TV actress Pepa Marcos is depressed after her boyfriend Iván disappears. The apartment is filled with animals. She accidentally sets the bed on fire. She puts sleeping pills in her gazpacho. Her distressed friend Candela shows up. Iván's son Carlos (Antonio Banderas) also shows up with girlfriend Marisa who are apartment hunting. Carlos' mother is crazy Lucía. Candela tries to jump off the balcony. She had an affair with an Arab who turned out to be a terrorist and she fears the police. It's a series of chaotic intertwining characters. It's a lot of wacky crazy chaos. It's a little hard to follow at times. It has some fun. It's got the Pedro Almodóvar style. I'm sure that I missed half of the jokes due to the language barrier. Still, it's wacky fun.

Fernando Guillén walks out on his lover, actress Carmen Maura, and she doesn't know why. Neither does his wife nor child. María Barranco thinks the police are looking for her because an old boyfriend may be an Islamic terrorist.

It's all standard behavior in Pedro Almodóvar's movie based on a Cocteau play, where people behave absurdly under stress, and self-inflicted stress there is aplenty. Like other Almodóvar movies, you have to watch the colors. The women wear red when they are functioning normally, blue when they are depressed. Greens are background, masculine colors. My eyes quickly became acclimated to this, and I kept looking for reds, only to find him playing with this code, offering painterly touches to fill up the screen. Visually, Almodóvar is in a long tradition of Spanish painters, and offers pleasure to his frazzled audience that way. It's too bad he never had the opportunity to work in Technicolor with someone like Jack Cardiff.... but that might distract from the wacky characters who inhabit his universe.

"Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios"" or "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" is a Spanish movie from 1988, so this one is already over 30 years old now and it was written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. It is not one of his really early works as he was already the man in charge on many more films before that, especially truly early in his career when he made one short film after the next. For this one here, he was in his late 30s and you could say that it was maybe his big breakthrough film internationally as he managed to score an Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film back then and also received awards recognition all over the planet. Not just him though, also his lead actress Carmen Maura did. The cast here really consists of many actors who kept appearing in Almodóvar's films in the following decades. The best example is a pretty young Antonio Banderas, who looks like a Hispanic version of Morrissey in here with his haircut really, who may have just come up with a career-best effort in the 2019 Almodóvar movie. But also all the girls really kept showing up in other projects. And this one here was also a family affair already as his brother Agustín is also producer here and they worked a lot together since then too.

However, I would say for this one Almodóvar was not yet at his best. Not even close. I quite like some of his works, but this one is among the weakest I have seen from him so far. The key concept of comedy here is one that takes us into treally abstruct, absurd and over-the-top situations and shows us the protagonists acting or trying to act in the most civilized manner as if it was really everyday moments. So there is a great deal of situational comedy to it I would say. One thing for which Almódovar is known to this day is really his art direction and the every day items (or wallpapers) that look somewhat interesting although they are really at their most normal, often in terms of colors. Something that stayed in the mind for me here from that perspective was the blue telephone outside. Or the red gazpacho. These two are Almodóvar's trademark colors in my opinion. Or also the thingey (don't know the English term) one character uses to find out who is at the other side of the door wanting to get in. That was an interesting design, nothing to be compared to how they look here in Germany. How boring you could say. But now I want to get back to why this film did not impress me as much as I hoped it would. The comedy, even if the characters were somewhat memorable, rarely truly impressed and entertained me. The first scenes after Banderas enters the scene are good and also the ending too starting with the chase sequence, but in-between there is so much absurdity that it really did not feel realistic at all. Also the plot twist with the gun. Or I did not really see the comedy in one character sleeping for almost the entire film the way some other people in the audience did. I don't know, maybe this is actually a movie that women understand and appreciate more than men. The 0.2 difference in rating here on imdb confirms it perhaps, even if I generally do not like statements like these that say one gender likes a film more. After all, there's many more female characters in here and they can also drool over Banderas of course. And for us guys I dont know, maybe Candela comes the closest or Ana, but she has almost no screen time. So what other moments were too much over-the-top and maybe not authentic enough for my liking? Perhaps Banderas' constant kissing. I must say he was a bit of a nothing character and perhaps his funny and probably also attractive looks made many people forget that. Or when Lucía gets out her guns towards the end in a really bizarre plot twist. It's a bit too showy for my taste all that and too much style over substance, even if admittedly there is no denying Almodóvar knows how to come up with colorful characters and also casts the right actors. It's probably just personal taste, but all in all I give this film a thumbs-down, even if it was a bit of a close call. On a maybe completely random side-note I find it a bit interesting how people are saying Almodóvar's newest (the one with Banderas I mentioned earlier) is somewhat about himself and also indirectly focuses on his early years somewhat (at least in terms of references and flashbacks),so also on the phase maybe when he made this film here. This would be all then. Perhaps I am a bit more positive about this film with a really complicated title (and why are there "s?) on rewatch, but I guess it's gonna take a few years until I give it another go unless it maybe airs soon on television on a lazy day.