Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman sits on the floor of a penthouse the color of a candy box and presses play. The voice that fills the room is her lover's — recorded, fond, businesslike, already gone. Ivan wants her to pack his suitcase. He will not pick up. He can't: he is a tape. Watch Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown through that machine on the floor and the whole delirious afternoon snaps into focus.

Deleuze splits cinema in two. In the movement-image — most movies, and every screwball comedy ever cut — a character sees a situation and acts on it; perception runs into action like current down a wire. Sometimes the wire is cut. A character can only look, or only listen, with nothing she can do about what she registers. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations: opsigns and sonsigns. Pepa's whole grief is one long sonsign. Ivan reaches her constantly and is never reachable. She can replay him; she cannot answer him. The phone gives her everything except the one thing a phone is for.

And the voice has no body and no address. Ordinary off-screen space — the out-of-field-relative — is just the next room; you could walk to it. Ivan's voice arrives from somewhere you can't locate at all, the out-of-field-absolute: a man already fleeing the country, total as sound, absent as flesh. Image and soundtrack have come unstuck from each other. She is in the bright apartment; he is in the recording; they never once share a frame. This is the film's quiet formal scandal, and it is Almodóvar's specific invention. He started from Cocteau's one-act La Voix Humaine, a woman pouring herself into a telephone at a lover the audience never hears, and he mechanized it. The live call became the answering machine — desire turned into a domestic appliance you can rewind. Cocteau's woman at least heard her man breathe down the line. Pepa gets a cassette. The abandonment has become a product, replayable on demand. The trick descends straight from Cocteau's other film too, Orpheus, where a radio of the dead transmits disembodied voices that compel the living; Almodóvar secularizes the device and keeps the mechanics exactly.

Now look at everything Almodóvar builds around that silent hole. The most kinetic apparatus in comedy: the Feydeau machine he inherits from Bringing Up Baby and The Lady Eve — an expanding cast deposited into one sealed set, characters who must not meet kept apart by editing timed to the second, a pitcher of Valium-spiked gazpacho moving through the plot like Chekhov's loaded prop. This is pure movement-image: perceive, act, near-miss, resolve. But ask what all the running is for. Every woman here is in motor overdrive because the man she needs has dissolved into something she can't act upon — a recording, a fugitive, a terrorist's vanished lover. Action with no object to land on. That is the title. To be on the verge is to have a sensory-motor circuit revving with nowhere to discharge. Deleuze would call a jammed circuit the crisis of the action-image; Almodóvar's coup is to make the jam hilarious without making it any less true. The farce is the symptom of the sonsign.

The color is in on it. José Luis Alcaine floods the frame with electric red, taxi-cab yellow, the impossible green of that terrace garden — not decoration but what Deleuze calls the colour-image, a color that absorbs a whole scene and its feeling. The gazpacho's red is comedy and grief in the same shot. The palette runs back to Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, where high-key light exposes the gap between a cheerful surface and a wrecked interior, and to Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, where saturation becomes the temperature of feelings nobody can say aloud. A room too bright for what happens in it: that mismatch is the film's governing irony.

And the faces. Rossy de Palma's Candela — that angular, Picassoid profile Almodóvar found by chance — is the film's affection-image at its purest: a face that doesn't advance the plot so much as register on it, a contour that becomes a visual argument about what a face is permitted to be. Carmen Maura's does the opposite labor, modulating grief into slapstick into rage inside a single take, while José Salcedo's editing cuts away from her sorrow a beat before it can set into pathos. The tone refuses to settle, and that restlessness is the point.

What did the film do to film? It proved the screwball machine and the time-image's listening woman could live in one apartment — that you could run a Feydeau farce around a hole shaped like an absent voice. It converted a stage monologue into a structure. And it bought Almodóvar his freedom: El Deseo's independence and the international art house's sudden appetite for Spanish-language cinema both date from here. Next time, don't only watch the doors. Watch Pepa press play. The comedy is in the timing; the film is in the tape that never answers.