Words Eloise Hallo
Spain in the 80’s was undergoing a social and political remodel. Captured in the vivacity of Almodóvar’s bold and absurd plot to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), he, as other artists and directors of the era, became a mouthpiece to this change. The Francoist regime, which had held the country in conservative throws for the 30 odd years preceding 1975, was finally faltering, and as such, creatives took to their long-awaited – and notably long suppressed – stage. Unfortunately for the unsuspecting traditionalists, decades of media censorship would, once defeated, bear sudden and well-prepared critiques on the sentimentalities that had, until then, left Spain in the 20th century. And, with its endorsement of female vulnerability and (spoiler!), empowerment, the film in question is a crowning example. There is, however, far more at work in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown than meets the uninquisitive eye. Almodóvar cleverly nods to Spain’s retired antiquation by structuring the narrative as a modern take on the old practice of comi-tragedy. This genius is unwaveringly supported by the film’s costuming, which categorises its characters as belonging to either the ‘new’ or ‘old-world’. Borrowing from Shakespeare, much of who’s work was itself a product of social and political reform, Almodóvar boasts the wherewithal to satirise the ‘old-world’ order Spain was leaving and invite that wind of change gusting in with its ‘new-world’ values, and he does it, in part, through fashion.
Feeling it apt to move through the chronology of Almodóvar’s choosing, let us begin on his situating of the ‘old-world’, which arises most evidently through two characters, Lucia, portrayed by Julieta Serrano, as crazed older wife, and Ivan, her philandering husband (aka Fernando Guillén), who can be imagined as largely at fault for her erraticism. Already, Almodóvar affords us the skeleton of any good theatre. Ivan, who I consider thematically uninteresting, is seen three times throughout the film. In each, he wears a perfectly mundane grey suit. Indeed, being that this is a film about women, it is through the fashioning of Lucia that the ‘old-world’ is most loudly amplified. Beyond the literality of her older age, Lucia’s aesthetic represents a nostalgia for the ’60s.
Often, she wears tweed two-pieces genesised and popularised, famously, by Chanel in what we’d imagine Lucia’s younger years, and not once is she screened without the illusory double-lid look of model Twiggy, who offers us a convenient timestamp, labelled ‘The Face of 1966’. Pastels, shift dresses, and even the particularly unmistakable beehive wig, aware us readily of the era Lucia is stuck in. What is less obvious, however, is why, which can be unpacked with some good old ardour when considering her main narrative ploy: avenging the nucleated family she feels she has lost.
In the scope of the film’s hyper-saturated 80’s feel, from bubble telephone boxes to cosmopolitan relationships, Lucia – both in nature and in styling – represents the last, and only, ballast in traditionalist values. And it is this conflict, enduringly upkept by notions of nature – and how that ‘nature’ might be logically styled – that preoccupies the film entirely. In so doing, Lucia’s look of longing remarks on an era of modesty, rigidity even, and confirms her positioning as an old-world representative upon Almodóvar’s imagined tragic stage.
Unfortunately for Serrano’s character, Shakespeare’s spokespeople for the ‘old-world’ are doomed in their pursuit of maintaining such values; true of Lucia in that she does not succeed in shooting, and presumably killing, Ivan, at the airport where he attempts to escape with yet another mistress, being subsequently jailed somewhere off-screen.
More foreboding still, new-world characters do not, by opposition, meet such typically hopeful fate. Their wont to ‘break the wheel’ of societal normalcy, which, more often than not, represents constricting beliefs around political rule, marriage, and gender norms, remains, to the tragic sphere, characteristically unsuccessful; my reader does not need me to tell them there are no winners in tragedy. Yet, Almodóvar’s clever comic spin trivialises this structure, in turn, freeing his new-world representatives from the seriousness of a tragic setting, and fate, in what is an analogy for the new Spain he both hopes for and celebrates.
The warring old and new orders are – and most artistically, I might add – chronicled in the mise-en-scene of conversations shared between Lucia and Pepa, played by Carmen Maura, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, represents the latter and with whom Ivan was having an affair. The styling in both scenes, right down to the directorial ploy to forefront telephones – a returning motif of modernity throughout the film – reminds us both Lucia and her belief system are outdated.
However, knowing Almodóvar’s winners and losers does little to account for the intricacies they represent. Pepa is our main character and, as I have already mentioned, the main representative of new-world values championed in the film. In many ways, she acts as an emblem to the multitudinous woman, with, as the narrative’s title foreshadows, a range of emotions, and, it is through her fashion that she is granted this freedom to emote.
Her styling is artifice of a global shift in the 80’s: women moving from the domestic sphere into the workforce. Pepa, as the modern woman she represents, is adorned in perfectly padded power suits, gilded jewellery, and, underneath it all (as we see in one scene), expensive lingerie. Requiring little abstraction, all three evidence the self-sufficiency, financial independence, and sexual freedoms women had begun comfortably situating themselves in. Adjoining what we are to make of her adornments is Almodóvar’s use of colour. Pepa is characterised by the colour red, which follows her throughout the film and is symbolic of her impassioned nature. Like the ineffable ‘red-ness’ connoting her character, Pepa is changeable, sentimental, sensitive, and Almodóvar’s choice to grant her this complexity is distinctly feminist. Most glowingly, her fashion invites us into a narrative of female vulnerability and empowerment and challenges Spain’s traditionalist backdrop, which would sooner have women be quiet, domesticated, and materially ‘flat’.
Secondary character, Candela, has a place in the new-world also, as does taxi driver, Mambo. Candela’s mini-skirts and novelty earrings represent Spain’s flourishing youth culture and a sexual liberalism which was beginning its acquiescence into common society. Her diametric ‘blue-ness’, which I have taken to mark naivety, condones a different kind of modern woman, one not so self-assured as to own shoulder pads, but figuring their space in the world nonetheless, and just as suitably.
And Mambo, with his eccentric leopard interior and peroxide blonde hair, befits fresh freedoms surrounding how men in Spain’s new order were allowed to dress, think, and behave. Our director’s choice to figure the trio as primary colours is, I suspect, an affirmation of their collusion as new-world representatives.
Perhaps the most compelling Shakespearean takeaway from Women on The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is simply that ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’, and maybe it’s just a bit of fun to re-imagine Almodóvar’s modern take on Hollywood slapstick as an homage to classic tragedy. Regardless, like the 80s incarnate, the film is characterised by distinctive dress, and it is these very distinctions that form an under-narrative surrounding the new freedoms to Spain’s new order. One thing we can be certain of, in art, as in life alike, is how fashion continues to express and, indeed, form character entirely of its own. And, where Almodóvar and the 80’s are concerned, that character is quite a character indeed.
Sources
Still 1) ‘Lucia reads Pepa’s Letter’, [accessed] https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/196188127495330620/
Stills otherwise from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown dir by. Pedro Almodóvar (1988), StudioCanal, Amazon Prime, [accessed]
‘Mambo’s Taxi’
https://stevematt.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/mambo-cyclist/