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

A reading · through the lens of theory

At the heart of Almodóvar's breakthrough is a pure sonsign: Ivan, the absconding lover, never appears in the flesh — he exists in the film exclusively as a prerecorded voice threading out of an answering machine, a disembodied transmission that nevertheless organizes the desire of half a dozen women. Almodóvar inherits this device directly from Jean Cocteau's La Voix humaine (1948), in which a woman performs her anguish into a telephone receiver while her lover is pure voice — Almodóvar secularizes and multiplies the arrangement, replacing the single telephone with the answering machine and the lone anguished woman with a spinning ensemble. What the Deleuzian sonsign names is precisely this: a sound-situation that doesn't advance action but suspends it, producing the dead time of waiting, replaying, listening — the tape Pepa cannot bring herself to erase becomes the film's emotional fulcrum. The farce machinery that surrounds this void runs on mise-en-scène: cinematographer José Luis Alcaine's palette of electric reds, cab yellows, and implausibly verdant terrace greens isn't naturalism or camp but a calibrated emotional thermometer, color temperature standing in for what characters cannot articulate. And in Carmen Maura's face — the affection-image at its most classically deployed — the film refuses to let comedy entirely absorb loss: her close-ups register genuine longing before any plot mechanism arrives to reclaim them, insisting that feeling is something prior to and in excess of farce, something the answering machine cannot contain.