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.

gavin6942 A woman's lover leaves her, and she tries to contact him to find out why he has left. She confronts his wife and son, who are as clueless as she. Meanwhile her girlfriend is afraid the police are looking for her because of her boyfriend's criminal activities.What I have to say about this film is really a side note. I could talk about the film as a whole, and how it strikes me as a sophisticated soap opera. But that is not what I found interesting.I found it interesting that the film kept saying "Shiite terrorist" rather than "Muslim terrorist". This makes me wonder if people in other countries are more knowledgeable with regard to different faiths. Most likely, yes. But it is my impression that few people in America know the difference between Shiite and Sunni, and even fewer knew before 2001.

Blake Peterson Hitchcock has Psycho, Godard has Breathless, Buñuel has Belle de Jour, and Almodóvar has Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. A knuckles-to-the-face romp that has a big bite and a big heart, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown sets its sights on Pepa (Carmen Maura), a fashionable but depressed voice-over actress. Her career has been mostly successful, but in just the past week, her life has turned into a housewife's dream of a soap opera. Her lover has left her, she's pregnant, she faints at the slightest source of drama, she nearly overdoses on sleeping pills, and her friend (María Barranco) is dating a terrorist. If that doesn't sound like Almodóvar, then you must not associate Steven Spielberg with E.T. and all-American families thrown into otherworldly situations.Almodóvar isn't in the mood to bump us around; he'd rather charm us, in the same way Doris Day vehicles did when soap commercials were still around. For Almodóvar, the '80s were a time to figure things out, drape his colorful images and themes onto unusual projects, and hope they'd stick. Usually, they'd be so outrageous that they'd be inevitably smacked in the face with the dreaded NC-17 rating. By Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, it seems as if he's bored with outright camp, in the same way John Waters was in the days of Cry-Baby.As one of cinema's most confident directors, Almodóvar restrains his inner wildness and lets the zippiness of the film speak for itself. In return, it becomes his calling card. Audiences don't want to be left in shock, after all; they want to have a good time. And I dare you to not be entertained by Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. There are only highly saturated colors, faux, pop-arty sets, six emotions, and women (save for Antonio Banderas and Fernando Cuervo). There are no subtleties to be found in the film, and it's all the better for it. It's a 1930s women picture on acid. It's such a madcap comedy that anything regarding realism would ruin its potent screwball scent. The conversations are so witty and so rapid-fire that they only exist in a blink-and-you'll miss it ideology. When the dialogue is serious, it has all the seriousness of a Lichtenstein painting. When the dialogue is funny, it would prefer to derive its laughs from the melodramatic turmoil of the film's leading characters.Almodóvar jumps all over the place, defining comedy, drama, romance, pulp, and action in a single swipe. In any other case, the film would be a lost cause in terms of identity, never knowing what it wants to be. Yet Almodóvar makes Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown singular. It's so broadly drawn in the first place that any case of camp seems to be begged for. Hell, if an elephant decided to join in on the complicated situation in Pepa's nutty apartment, it wouldn't come as a surprise. Yes, the film is a comedy; but it's so Almodóvar it deserves its own unique genre, off on some weird, cartoonish planet. Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com

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.