Who could imagine a better quasi-opening for a Pedro Almodovar film than a delirious scene from a Spanish dub of the most sacred of sacred cinephile films, Johnny Guitar? (Nicholas Ray being, with the exception perhaps of the most obvious Douglas Sirk, the biggest costume in Almodovar's great carnivalesque closet of transnational cinema). Better yet, the sequence actually adds to Ray's film rather than just name-checking. It extends Ray's decidedly neurotic melodrama to new cultures and across eons while exposing his diabolical genre complications and tragicomic compulsions even more openly than Ray, a closeted Hollywood closet rebel, ever could. TO DO. Almodovar's mission is already clear: in the realm of melodrama, a purgative for your cynical ways. Naturally, Almodovar's sometimes bewitching concoction is more than just melodrama, filing a feverish, frenetic dose of zany comedy and always hard-hitting for a witch's brew that is equal parts ego-tactical hubris and humble energy low class motor vehicle. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get the original essay Vibrant but with undercurrents of social abjection sublimated but not eliminated under social decorum, Women on the Verge a nervous breakdown is probably best described as a farcical treatment of melodrama of the Unknown Woman genre (insofar as one can describe Almodovar's whirlwind of inspirations and feelings without befriending a dictionary of German compound words). But Almodovar's love for the film never gets lost in the kind of morass of references intended only for the cultural elite to elicit laughs in a display of sympathy for respectable and canonical culture, à la Woody Allen. Almodovar's films are not locked in the mire of the past, a shield against the passage of time. Instead, they use the past, revitalize it, weaponize it, rather than fear it or bow to it. Conscious of the desire to self-regulate and shape ourselves into the most willing and shy version of our being, a film like Women exists in a rebellious, outward emotional state of physical movement (exaggerated gesticulations and comical stumbles) and garish, even garish colors. which externalizes emotion. Almodovar provides the outer self that we both turn into canvases for personal expression and use as a weapon to limit ourselves to packaged, socially acceptable facsimiles of our nagging internal desires. That an Almodovar film is magnificent is not something I need to climb the mountains to scream at the audience, but he remains more than ever content to transform blasphemy into transcendence through supersaturated colors that bring out inner emotions. Always wanting to have it both ways, he swims upstream toward greater self-realization while going against the tide to fly straight downstream in...well, in Almodovar's case, it's probably in the pants of someone in a gesture of commiseration with an appreciation of each other's sexual inconsistencies. and inclinations that are both life-affirming and difficult to admit. And all this without the interplay of melodrama, wry comedy, camp and kitsch that swirl around our preconceptions not only of how the narrative will unfold but, more importantly, of how we are supposed to feel about the scenes. When main character Pepa (Carmen Maura) mixes enough sleeping pills into her drink to kill herself, increasingly crazy circumstances pile up as ifforce-feeding her a classic Hollywood plotline to distract her from her depression, with the film serving as an almost literal source material. of howling life. Playing as the angel and the devil on your shoulder, one scene turns a suicide attempt into a frenetic physical routine worthy of a Howard Hawks movie. (The film's sharpest laugh, however, is a laundry detergent commercial featuring the protagonist in which she fools detectives searching for her notorious serial killer son. She washed the blood stains clean before the detectives can finger him). Almovodar's film, while a wonderfully toxic and sweet black comedy, also demands more. For this humanist of all humanist directors, these disturbing filigrees of emotional confusion are anything but cynical nose shots or situational molotovs. Instead, failing to understand the colliding electrons in our feelings or emotions is not simply a reflection of a nervous breakdown, a social problem that needs to be addressed, or the sign of a person who expresses himself inappropriately. Instead, the liminal state between emotions and reactions that evoke an internal feeling that is impossible to map is the essence of life itself. The thrill of confusion is the beat of life, of the intangible impulse to understand oneself and the eventual and liberating release of the realization that emotion and physical sensation, rather than reason or what we define as logical (but are actually cultural constructs), is the blood of humanity. The fact that the streams of comedy and drama are mixed here to the point that no scene has a stable reaction disrupts socially accepted norms of feeling, suggesting that true humanity does not know how to react and simply collects all instinctual reactions that you can. Laughing at the absurdity of not being able to commit suicide is the very source of life, the very feeling of emotional chaos, confusion, exultation, terror and the beautiful, unexpected reactions we give when we are not controlled by societal expectations, all of which is what makes a life worth living in the first place for Almodovar. It perhaps goes without saying that the director had not fully matured at this point, but Almodovar the Leprechaun is no less enjoyable than Almodovar the Scholar. If Women on the Verge is remembered, it is only circumstantially when placed as a prelude to the more mature Almodovar, ten years later, one of the rare bursts of artistic growth that did not iron out the eccentricities of a director nor forced him to neutralize his provocative itching. He became more gnarled and manic-depressive, actually increasing the heterogeneity of mood registers in his films, riding disparate feelings in ways that inflamed each other as anxious, explosive opposites rather than neutralizing the the effect of each and drowning the film in a swamp of organized, mass-appealing indecision, serious but not too serious. Almodovar has, to this day, never designed to produce the kind of milquetoast offerings that the Academy likes to trumpet. You know, the ones that are carefully curated to be solemn and thematic enough to make you feel smart and bourgeois because you like them, but not really daring or difficult enough to make you really exercise your emotional and philosophical registers. Because maturity has sharpened its teeth, Women on the Verge exudes a slight whiff of timidity compared to the clawed, manic likes of (earlier works) Matador and Law of Desire and (later works) Talk to Her and All About My Mother. However, with his..