High Heels (1991 re-release)

High Heels fails to live up to its potential. What could have been an incisive piece of social commentary proves to be no more than a histrionic film with a tortuous plot. This alleged black comedy also falls short of being noticeably witty.

Sub-titled nineties melodramas are an acquired taste; none more so than this film. Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, High Heels is the cult filmmaker’s ninth flick. High Heels tripped onto the silver screen in its native Spain in 1991.

The female protagonists are flighty, unconventional performer Becky del Páramo and her daughter Rebeca, a broadcast journalist. The pair’s relationship has been forced to weather the strain of a prolonged separation, following Becky’s abandonment fifteen years earlier of her young child in order to pursue a career overseas.

Principally set in Madrid, the film features flashbacks to the 1970s and frequent references to Mexico, the land that lured the narcissistic singer from her parental responsibilities.

It’s a promising opening. Regrettably, the director’s treatment of this neglected mother/daughter relationship remains fairly simplistic. How did Rebeca cope with her mother’s protracted absence? Why was Becky so readily able to eschew all sense of maternal duty? Almodóvar overlooks the intricacies of the fractured familial bond in favour of a jumpy and overly-dramatic plot. The film seemingly can’t decide which of its meandering sub-plots to focus on, and so elects to touch insufficiently on each.

The haphazard plot development encompasses Rebeca’s husband Manuel’s various liaisons with his wife, his coquettish ex-lover Becky, and another mistress; two murders; a confusing court case; several sensational confessions to the crime; subsequent recriminations; drag artist Letal’s numerous adopted personas and disguises and the transvestite’s unlikely, smouldering affair with Rebeca, all clumsily woven together with the perfunctory handling of Becky and Rebeca’s relationship.

The latent, simmering resentment between Becky and her daughter is alluded to but not sufficiently explored during a brief conversation between the women, and insinuated by Rebeca’s marriage to Manuel and fling with Latel, who impersonates Rebeca’s mother on stage in all her flamboyant glory. A more sustained unpacking of these emotional complexities would have given this melodramatic piece some much needed profundity. As it is, the film is peppered with a cast of two-dimensional characters.

In the flashbacks to Rebeca’s tumultuous childhood during the 1970s, Becky’s aspirations to take up a career as a singer are strongly opposed by her critical husband, who believes she cannot be both an artist and a dutiful wife. In order that his wife be liberated to lead her own life and make her own choices, Rebeca deliberately doses her unwitting step-father with Valium (swapping his stimulants for the tranquilising drug) just before he takes to the wheel of his car.

Young Rebeca’s murder of her step-father could have been taken as a trenchant indictment of a patriarchal society (coming as it does at the tail end of Franco’s authoritarian rule) but serves only as a dramatic device further compounded in a later scene by the slaying of another character.

Thick on sub-plots and thin on interest, it’s worth a passing glance if you’ve got nothing better to do.

Last edited: 23rd July 2009