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High Heels
High Heels | |
| Rated: | None |
| Studio: | Miramax Films |
| Director: | Pedro Almodóvar |
| Release Date: | 1991 |
| Genre: | Drama, Foreign |
At the Creative Alliance at the Patterson July 6 at 8 p.m.
By Bret McCabe | Posted 6/29/2005
The last of Pedro Almodóvar’s purely women’s movies in the vein of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the penultimate flick with his 1980s-’90s muse, sexpot Victoria Abril, 1991’s High Heels betrays not one hint of the emerging shifts in Almodóvar’s sensibility. In fact, it’s one of the most predictable movies in his entire output. Little more than a bizarrely goofy love triangle between Becky del Péramo (Marisa Paredes), her daughter Rebeca (Abril), and Rebeca’s husband (Féodor Atkine), one of Becky’s former flames, High Heels is a murderous romp through a better art-directed Knots Landing. None of Almodóvar’s blithely kinky streak or impish bawdy comic plot twists come into play—save for a tangential involvement by Rebeca’s female impersonator friend (Miguel Bosé)—leaving High Heels to simmer down into a lame riff on Mildred Pierce. Only for the wonderful ways Abril wears professional-woman wear—Rebeca is a Madrid news anchorwoman, but she wears Karl Lagerfeld fit for a Dallas oil man’s wife—and a musical number in jail does High Heels escape outright dismissal.