Who could think of a better opening for a Pedro Almodovar film than a delirious scene from a Spanish dub of the holiest of cinephile films, Johnny Guitar? (Nicholas Ray is, with the possible exception of the more obvious Douglas Sirk, the biggest suit in Almodovar's vast carnivalesque closet of transnational cinema). Even better, the sequence actually adds value to Ray's film rather than just name-checking. It extends Ray's emphatically neurotic melodrama to new cultures and across eons, highlighting his diabolical gender complications and tragicomic compulsions even more openly than Ray, a rebel trapped in the Hollywood closet, was capable of doing. Almodovar's mission is already clear: in the arena of melodrama, a purgative for your cynical ways. Of course, Almodovar's sometimes charming blend is more than just melodrama, sketching out a feverish, frenetic dose of scrappy yet lively comedy for a witch's brew that's equal parts ego-tactical arrogance and humble, low-class motor energy. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Vibrant but with undercurrents of social abjection sublimated but not eliminated beneath social decorum, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is probably best described as a farcical treatment of melodrama of the stranger genre (to the extent that one can describe Almodovar's whirlwind of inspirations and feelings without making friends with a dictionary of German compound words). But Almodovar's love for the film never gets lost in that quagmire of references intended exclusively for the cultural elite to elicit laughter in a demonstration of sympathy for respectable and canonical culture, à la Woody Allen. Almodovar's films are not trapped in the quagmire of the past, bulwarks against the passage of time. Instead, they use the past, revitalize it, weaponize it, instead of standing in awe of it or bowing before it. Aware of the drive to self-police and mold the self into the most acquiescent, timid version of our being, a film like Women exists in a rebellious, outward emotional state of physical movement (exaggerated gesturing and comical stumbles) and dark, even gaudy colors. who externalize emotions. Almodovar provides the external self that we both transform into canvases of self-expression and weaponize to limit ourselves to packaged, socially acceptable facsimiles of our throbbing internal desires. That an Almodovar film is gorgeous isn't something I need to climb mountains to scream at the audience about, but he remains as content as ever to transform blasphemy into transcendence through super-saturated colors that stimulate inner emotions. Always wanting to have it both ways, he swims upstream towards greater self-realization while swimming against the current to fly downstream straight towards... well, in Almodovar's case, he's probably in someone's underwear in a gesture of commiseration with an appreciation of the sexual inconsistencies of all and inclinations that are life-affirming and difficult to admit. And that's all without the interplay of melodrama, tongue-in-cheek comedy, camp and kitsch swirling around our preconceptions of not only how the narrative will flow but, more importantly, how we should feel about the scenes. When protagonist Pepa (Carmen Maura) mixes enough sleeping pills in her drink to kill herself, increasingly demented farcical circumstances pile up as if to force-feed her a classic Hollywood plot to distract her from her depression, the film serving as an almost literal source. of life that screams. Playing the angel and thedevil on your shoulders, one scene recasts a suicide attempt into an approximation of a frantic physical routine straight out of a Howard Hawks movie. (The film's sharpest laugh, though, is a laundry detergent commercial starring the protagonist, in which she deceives detectives hunting for the son of her famous serial killer. She washed the blood stains are removed before investigators can touch him). Almovodar's film, while a wonderfully sweet and toxic black comedy, demands more. For this humanist of all humanist directors, these tormenting watermarks of emotional confusion are anything but cynical nose pokes or situational Molotov cocktails. Instead, not understanding the colliding electrons of one's feelings or emotions is not simply the reflection of a nervous breakdown, of a social problem to be solved, or of an inexpressive person. Instead, the liminal state between emotions and reactions that connote non-mappable internal feelings is the essence of life itself. The pulse of confusion is the pulse of life, of the intangible impetus to understand oneself and the eventual, liberating release of the knowledge that emotion and physical sensation, rather than reason or what we call logic (but are actually cultural constructs), is the blood of humanity. The fact that here the streams of comedy and drama are mixed together to the point where no scene has a stable reaction disturbs socially accepted standards for feelings, suggesting that true humanity finds itself not knowing how to react and simply organizing any reaction instinctive as possible. Laughing at the absurdity of not being able to commit suicide is the very source of life, the very sense of emotional chaos, confusion, elation, terror and the beautiful unexpected reactions we give when we are not controlled by society's expectations, which is all that makes life worthy of being experienced first and foremost for Almodovar. Perhaps it is obvious that at this point the director had not yet reached full maturity, but Almodovar the devil was no less pleasant than Almodovar the wise man. If Women on the Edge is held back, it is only so circumstantially when it is placed as a prelude to the more mature Almodovar of ten years later, one of the few spurts of artistic growth that has not blunted a director's eccentricities or constraint. him to neutralize his provocative itch. He became more tonally intricate and manic-depressive, effectively increasing the heterogeneity of mood registers in his films, layering disparate feelings in ways that ignited each other as anxious, explosive opposites rather than neutralizing the effect mutual and drowning the film in a swamp of curated indecision and mass appeal, serious but not too serious. Almodovar, to this day, has never planned to produce the kind of milquetoast offerings that the Academy loves to flaunt. You know, the ones that are carefully curated to be solemn and thematic enough to make you feel smart and bourgeois for liking them, but not bold or difficult enough to make you really exercise your emotional and philosophical registers. Because maturity has indeed sharpened its teeth, Women on the Verge carries a slight whiff of timidity compared to the manic, clawing works of (earlier works) Matador and Law of Desire and (later works) Talk to Her and All About my Mother. Yet, with his Hawksian gift for bizarre chaos as problem and solution (or balance and counterweight) and the subversive spirit of a born formalist like Max Ophuls, the sexually curious patron saint of modern Spanish cinema is arguably the true modern heir. to the throne of the old melodramas and the most feminine comedies of classic Hollywood. Women remains his film..