Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

BFI Film Classics

by Peter William Evans

This text analyzes the director Pedro Almodovar's insights into gender, sexuality and subjectivity in his film "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown". It draws on a range of psychoanalytic and critical concepts, and sees the film as an account of the often tyrannical spell of sexual desire.

Genres: Film

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 1996

About the author

Peter William Evans is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies. He has published widely on Spanish, Hollywood, and British cinema, with a focus on Buñuel, Almodóvar, musicals, and Carol Reed. He curated major film seasons for the NFT and BFI.

Reviews

[Nick Jones]

For about 15 years from the mid-1990s, Pedro Almodovar made a remarkable series of films that placed him as one of the leading European film directors. One of the fascinating things about them was that they had excessively melodramatic plots populated by naturalistically motivated characters: it was as though Ibsen had written a day time TV soap opera. But I know less about Almodovar’s earlier, famously kitsch films: I have never seen some of the most famous (or infamous) ones or only once many years ago – the one I know best is the most famous: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Yet, although I think it is fun, I’ve liked it as much as its reputation demands. But I came across this short book/long essay in the BFI Modern Classics series and went looking for enlightenment. It does what the BFI essays tend to do: there is a certain amount of background, a certain amount of textual reading. The background, as might be expected, was most useful when Evans investigated things I knew little or nothing about: for anyone who likes Douglas Sirk and 1950s Hollywood melodrama, its influence on Almodovar is obvious and I didn’t find anything particularly thought provoking in Evans's consideration of the influence; but I know nothing about the traditions of Spanish film comedy and Evans’ discussion of their influence on Almodovar is useful – as are his general comments about Almodovar’s place in Spanish culture. My great doubt about Evans’ essay is when he responds to the film – there is something a little glib about it. The problem is that he uses a certain sort of discourse, one that encompasses gender studies and psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, that was (and maybe still is) very common in academic film studies: forty years ago it was new and provoked interesting new responses to cinema, but by the mid-1990s it was well established and it was easy for practitioners who knew their way around the tropes to fall into a slightly glib discourse that met the critical expectations with a gleeful obviousness. This is what I feel happens here. It’s not that I disagree with Evans’s methods or what he says about the film, it’s just that it all seems very obvious: if you know the methods you can almost guess what he is going to say next. And if one of the purposes of criticism is to make the reader think about the text in fresh ways, this doesn’t do that.

[Wayne Low]

Fairly trite but readable