Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The film that made Pedro Almodóvar an international name, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) earned an Academy Award nomination and a Venice screenwriting prize, and announced one of world cinema's great chroniclers of female passion. After a string of provocations, it found the Spanish director channelling his anarchic energy into a dazzling screwball comedy.

Carmen Maura plays Pepa, the actress whose romantic abandonment sets off a single delirious day of overlapping crises, with a young Antonio Banderas among the bystanders. Almodóvar shoots a candy-coloured, pop-art Madrid — bold reds, designer interiors, a celebrated spiked gazpacho — and orchestrates the farce with the precision of classic Hollywood comedy while keeping its emotional core of wounded, resilient women.

Emerging from the cultural explosion of post-Franco Spain known as la Movida, the film became a worldwide arthouse sensation and the foundation of Almodóvar's later acclaim with All About My Mother and beyond. Its melodrama-meets-comedy sensibility and its devotion to female experience have influenced film-makers around the globe. Stylish, hilarious and bighearted, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is the joyous breakthrough of a major artist hitting his stride. It opened the door to Almodóvar's later international triumphs, and its blend of melodrama and comedy has shaped film-makers far beyond Spain. Emerging from the cultural explosion of post-Franco Spain, it became a worldwide sensation and the foundation of Almodóvar's later acclaim.