This is a touchingly comic melodrama about Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), a hard-working woman with a teenaged daughter, a good-for-nothing husband, and an endearingly wide-eyed older sister. The death of an ailing aunt, an irruption of violence into a not-so-happy home, and the sister’s initially disturbing encounter with their dead mother draw them into a tale of unlikely secrets and the power of maternal love.
Although the plot is faintly far-fetched, it is self-consciously so, and somehow this refusal to take itself too seriously enables us to accept the more implausible elements and just go along for the ride.
And what a ride it is. The gorgeous (if occasionally comically overwrought) sound-track, the rich colours, the attentive shots of food, and the beautiful cinematography make it an intensely sensual experience. But the real joy of the film is the characters and the way they are brought to life by a fabulously talented cast.
This is a film about women: women as mothers, sisters, friends, daughters, neighbours, the things that draw women together, drive them apart, and bring them back to one another. Men are entirely peripheral – necessary to keep the plot moving and for some passing flirtatious tension, but dispatched (one way or another) as quickly as possible.
Almodovar handles difficult issues lightly but without making light of them; the film is not hard-hitting or confrontational because it subordinates the exposition of its themes to the development of the characters’ relationships. This is perhaps its greatest strength – it depicts women facing events (murder, incest, betrayal, death) that we would usually consider catastrophic. Yet they are neither tragic victims of their circumstances nor cartoonish superwomen who take on the world without so much as smudging their mascara; together, these women cope magnificently with it all.
Highly recommended.
Although the plot is faintly far-fetched, it is self-consciously so, and somehow this refusal to take itself too seriously enables us to accept the more implausible elements and just go along for the ride.
And what a ride it is. The gorgeous (if occasionally comically overwrought) sound-track, the rich colours, the attentive shots of food, and the beautiful cinematography make it an intensely sensual experience. But the real joy of the film is the characters and the way they are brought to life by a fabulously talented cast.
This is a film about women: women as mothers, sisters, friends, daughters, neighbours, the things that draw women together, drive them apart, and bring them back to one another. Men are entirely peripheral – necessary to keep the plot moving and for some passing flirtatious tension, but dispatched (one way or another) as quickly as possible.
Almodovar handles difficult issues lightly but without making light of them; the film is not hard-hitting or confrontational because it subordinates the exposition of its themes to the development of the characters’ relationships. This is perhaps its greatest strength – it depicts women facing events (murder, incest, betrayal, death) that we would usually consider catastrophic. Yet they are neither tragic victims of their circumstances nor cartoonish superwomen who take on the world without so much as smudging their mascara; together, these women cope magnificently with it all.
Highly recommended.