son Carlos.

Candela represents the people who is willing to touch upon new objects in the cultural transition. There were “cultural anxiety” and “generic instability” in Spanish culture at 1980s. Although there are political and sexual liberation with artistic freedom in this kind of “new Spanish mentality”, they could also be coward and scared when new trends sweep.

3 Pepa

Pepa is the female protagonist and she is in search of her lover Ivan to tell him that she got pregnant. She spends time on the phone listening or asking others about Ivan. However, she does not get the chance to meet Ivan in person. At last, Pepa moves Ivan from her emotion and to save him not from love and this turn her from a loser to a winner (Willem, 1998). The growing of Pepa could be related to the Hitchcock. In Hitchcock’s film there are male roles who are being psycho, here Almodóvar reversely use it to express that women could also liberate themselves from neurotic men (Acevedo-Muñoz, 2006).

Pepa represents the people who are searching in the background of a chaos world and get rid of the negative side of the last. Ivan could be a metaphor of the history that haunted people. Eventually, Pepa leave Ivan decisively and broke the repressive chain with Ivan. Ivan represents the dictatorial political relationship of under General Francisco Franco’s regime in 1975. Pepa’s leaving is the metaphor that the Spanish society have escape from dictatorial repression (Hodge, 2010). At the end of the film, Pepa and Merisa are talking on the peaceful terrace, when Merisa says that she has had a good dream. This reveals the optimism of Almodóvar. Although Spain has gone through cultural transition or other chaos just like Pepa, it will reborn with other new culture and more democratic social order.

Women and power relationship

In the film, Pepa searches for every chance to hear Ivan’s voice. However, Ivan could leave his voice and leave without responsibility. Here it could be understanded as that men have the right to let women waiting and do not care the feeling of women. Women and men could not talk to each other with respect and equality. The patriarchy in the legacy of dictatorship still exists.

Additionally, the film also expresses the attitude towards love. It is love that made these women on the nervous breakdown. However, it is this patriarchal society makes love a shackle on women. Women are thought to be crazy or vulnerable in front of love. Once without love, they will go insane but men could walk away in peace. Almodóvar expression this issue with melodrama and cast the question that how to maintain sex equality to the viewers.

The relationship between human and technology

Pepa utilized the telephone and voice mails to communicate with Ivan. However, this communication is invalid and Pepa does not have the chance to tell Ivan that she is pregnant. Ironically, the technology impedes the interaction instead of making communication more convenient. Hodge (2010) pointed that Pepa interact with Ivan’s voice mail and blame the machine, making her a slave to the machine. The obsession with machine could not figure out Pepa’s issue and make her entangled with frustration.

Pepa’s love-hate relationship with telephone

At 1980s that this film describes, the new technologies like voice mails or other machinery; There were movement among writers advocate instead of providing convenience the machines could bring potential disasters. The writers were in worries that the machines could reverse their power relation with human, becoming autonomous individuals and make people under repression (Hodge, 2010). The destroying of telephone in the movie could be an allusion that people should break the restriction of machines. More reflection of how could people appropriately use machine to gain convenience is also asked by Almodóvar.

Women on the Verge of Nervous breakdown utilized intertextuality and melodrama to capture different women images. With the hybrid of genres, Almodóvar nurtured his own style and reflect on the Spanish society at 1980s to evoke social contemplation.

Reference list:

Acevedo-Muñoz, R. E. (2006). Melo-Thriller: Hitchcock, Genre, and Nationalism in Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. In D. Boyd and R. B. Palmer (Ed.), After Hitchcock: Influence, imitation, and intertextuality (pp173-194).//learningmall.xjtlu.edu.cn/pluginfile.php/77440/mod_resource/content/1/Required%20reading%20week%2013.pdf

Hodge, P. J. (2010). The Role of Technology in Creative Productions by José Moreno Arenas and Pedro Almodóvar: Keep the Change, Doll and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. International Journal of the Humanities, 7(12), 137–146. //doi.org/10.18848/1447-9508/CGP/v07i12/42786

Willem, L. M. (1998). Almodóvar on the Verge of Cocteau’s “La Voix humaine.” Literature/Film Quarterly, 26(2), 142–147.

Author: Coconuttree666, a Chinese student who wants to be a serendipper in film studies and capture a kaleidoscope of colors in each frame

崩溃边缘的女人 (1988)

7.8

1988 / 西班牙 / 剧情 喜剧 / 佩德罗·阿莫多瓦 / 卡门·毛拉 安东尼奥·班德拉斯

The 1988 movie Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown movie, directed by Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, is described in the academia as highly stylized with the “colorful characters, vertiginous plotlines and rich intergeneric allusions” (Acevedo-Muñoz, 2006, p. 173). Just as West (2013) stated, Almodóvar is among those filmmakers who insert personal experiences as motives and features within their films. Although tons of critics have discussed the film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, I intend to specifically underline two idiosyncratic attributes of it in this film blog, namely the color and the references to Hitchcock’s work, within the biographical context of Pedro Almodóvar.

To start with, as the artistic director Antxón Gómez observes, “Pedro works with a very definite range of colors. He has trouble working with white, for example. He always says, ‘I don’t understand black and white.’” According to Oliva (2009), the recognizable use of color constitutes a dominant trademark in Almodóvar’s movies, frequently acting in concert with a neo-baroque aesthetic style that is prominent in Hispanic culture. From my point of view, the most astonishing aesthetical achievement in this film should boil down to the various outfit of the leading actress, Pepa Marcos cast by Carmen Maura (see the screenshots below).

In terms of semiology, the color can function as a signifier, which will denote deeper significance namely the signified, the process of which helps us to deconstruct the film as an aggregation of signs. In the first several scenes featuring Pepa, she is wearing a gray suit, which signifies professional and formal; yet after she feels extremely disappointed at her relationship with Iván, the frequent show-up of the color red could manifest that Pepa is the woman “on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, except for once she chooses to wear a blue suit pairing with a white shirt with black polka dots when she needs to be the adult for solving Candela (Maria Barranco)’s problems when seeing the feminist lawyer, where blue delivers a sense of calmness and intellect here (it can be somehow interestingly confusing with the same color constructing different meaning-making —— Candela, the character who represents irrationality and obtrusion, also wears a blue outfit when she shows up in the film for the first time). Furthermore, it is demonstrated by Oliva (2009) that the distinctive understandings of colors of Almodóvar might be triggered by his mother, Francisca Caballero, who made many cameos in his films before her death in 1999; as “bookish” as he could be, Almodóvar shows a sense of sensitivity through repeatedly claiming that his unlimited passion of narrative in the form of colorful visual compositions comes from his mother ——

As he said in a speech: “I like to think that my passion for color is not merely a function of the baroque style of my characters, but that it is also my mother’s answer to so many years of mourning, in which black was the dominant color. I was her extravagant reaction to the stultifying and excessive tradition of La Mancha (where Almodóvar grows up —— from the author)”.

…

“My mother was the territory where everything happened. I learned boldness from her, and something more: the need for certain doses of fiction so that reality can be better digested, better narrated, better lived… It was not a question of complacently accepting things, but of perfecting reality by adding a little bit of fiction.”

According to Zurian (2013) that when Almodóvar was eight, his family moved to Orellana la Vieja, a village with few traces of modernity, where he received the primary education under the religious supervision; at 17 he came to Madrid but never enrolled in the Official Film School since it ceased giving classes and gradually closed, then Almodóvar became an assistant in Telefónica, the national telephone company. Albeit lack systematic cinematic studies, he seems to be capable of expressing himself without any established rules; in the universe of narrative and film, his family, especially his mother seemingly leads him to a bigger illusionary world full of vivid colors that are conveying complicated connotations.

Moreover, it seems to have become a consensus in the sphere of film critics that Hitchcock should count as the primary textbook of Almodóvar, aesthetically and industrially; you can still tell new traces of the presence of Hitchcock in the form of appropriation in Almodóvar’s movies after accomplishing global success (Acevedo-Muñoz, 2007; Kercher, 2013).

Brill (1988) contended that many characters in Hitchcock’s films are victims of the inevitable and fatal traps of their past; conversely, Acevedo-Muñoz (2007) specifically argues that Almodóvar’s approaches are based partly on the unstable genre as a metaphor for national identity through direct quotations of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, but as a therapy to damage the social diseases from cultural and religious repression in Franco’s Spain.

For instance, at the end of Women on the verge, Pepa ultimately reach some emotional firmness when facing Lucía, the crazy mother, who also actively asks to be taken back to the mental hospital after the failed attempt to kill her ex-husband, which is allegorical of the nation’s process of recovery; therefore, Almodóvar determined to establish stability and positivity out of the melodrama’s natural chaos by making the women exactly be “on the verge” of insaneness, just as the title reads. To sum up, he is trying to pass the positive message that the national trauma could be cured ultimately, or at least offset by presenting that the negativity can be, “paradoxically, a redeeming force”, as Almodóvar himself mentioned in an interview: “I don’t want to let even the memory of Francoism exist in my films”.

(Word count: 942)

References

Acevedo-Muñoz, E. R. (2007). Melo-Thriller: Hitchcock, Genre, and Nationalism in Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. In D. Boyd & R. Barton (Eds.), After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (pp. 173-194). Texas: University of Texas Press.

Allinson, M. (2001). A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar. London: I.B.Tauris.

Brill, L. (1988). The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kercher, D. (2013). Almodóvar and Hitchcock: A Sorcerer’s Apprenticeship. In M. D’Lugo & K. M. Vernon (Eds.), A companion to Pedro Almodóvar (pp. 59-88). Chichester: Blackwell Publishing.

Oliva, I. (2009). Inside Almodóvar. In B. Epps & D. Kakoudaki (Eds.), All about Almodóvar: a passion for cinema (pp. 389-445). London: University of Minnesota Press.

Townson, N. (1988). The Spanish Labyrinth. New Statesman & Society, 1, 40.

West, D. (2013). A companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Choice, 51(4), 644.

Zurian, F. A. (2013). Creative beginnings in Almodóvar’s work. In M. D’Lugo & K. M. Vernon (Eds.), A companion to Pedro Almodóvar (pp. 39-59). Chichester: Blackwell Publishing.

美琪，西班牙大师展，8分。

1，艳丽海报风的片头独具一格，抓人眼球，贯穿全片的对色彩的运用极具奢华之能事，从服装到美术上内景的搭建到夏布里埃的《西班牙》，热情如火。

2，将《荒漠怪客》的台词原封不动地演绎，也算是对这部炫丽彩色老电影的致敬（颜色对于阿尔莫多瓦几乎是圣经了）

3，我最称赞的是此作近乎戏剧结构的剧本，天衣无缝的转场，细腻冲突的人物性格和事件，将所有角色（即便有些神经质也是影片所需）刻画得丝丝入扣，这样原创的故事值得所有青年导演学习。对于电影制作过程（配音，模型等），在电影开场阶段也做了不少展示。

4，音乐（从古典的移植到流行的演唱），也颇让人印象深刻。

5，喜剧让人捧腹，但当眼泪流下，你会理解生活原貌的悲喜同体。我最喜欢的一幕来自：佩帕为扔情人的皮箱，两次从艾文的电话亭经过，缘分留给他们的只剩渐行渐远的背影，和无法挽留的平行，他们本意为了相爱而结合（女人的痴情，和男人一夜风流后的无情），但这样的错过意味着上帝不再给你和解的权利。如果这是生活与爱情残酷的真相，观看这一幕的我们还真的可以一笑而过让往事随风吗？

6，奥妙洗衣粉，最好的广告原来是阿尔莫多瓦拍的。