nycritic
Pedro Almodovar seems to be aiming for the excesses of female drama even in his future explorations of male passion, seen in films like CARNE TREMULA (LIVE FLESH) and LA MALA EDUCACION (BAD EDUCATION). A hybrid caught between his lurid comedies of the Eighties and the darker, more textured dramas that would present him in a more mature light after the success of LA FLOR DE MI SECRETO (THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET), TACONES LEJANOS (HIGH HEELS) finds Almodovar continuing to explore the female psyche in a story that's an equivalent of a spicy gazpacho made with combinations of the histrionics of Joan Crawford in MILDRED PIERCE and the melodramatic garishness of a Douglas Sirk melodrama with a subtle reference to Ingmar Bergman's HOSTONATEN. Throw in the usual suspects -- a mother (with a name that recalls high-drag), Becky del Paramo (Marisa Paredes), her estranged daughter Rebeca (Victoria Abril), Rebeca's husband Manuel (Feodor Atkine) who is one of Becky's former lovers -- a little murder and a female impersonator (Miguel Bose), and you have a sizzling story that is vintage Almodovar.
rbverhoef
I like the films made by director Pedro Almodóvar and 'Tacones Lejanos' ('High Heels') is no exception. Even his lesser film ('Kika') have something to enjoy, most of all because they are so very different from other films you have seen. Like a Tarantino-film, an Almodóvar-film is sort of like a genre on itself. Although Almodóvar reached greatness with 'Todo Sobre Mi Madre' and especially 'Hable Con Ella', his earlier films like 'Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios' and this one are a lot of fun. He mixes so many genres here, uses symbolism in such an effective way, the least thing it does is being original. I guess there is nothing wrong with that.The story involves a daughter Rebeca (Victoria Abril), her famous mother Becky (Marisa Paredes) who returns to Spain after fifteen tears, a murder that could have been committed by Rebeca, Becky and a third suspect, Judge Domínguez (Miguel Bosé) who is on the case, and a lot of colorful supporting characters. I could tell you more but the plot is not really the issue here. Although this films sounds like a drama, maybe a detective or a thriller even, it is closer to a comedy because of the way Almodóvar handles the absurd situations. There is a scene where Rebeca, an anchorwoman, tells something about the murder where she herself is one of the suspects. Next to her sits a woman who does the news in sign language. The whole scene, which is dramatic in what it tells us, is one of the best moments of comedy I have seen.Of course the themes here are really dramatic. Not only we have the murder, we also have Rebeca who has wanted to impress her mother her entire life. It is just that Almodóvar creates a world that reminds you of a soap opera that can bring comedy out of every dramatic event. That his film is more serious than you might think is proved by the symbolism he uses. Scenes where Rebeca is temporarily in prison show her in a symbolic way how she feels. In another beautiful scene we see Rebeca driving her car, but it is the wall on the background that draws her attention. It is like her entire life is written on the wall. Almodóvar who loves to use bright colors finds an effective way here to use them, representing the state the character is in. It is not only effective it is quite beautiful to look at as well.
Alice Liddel
It might seem incredible to believe now that in the early 1990s Pedro Almodovar, now firmly one of the great directors, was thought to have lost his way. The films had become excessively formal they said, squeezing out character, comedy and narrative; the sexual daring had stepped over the line and become gratuitous and nasty - there is one sequence here in which a rape is treated as comic, becomes enjoyable for the victim, and produces a redemptive conception. With films like this and 'Kika', Almodovar was accused of believing his own hype, of taking the grand claims of auteurism too seriously, and forgetting about the things that had made him precious in the first place, the audacity, the iconoclasm, the fun.Now we can appreciate 'HIgh Heels' as a dry run for his masterpiece, 'All About My Mother', with which it shares some startling similarities - the daring colours, the rich compositions, the masterly camerawork; the central parent/child relationship; Marisa Parades as a performer; the themes of identity and imitation. But, while hugely flawed, 'Heels' is also an entertaining film in its own right, full of (naturally) astounding acting, perverse plotting and a gloriously full, melodramatic score.What hampers the film is its reliance on genre. Although ostensibly a typical Almodovar melodrama, visualising the emotional and sexual lives of his female characters, the plot is underpinned by a murder mystery. His remarkable 'Live Flesh' shows how genre can be used for complex, non-generic ends, but he hasn't quite got there with 'Heels'. The crime story is useful as a springboard, offsetting and bringing various crises and themes together, but just as the film is about to hit an emotional crescendo, it is weighed down by the need to tie up loose plot ends, so that a climax that should be moving and cathartic ends up in a grotesque haggling over guns and fingerprints.None of this is thematically irrelevant - the characters are as emotionally trapped as they are by generic circumstances; Paredes claiming Abril's murder, her transferring her fingerprints on the murder weapon, her dying for her daughter's sin in a religious parody, explicitely revealed in the final composition, framed and coloured like a sacred painting, all form part of the film's variations on family, the past and present, tradition and individuality, responsibility, anti-Oedipal struggles, and, especially, imitation, this latter embodied in the figure of the Judge, a man representing a monolithic institution, run by men (while the women languish in prison), who is in fact three (or more) people, his very existence a rejection of dogmatism, of the stable, certain, repressive - in the end he will marry and (unwittingly?) shield a murderer. His imitation of Paredes mirrors negatively her daughter's feelings of inferiority, that she is a bad pastiche, can't even imitate her as well as a drag queen.
This theme of artifice, visualised in the sets and colours, in the mirrors and reflecting glass that splits characters into multiple versions of themselves, does not suggest the world is fake, but that people have so many complex, often contradictory emotions and desires, that they cannot possibly be contained in one, whole, identity; single identity is here equated with death, in the case of macho reactionary hypocrite Manuel. Truth even manages to subvert the fabrications of the media, with Abril's on-air confession, although its status as truth is automatically made suspect (anything said on telly couldn't possibly be true, could it?).The film is full of wonderful flourishes, in particular the musical sequences, a thrilling dance scene in the prison, heartbreaking torch songs at moments of drama-overspilling crisis. In each individual scene, Almodovar's control of all his technical tools is faultless. Put together, though, and the thing doesn't seem to cohere. It must have been the script.
