New Year’s Eve Double-Bill
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown & 9 to 5

QUESTION:Take an intense world of machismo, voiceovers, red gazpacho,  answering machines, love triangles, Arab terrorists, and a mambo taxi driver who puts Uber to shame. To this vivid background add a vibrant cast of women crazed with love, along with a nosey secretary, a Jehovah’s Witness, two policemen and the telephone repair guy. What do you get?

ANSWER: Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s smart, funny and touching international breakthrough film. A feast of style, colour, and music. ‘Nervous breakdown’ may not be quite the right translation for the Spanish ‘Ataques de nervios’; but look out for dramatic outpourings of negative emotions, bodily gestures occasional falling to the ground, and fainting, often in response to receiving disturbing news or witnessing or participating in an upsetting event. (Thanks, Wikipedia, for the clarification.)

Ana (Ana Leza) : I’m fed up. I’m gonna get myself some quick cash, buy
myself his bike and split. With a bike, who needs a man?
Pepa (Carmen Maura): Learning mechanics is easier than learning male
psychology. You can figure out a bike, but you can never figure out a man.

Almodóvar’s film doesn’t quite pass the Bechdel test for representation of women in fiction, but it comes pretty damn close. (More than two named women ✔︎; who talk to each other ✔︎; about something besides a man – some of the time).

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown takes place mostly in a snazzy Madrid penthouse. Pepa wants to know where her lover Iván (Fernando Guillén) is because she has to tell him something, Over a hectic 48 hours. Pepa, her friend Candela (María Barranco), Iván, Lucia (Julieta Serrano), Carlos (Antonio Banderas), Marisa (Rossy de Palma), and Paulina (Kiti Mánver) gradually figure out their relationships to each other. Spoiler alert: expect the unexpected.

Iván: How many men have you had to forget?
Pepa: As many as the women you remember.

Surely you deserve a bit of fun. On New Year’s Eve at 4pm put the trials and tribulations of 2018 behind you; treat yourselves to a beer or glass of wine from the Picture House kiosk; and prepare for the trials and tribulations (and successes) of 2019, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is being shown as double-bill with 9 to 5 (1980) which features Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda.