Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios) (1988)

 

Kvinder på randen af et nervøst sammenbrud

Comedies about people going crazy rarely work for me and that special type of Mediterranean comedy with a lot of shouting and arm-waving tend to just annoy me. “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) is both, but to my own surprise it totally works for me.

Pepa (Carmen Maura) is a voice actress of some renown who has been left by her lover, the middle-aged Ivan (Fernando Guillén). She is depressed about it and considers various ways of ending her life, including burning down her apartment. Ivan has broken up on an answering machine and left a message to pack his things in a suitcase. Upset, Pepa tries desperately to contact him, and she spikes a can of gazpacho with sleeping pills to pin him down.

 A friend Candelia (María Barranco) tries desperately to contact Pepa and leaves about a million messages on her answering machine, eventually showing up in person. Candelia has been sleeping with men who then turned out to be Shiite terrorists. Now she is afraid she will be named an accomplice. Pepa though has no surplus to deal with Candelia, until Candelia attempts to jump off the roof-top terrace.

Meanwhile, Ivan’s wife, Lucia (Julieta Serrano), a deranged woman recently released from a mental hospital, is looking for Ivan, convinced he is with Pepa. Her son, Carlos (Antonio Banderas) and his girlfriend, Marissa (Rossy de Palma), coincidentally shows up in the apartment, looking to rent it and Marissa drinks from the spiked gazpacho, falling into deep sleep. Trying to help Candelia, Pepa contacts a lawyer, Paulina (Kiti Mánver), who helped Carlos mother, only to learn, in turn, that Paulina is Ivan’s new girlfriend and they are on the way to Stockholm on the plane targeted by the terrorists.

What a mess.

Writing this synopsis, this all sounds like a soap-opera and I guess it is, except it is all so completely out there absurd, almost like the old sit-com “Soap”. These are all a lot of women going crazy. They are barely keeping it together, worked up as they are by what they perceive as extreme emotional stress. Lucia chasing her philandering husband, Pepa on first losing her lover, then trying to get rid of him, Candelia fearing the police and Paulina, running away with Ivan. Even Marissa, who sleeps through much of the movie is stressing out, not least because she find Carlos asleep with Candelia.

I would normally, as mentioned in the opening, not find this type of comedy funny, but here it is. All these crazy women are navigating in a seemingly normal world that keeps throwing curveballs at them and it is the absurdity of it that generates the comedy. In their own right the characters are actually tragic, it is misfortune that sends them out there on the verge of disaster, but in combination, the craziness becomes hilarious. These women are willing to go pretty far.

The men of the movie are largely uninteresting. Ivan is like the McGuffin, the object this is all about, but an empty cipher. Carlos is busy going the same way and the policemen, taxi driver etc. are merely elements in these women’s crazy situation.

“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’” was nominated in the Best Foreign Language category at the Academy awards and made Pedro Aldomodovar internationally known. I am not a big fan of him as a person, but his career has since produced exceptional movies, and this one is one of the best.

I did not expect to like “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, but I found myself loving it and it made me laugh. That is a success for a comedy.