Pedro Almodòvar
Donne Sull'Orlo Di Una Crisi Di Nervi

THE REVIEW

I watched this movie yesterday, convinced it was Almodóvar's masterpiece. Considering that I have never watched any of his films, I was curious to see what it was about.

Frankly, though, I don't understand where the brilliance of this director and his collaborators lies. Throughout the whole film, an absurd plot unfolds; the women are not on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but rather they are neurotic to the core, with plenty of insults towards their own "gentle" sex; the men, apart from the ambiguous figure of Ivan, are good and friendly (see the taxi driver). The dialogues, in my opinion, are as kitsch and grotesque as one can imagine in the cinematography of the last 50 years. 88 minutes of film and I was already eagerly awaiting its end after just 18 minutes.

The characters are poorly characterized, acidic and childish, it seems they are just playing tricks on each other; the sequences follow one another without a logical thread for most of the film; finally, some aspects of the film don't make sense: if someone makes love with a terrorist, is she an accomplice??? The only thing that is clear is that they used her, nothing more.

"Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" seems like a poorly executed theater piece transposed into an absurd cinematic version. A film that wants to be everything and is nothing. A mediocre comedy.
It's a movie that doesn't make you laugh (or only forcibly), doesn't make you think, isn't beautiful or aesthetically powerful (the costumes, the clothing of the female characters, in my opinion, are horrid, but those are my personal tastes, to be clear), it doesn't captivate, and it's not even a pastime movie.

I don't know, maybe it's my fault for watching it in the original language (Spanish) with Italian subtitles, or perhaps there was something I was supposed to notice that I missed.