Sightlines · reception

How Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was received

1988 · Pedro Almodóvar · Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown on Sightlines

The arc

A smash hit from day one — Spain's box-office champ, a Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee, and the film that turned Almodóvar from Madrid cult figure into international brand. Today it's less reappraised than repositioned: the fizzy 'gateway Almodóvar' fans revisit after the heavier late masterpieces.

What’s debated

The perennial Almodóvar-ranking fight: is this his most purely enjoyable film, or the crowd-pleasing breakthrough that his deeper work (All About My Mother, Talk to Her) left behind?

Its footprint

The title alone became a catchphrase — 'X on the verge of a nervous breakdown' is a headline formula to this day — and the spiked gazpacho is one of cinema's great running gags. It even spawned a 2010 Broadway musical with Patti LuPone, which promptly flopped.

Where it stands

A load-bearing wall of the camp/queer canon and the standard 'start here' Almodóvar — the primary-coloured Madrid apartment lives rent-free on a thousand Letterboxd lists.

Did you know? At the very height of the film's success, Almodóvar and his muse Carmen Maura — who carries the whole movie — had a famous falling-out, and they didn't make another film together until Volver, eighteen years later.

Named by the director

• Jean Cocteau — Almodóvar has repeatedly said the film began as a loose adaptation of Cocteau's one-woman play The Human Voice, which he finally adapted straight in his 2020 Tilda Swinton short.
• Billy Wilder — Almodóvar cited the polished 1950s–60s Hollywood 'high comedy' of directors like Wilder as the register he was aiming for — sophisticated, artificial, studio-bright.

A Deleuzian reading of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown →