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I went to see this one with an entirely open mind. Apart from the first two paragraphs of a review tacked up on the wall of the cinema foyer, I deliberately, staunchly refused to read anything about it, as I wanted to go along with a clear and empty mind.

It’s a very beautiful film.

Penelope Cruz is the impossibly glamorous mother of a grumpy, frumpy daughter, living in a dead-beat wind-swept town in a fairly anonymous corner of rural Spain. Almodovar spends a lot of his camera time looking at either her bum or down her top at the deep crevice that sits just inside the top of her tight dresses, and the rest outlining a simple story of three women living, loving and fighting with each other, all the time learning more about their own and their friends’ pasts. It’s like a Spanish Desperate Housewives set many leagues from the closest city.

There are deaths, reunions, fights and tragedies. The only thing that’s missing is a marriage to round things off, and while much of it shows how hard are the lives that they live and how resilient they have to be, there is some genuine laugh-out-loud humour that lightens the flow at the perfect moment.

I’m sure that there is a metaphor in there somewhere: something to do with the wind turbines that appear again and again and again, never still for a moment in this town where the wind never dies down. Are they telling us that this is a story about how our lives turn full circle? That what goes around comes around? That our pasts always come back to haunt us?

Perhaps all three, and perhaps none of them. What is true, though, is that the two hours of this colourful (in the most literal sense), charming film pass by almost as quickly as the breeze that is so central to its characters’ torment. And even if the punch-line can be guessed not long after you pass half way, it’s a worthy watch that would probably repay re-viewing once you know how it ends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.