A girl's mother returns after 15 years to find her daughter has married one of her (the mother's) old boyfriends
by Mat Snow |
Published on
Release Date:
01 Jan 2001
Running Time:
115 minutes
Certificate:
15
Original Title:
High Heels
High Heels starts off in camp fashion with a title sequence straight out of the mid-60s Monty Berman school, promising lots more japes in Swinging Madrid.
Instead, however, we get a mother-daughter murder melodrama even more farfetched than the Joan Crawford classic, Mildred Pierce, on which this would appear to be loosely based.
Almodovar, in his double role of writer-director, intensifies this clash of styles and audience preconceptions by locating a just-about naturalistic dissection of family tensions within a milieu which Joe Orton would relish, all lawmen in drag, transvestite bars, and lots of singing.
That the film works at all and an unqualified triumph it ain't is down mostly to his star Victoria Abril, who, with total plausibility, handles all the seemingly impossible curve-balls her director throws her way, including one outlandish yet weirdly
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