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.
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.
