Week 4: High Heels (1991)

"According to the coroner, don Manuel Sancho died between 9 and 11 pm. During this time, three women visited him: with one he made love, with another he argued, and the third found him dead."

In High Heels, Victoria Abril (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) returns as Rebecca, a successful newscaster who tries to welcome her mother back into her life after years of estrangement. Her mother, Becky (played by Marisa Paredes), is a famous singer who puts her career before everyone else (including her daughter). Upon her return, Becky is introduced to her daughter's husband, Manuel. Becky has simply heard news of the wedding and has no idea who Manuel is . . . or so she thinks.

"Did one of you kill him?"

As it turns out, Becky and Manuel were former lovers—the sexual tension of which strains the already difficult relationship she has with her daughter. To make matters worse, the love triangle results in Manuel’s murder and implicates both mother and daughter as prime suspects.

Becky (Marisa Paredes) and Rebecca (Victoria Abril)

With High Heels, I was a bit bored with it all. The murder and the strained mother-daughter relationship felt a little too Mildred Pierce for me. (And Marisa Paredes is no Joan Crawford). Also, where Mildred Pierce has the perfect excess of melodrama, High Heels wasn’t melodramatic enough. This is mostly due to Paredes’s rather stale performance. True, her character is supposed to be self-involved and distant, but even when this exterior is broken (and it most certainly is broken by the end), she’s still very unconvincing. The only highlight of her performance is also a performance: her character gives one final tearful concert in honor of her daughter. But this is ironically overshadowed by a more impressive performance prior in the film when Rebecca’s cross-dressing friend impersonates Becky.

In contrast to Paredes’s underwhelming portrayal, Victoria Abril is simply amazing as Rebecca. A step up from her frenetic performance in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Abril delivers a perfectly desensitized and tortured depiction of a newscaster putting on a face to confront her life and report the news. After the murder of her husband, her life and the news become synonymous and the true extent of Abril’s talent is revealed when Rebecca must report the death of her own husband to the public.

Even so, Abril couldn’t save the film from the pit that it would eventually find itself in. I blame it all on the terrible plot twist in the third act. I also think that another reason why I didn’t like High Heels was because it was, ultimately, a very sad film. I wasn’t even aware that Almodóvar made sad movies. You have the earlier flashbacks of a young Rebecca coping with her mother’s narcissism. You have the mother’s final act of repentance. And you have the final lines of the film, uttered by an inconsolable Rebecca to her mother:

"As a child, when we lived together, I could not get to sleep without hearing your heels. Far away. Fading away in the corridor, after you had passed to see me. It didn’t matter how late, I stayed awake for the sound of your heels."

The poignancy is upsetting. And when you look at the original Spanish title, the literal translation of "Tacones Lejanos" is not "high heels," but "distant heels." Much of the film’s sentimentality ends up lost in translation.

Next week: Kika (1993)