The Flower of My Secret

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar (1995) ***1/2

Borrowing plot elements from Dorothy Parker’s short story The Lovely Leave, The Flower of My Secret could be described as a sad dramedy. Its protagonist, a middle-aged author by the name of Leo Macías (Marisa Paredes) is, in short, a mess. Women in Pedro Almodóvar’s movies often are (his first international success: 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Leo is frantic for the return of her husband, Paco (Imanol Arias), an officer stationed in the Bosnian War. She’s so tense and distraught that she can no longer turn out the trite, best-selling romance novels she’s been under contract to write for decades, under the pseudonym Amanda Gris. Instead, she writes a sordid novel of murder, rape and revenge (Almodóvar, never one to waste a story idea, later used the same plot for Leo’s spurned book as the basis of his 2006 film, Volver).

Cleverly introducing the theme of being emotionally cut off from a loved one forever, the film opens with a scene of two doctors trying to convince a mother her son is brain dead. This sequence turns out to be an instructional film headed by Leo’s best friend, Betty (Carme Elías), who has her own secret relevance to the plot. In fact, Almodóvar’s film is filled with sharply etched characters, all with their own hidden motives and agendas: her new publisher, Angel (Juan Echanove), who hires Leo to write a newspaper essay criticizing the work of “Amanda Gris”; Leo’s half-blind mother (Chus Lampreave) and hot-tempered sister (an Almodóvar regular, Rossy de Palma); her maid (Manuela Vargas) and her maid’s son (Joaquín Cortés), a flamboyant dancer. At the center of all is Paco, shown in only one emotionally fraught sequence which all else revolves around.

This sequence and many others recall the emotionally hyper-stylized work of director Douglas Sirk. It’s apparent in the thoughtful, intriguing and beautiful camera angles and meditative shots that Almodóvar is, even more than a screenplay writer, an artist who happens to use film as his medium.

The Flower of My Secret successfully navigates between melodrama and comedy. As in life, some of the worst and most embarrassing events can be underlined with humor. The film is so filled with intimate moments of believable life, it reminds me (and I mean this in no derogatory way) of the “down-time” moments in Alfred Hitchcock’s films; the character moments not essentially a part of his main plots. (Hitchcock only rarely deviated from his crime-based stories, but his 1941 screwball comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith can give one an idea of what he was capable of in this regard.) There’s a flamenco dance two-thirds of the way into the film that encapsulates the life-affirming spirit of the movie: it’s dead serious and somehow also hilarious. That’s a hard tone to master, but it’s what Almodóvar’s accomplished here.

—Michael R. Neno, 2017 December 17