Spain: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spanish: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) is a 1988 Spanish film written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, starring Carmen Maura, Fernando Guillen and Antonio Banderas. 

Pepa and Ivan are voice actors. Thanks to his career, Ivan has had access to the most beautiful women in film and television and he has had unstable relationships with many of them. The problem is that non of them have been the only ones. After a long relationship with Pepa, he breaks up with her by leaving a message on the answering machine asking her to prepare a bag with his things.Pepa becomes depressed about the situation and decides to rent the apartment were she lives because she can not deal with all the memories. 

The story becomes funny and unexpected when Ivan fails to get a hold of Pepa and she is not able not get in touch with him either. They keep missing each others phone calls and the whole plot of the story transforms into a fight between the characters and the phone.

Pepa becomes obsessed with finding Ivan and telling him that she has just learned that she is pregnant, while at the same time her house starts filling up with different people that somehow end up connected with each other. Through them, Pepa learns a lot about loneliness and madness and also learns some secrets about Ivan that she completely ignored.

One of the main themes of the movie is without a doubt “the return to self” that Pepa and some of the other actors in the story are invited to experience. It is interesting to observe how all the different women that Ivan has been involved to have a common denominator: they have been lied to. Ivan portrays the typical unstable man that believes he is aloud to do anything he wants just because he is a famous actor and has “the looks”. He is clearly a guy that doesn’t care about betraying or hurting this women and uses his power over them to have them under his spell.

I believe the importance of the movie, is that it lets us observe the different ways these women handle the situation. One of the women becomes completely insane, the other one stays with him still under his spell, and Pepa is actually able to realize the type of guy Ivan was and decided to break free of that situation.

All the other characters in the movie are also important pieces to the story in one way or another. Their particular situations reinforce the learning experience that Pepa needs to go through in order to be able to become the woman we see at the end of the movie. A woman that has understand that her life goes beyond a man that cheated and lied to her with any contemplation and that she has a more important and transcending purpose in her own life and the life of  others.

Pedro Almodovar makes himself heard and felt through this work. BRAVO!