Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
Pedro Almodóvar’s career followed a relatively traditional arc in the ’80s: a few crude, explicit, low-budget movies, some more polished, acclaimed efforts and a celebrated international breakthrough. However, for most of the ’90s he was, while prolific, somewhat on the sidelines. His 1990 film, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! was a mild scandal, earning the new NC-17 rating, which was a death sentence in terms of box office. Few people talked about the movie but, rather, about the explicit sex scenes. Perhaps in response to critics who found his movies frivolous, lusty and excessive, he made a stab at more mature, understated films with High Heels and The Flower of My Secret, but these came at the price of a certain exuberance and they didn’t succeed like his later films. High Heels is one of the lesser known films in his canon and currently isn’t even available on DVD. Compared to his earlier work, it’s measured, free from irrelevant subplots and relatively tame (there is one enthusiastic sex scene). It’s also uneven, poorly paced and too long. It’s a tentative step in a new direction that wouldn’t be fully realized until Live Flesh and All About My Mother.
It opens with Rebecca, played by Victoria Abril, who also appeared in Tie Me Up and later in Kika, waiting at the airport for her mother, a famous, diva-ish singer who has been living in Mexico. There are several short flashbacks, one in which Rebecca’s boorish stepfather jokingly tries to sell her to a group of men and one in which she switches his pills so that he takes the wrong ones and dies in a car accident (a staple of Almodóvar films). The mother, played by Marisa Paredes, is the performer-type that Almodóvar loves: flamboyant, colorful and arrogant. But as a mother, she’s overbearing, distant and difficult. She moves back into her own house and learns that her daughter has married a former lover of hers. They all go out to a drag show, where drag queen Lethal impersonates the mother. Rebecca goes backstage and they make torrid love. Later we learn that Lethal is really an undercover judge who lives with his mother. As with many of his earlier films, enjoyment is contingent on relaxing your sense of rational plotting.
As he often does, Almodóvar hitches a family drama to a somewhat formulaic murder mystery. And as he often does, the film starts one way and ends up somewhere entirely different. High Heels does get points for unpredictability, but the turns and twists are less enthralling than they were in his recent, underrated Broken Embraces. After some family melodrama, Rebecca’s husband ends up murdered. She, her mother and her husband’s pneumatic lover are called in for questioning. Soon after, Rebecca, a newscaster, announces on air that she murdered him. It is unclear whether she is really the culprit and the judge is determined to help her. She spends some time in a women’s prison and, in the film’s most poignant moment, listens to her mother singing a highly emotional song on the radio. The heart of the film is the loving, strained relationship between mother and daughter. In one confrontation, Rebecca admits that she always felt overshadowed by her mother and makes a reference to Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, another film about a talented mother and a less talented daughter. She also confesses to switching her stepfather’s pills.
Almodóvar does bring some closure to all the various strands floating around, the most unsatisfying of which may be the love story between Rebecca and the judge, which never feels very organic. It does end rather abruptly and with one of Almodóvar’s most somber and melancholy conclusions. High Heels has its moments and the two central performances are strong and deeply felt, but it feels like a transition work rather than the kind of fully formed, self-referential and emotionally complex films that he would begin to produce later in the decade.
by Lukas Sherman
Other Almodóvar Oeuvre Features
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
What Have I Done to Deserve This?
