Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

I can understand what this whole movie is going for, the bare camera shots, the excessive colors and the excessive drama. It all seems like it could be quite fun, when looked from aback. Unfortunately the glue that would tie this all together is the wit, and there is obviously a good amount of wit, unfortunately its not particularly interesting in English subs, much of the conversations come off as trying too hard to be funny. This is just how I feel about it, and I think there is a good chance the issue is that i'm not a native language speaker. The worst I can say about a movie is that its boring, unfortunately this approaches that description, I am however leaving some leeway because I think it is my own fault for not speaking native Spanish.

A woman's lover leaves her, and she tries to contact him to find out why he has left. She confronts his wife and son, who are as clueless as she. Meanwhile her girlfriend is afraid the police are looking for her because of her boyfriend's criminal activities.What I have to say about this film is really a side note. I could talk about the film as a whole, and how it strikes me as a sophisticated soap opera. But that is not what I found interesting.I found it interesting that the film kept saying "Shiite terrorist" rather than "Muslim terrorist". This makes me wonder if people in other countries are more knowledgeable with regard to different faiths. Most likely, yes. But it is my impression that few people in America know the difference between Shiite and Sunni, and even fewer knew before 2001.

excerpt, full review at my location.Director Pedro Almodovar shot to international fame in 1988 when Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown was released. It was nominated for an Oscar and won numerous other awards, as well as smashing box office records in Spain. It is a stylish black comedy that oozes visual flair and a sharp sense of humour from start to finish. It is easy to see why this film was so successful and why Pedro Almodovar has become such a cult icon. Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, although slightly dated, has an incredible amount of charm, a great sense of visual style and a quirky wit that makes it a very enjoyable movie. If you are new to Almodovar, then this is the best film to introduce you to him. Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown is undeniably a grand landmark in Spanish film.

Every true artist trusts, to more or less extent, in his intuition. There are those whose magic lies almost entirely in the choices they make out of intuition. It's marvelous to be able to trust someone's intuition (even more when our own intuition works). Than we have those who start over a rational basis, and only after creating a safe net on which they can trust do they put something of their deep feelings over it. I think this second definition suits the vast majority of creative minds. For a long time i thought Almodóvar belonged to the first kind of director. After seeing this film i definitely place him in the second kind. For an uninformed viewer, such as i was when i got into the world of Almodóvar's films, he can look as if there was no specially recognizable structure underneath what you get. My recent viewings of some of his films convinced me otherwise, this one specially. This is a film in which (unlike his other films) the mechanics of the story has to do with how facts unfold. It's comedy alright, and it builds a world of linked coincidences and facts that always come to be important, further in the story.So we have a narrative made of coincidences, circular stories, and intersections. The first 5 or 6 minutes of the film (including the initial credits) are specially marvelous in the way we get to see this. We have a pop montage of magazine cuts, pieces of lives, faces, coloured bits. This introduces us to the pace of the film, which is frantic in comedy sense (this shows through the story, not the editing). Than we have an introduction to our central character, around which everything revolves: she dubs films, which means she lends her voice to other bodies. She was (we come to understand) the lover of a man who does the same. And we get a marvelous piece of film, in which we follow our voice off dubbing, and the film she is dubbing, already with the translated line. She is dubbing alone, the male voice is silent. This is exquisite work. A fantastic scene. It got me into the mood, i thought. This because we are deceived by this first scene. Next to this, it turns to a comedy environment (tracking American screwball comedies, this is assumed by Almodóvar).The major cinematic concerns in every film by Pedro Almodóvar is on working narrative in ways that are new, seductive, and visual. All his films (specially those of the 80') were pure experiments, completely different from the previous one. There, Pedro was more attached to a certain mood, a certain psychedelic way of living, certainly derived to his experience inside the Movida, Madrid's underground of the 70'. Nevertheless he was already trying build new cinematic narrative forms. There is a certain aspect that happens in all of his films, despite the differences between them: he likes the idea of having actors whose characters perform. Actresses playing actresses, characters pretending to be something else. His narrative mood has really much to do with this. Here he is very intelligent in the depiction of this aspect. The first scene i mentioned establishes this, the mad mother who pretends to be sane in order to fulfill her madness does it, and the film has an unfolding moment in a scene where everybody is acting and lying to the police. Near the beginning, the mad woman (who pretends to live 20 years before her time) says to her father: "You lie so well, dad! That's why i like you". Almodóvar wrote the script...The flaw here is that everything is mechanic. This development through circular coincidences, and a hidden plot that comes to unfold and reveal us the truth is not exactly in line with the best visual efforts of Almodóvar. I think he knows that, he even stated that this script was a lot easier to write than that of, for example, Kika (a lot more implicit in its narrative content). So, narratively, this IS Almodóvar, but not his best. But it has beautiful strokes, underlined intentions, and i will take those first minutes with me wherever i go.My opinion: 4/5http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com