The Flower of My Secret

Pedro Almodovar
1995

I can't easily think of a director who's had as comparable a string of artistic successes as Almodovar has of late. Since 1999's "All About My Mother," every successive installment in his estrogen drenched ouvre has been a homerun. I don't have much experience with his earlier pictures though I found "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (1988) to be intolerably campy compared to the mature melodrama's he's been churning out as of late. "The Flower of My Secret" appears to be something of a bridge to his recent work - not quite as accomplished or assured in craft and tone, but on the right track. Marisa Paredes stars as a disillusioned romance novel scribe, scratching away under the pen name Amanda Gris. Struggling with professional dissatisfaction and a crumbling marriage to military man Paco, Paredes takes a gig at a newspaper, slamming the sappy fiction that she has written. This being an Almodovar film there's plenty of performances both theatrical and musical, and plenty of adoration devoted to the pre-menopausal diva under fire. The picture's solid, though some of the plotting feels a tad clinical, not having the emotional weight of "All About My Mother," or the awkward honesty of "Talk to Her" (2002).