Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 comedy of mislaid lovers and spiked gazpacho arrives from a Madrid where the telephone is a weapon and the answering machine a confessional. Pepa, a voice actress abandoned by her lover Iván, spends a single frantic day trying to deliver a message that will not wait. The film was greeted at the time as working in a distinctly feminist vein, and the assessment holds. Carmen Maura carries the whole apparatus on her shoulders, and the men in orbit around her are mostly furniture with speaking parts.

The picture's progressive credentials are real but modest, calibrated to 1988 rather than to any later decade. The ensemble is female and unruly, a small victory of casting that predates the current obsession with demographic accounting. There is a Shiite terrorist cell lurking in the background, treated as farce and never as sociology, which keeps the racial and geopolitical commentary at arm's length. The protagonist's ataque de nervios, a culture-bound collapse rendered as comedy, gestures toward mental distress without ever reaching for a clinical vocabulary. A suicide attempt is played for laughs, and the film declines to moralize about it.

The engine here is chaos, not sermon. Almodóvar wants us to laugh at the absurdity of desire, not to be instructed on how to feel about it. The result is a confection with a feminist spine, light on doctrine and heavy on color. It has aged into a pleasant artifact, one that reminds us how much social commentary a filmmaker can smuggle in when nobody is being lectured. The verdict is affectionate. The film earns its reputation without ever climbing onto a soapbox, which is a rarer achievement than it sounds.