I don't want to give away the plot. Besides, the plot is too crazy to explain... You just have to see it. I'll just say that you will see:
Banderas as a stuttering, young man in glasses [beautiful, just as well...], who is totally under control of his impossibly ugly fiancee [very gifted comedian actress, but the way].
Young girl, trying to commit suicide, by sliding off the penthouse balcony.
Young virgin, having an erotic dream and, subsequently, "losing her virginity" in a dream, after being heavily drugged.
Also, coming to the screen near you: crazy mother, strange taxi-driver, unlucky terrorists, wacky neighbors, sloppy policemen, and one over-sexed womanizer, who gets what he deserves, but not quite....
All in all, it is a total mad-house, created in a very beautiful Spanish penthouse, by a series of unfortunate circumstances.
After watching this film, I thought to myself, that Shakespearean comedies have finally found their independent counter-part in the 20th cenruty's cinema.
Pepa is pregnant by her dashing, unreliable, older lover, Ivan. A rat-bag he is indeed but very charming with it. She is trying to tell him but can't contact him because he is having an affair with her "feminist" lawyer acquaintance. Meanwhile she has the added problem of sheltering her young fugitive friend who got involved with terrorists and is now running from the law. But that's not all; she has Ivan's psychotic ex-wife baying for her blood, a couple viewing her flat and not only is one of them the son of her lover but the woman in the couple drinks the drugged gazpacho soup in the fridge intended for Ivan....
And just to make things even more complicated Pepa keeps running into a colourful taxi driver who likes to add a bit of modern enterprise to his business.
You'll either be charmed or put off by the quirkiness of this film but if you are the latter then stick with it; it really is very funny and entertaining stuff.
Very Almodovar; he really is a talented director and the actors aren't too bad either. Watch closely for Antonio Banderas in a pre-Hollywood. He looks really different.
We have a blond, eccentric taxi-driver, who has his colourful "Mambo" taxi stuffed with magazines, drinks and every possible Medicare product, who, by coincidence, just happens to be there on the three occasions Pepa needs him. And then we have her friend, Candella (Maria Barranco), a tall, slender girl, who, thinking she is being pursued by the police because of her involvement with a Shiite terrorist, comes to Pepa's apartment for advise and succour and failing to get either tries to throw herself off the balcony. She is saved by Pepa's ex-lover's son, Carlos (Antonio Banderas), and his ugly girl-friend, Marisa( Rossy de Palma). Pepa has not met Carlos before; he has come, by coincidence, to view the apartment which Pepa now wants to let. Whilst the others talk, Marisa drinks some Gazpacho, prepared earlier by Pepa with a near lethal dose of barbiturates for her ex-lover, Ivan. She then spends the rest of the film in a deep sleep thus giving Carlos and Candella time and opportunity to fall in love.
Towards the end, Pepa, in a wild chase scene, follows her ex-lover's pyschotic wife, Lucia (Julieta Serrano), who is on a motor bike with her hair flying, to the air-port and arrives just in time to prevent her shooting her husband, Ivan (Fernando Guillen). The latter is so grateful that he wants Pepa back but she will have none of it.
Despite its underlying theme of despair and occasional descent into sick humour, this is, paradoxically, a happy film - bright, colourful, fast-moving, with hardly a dull moment, the sort of film you might turn to to help raise your spirits on a rainy afternoon.
