coming back to go away again
by
Douglas Messerli
Pedro
Almodóvar (writer and director) Tacones lejanos (High Heels) [Distant
Heels] / 1991
A
day after watching Egoyan’s film Guest of Honour, I selected, completely
by accident to see a Pedro Almodóvar film that I had previously missed, High Heels, or
more properly given its Spanish title, Tacones lejanos, Distant Heels.
I describe this viewing as accidental
simply because of the kinship of the Almodóvar work with the Egoyan film, both employing
as their dominant genre, melodrama, and the focus in both films
upon
the sometimes-lethal relationships between young girls and their fathers and
mothers.
A motivation
similar to the central figure of Egoyan’s work—in which the young heroine “kills”
her victims only symbolically—lies behind the young Rebeca’s (Victoria Abril) actual
murder in High Heels of her step-father, who has abusively treated her
mother and threatens to divorce her. Rebecca’s second murder of her own husband—perversely
her mother, Becky del Páramo’s (Marisa Paredes) former boyfriend—derives from
parallel issues, with Manuel abusing Rebecca and threatening divorce.
In both films, moreover, the daughters
suffer enormously over what they feel is the loss of love of their parents, the
cheating father in Guest of Honor and the famous but always absent
singer-mother in High Heels.
Later, when Rebecca ends up in prison—in another
parallel with Guest of Honour—we witness several lesbian relationships
at play and, in a moment of sheer magic, an all-female prisoner dance to a merengue
by Los Hermanos Rosario, which reminds one a bit of the female sharks’ dance in
the original version of West Side Story.
But immediately after, the usual Almodóvar
themes are somehow lost, as the sexual proclivities of his characters become
far less important than the affinities of gay men to directors such as Douglas
Sirk and the appreciation of films from the same melodrama genre such as Stella
Dallas, Mildred Pierce, and particularly Imitation of Life—the
last a film which High Heels, to a great degree, even imitates,
particularly when we recall that the daughter, Cheryl Crane, of that movie’s
star, Lana Turner, stabbed to death her mother’s lover, Johnny Stompanato. And,
of course, how can we ever forget Christina Crawford’s 1978 memoir, Mommie
Dearest, which almost did in her famous adoptive mother? These incidents
too hover over Almadóvar’s story.
To explain her own horrific relationship
to her mother, Rebeca recites a great deal of the plot of Ingmar Bergman’s An
Autumn Sonata, in which a great pianist returns home after a long absence; asking
her daughter to play a song for which the elder has become quite famous, following
up the girl’s performance with an intimidating critique.
But let us return to Rebeca in the
dressing room of the transvestite Lethal, who, upon catching a glimpse of his
obviously well-endowed genitals, allows herself the enjoyment of having sex
with him/her, at which time, we soon discover, Rebeca is impregnated. It’s difficult.
after that moment, to see Lethal as one of Almodóvar’s more fragile if street-hardened
transvestites. And the lesbian relationships of the prisoners seems to go nowhere,
until one of the girls attempts to buy a jacket from another, which just
happens to be the loyal nurses’ boyfriend Hugo’s identifying wrap. Presented
with a nude picture of Hugo, Rebecca recognizes him as Lethal from the birthmark
on his penis.
A sympathetic
judge, Eduardo
Dominguez, who only superficially interrogates the mother and daughter—lover
(now both former and, since Becky has started up a new affair with Manuel current)
and his wife about the murder—he finds no convincing evidence, and without
explanation releases Rebeca from jail—despite the fact that Rebeca has
confessed to the killing on television!
Invited to the last performance of Lethal’s
act, Rebeca reluctantly attends, finding in the dressing room not only Lethal
and Hugo, but the Judge, whose sartorial beard and side-burns, it turns out,
are only part of another costume. He vaguely attempts to explain that his
drag-self was created in order to track down a murderer of transvestites; but
the more important thing he offers up is his desire to marry her, since they
have already begun a family of sorts, he diffidently adds.
If both Rebeca and Lethal/Hugo/Dominguez
have kept a few secrets from each other, so too has the girl’s mother, Becky, as
they soon discover that she has returned to Madrid not to seek out her long-abandoned
daughter but because she is suffering from a serious heart condition.
At the hospital, she privately asks Rebeca
once more if she actually murdered Manuel, since her daughter has confessed to
it and then denied the confession. Yes, Rebeca answers, I killed him. One of
the best lines of the film is Becky’s response: “You really have to find a new
way to deal with your problems with men.”
About to die, the mother herself
confesses to the murder, ordering up the gun in secret to make certain her
handprints are pasted upon in. The two then settle down for a final talk,
Rebeca describing how the sound of her mother’s heels approaching always helped
to sleep; in the original, it is the sound of her mother’s heels after she
has returned and is moving back down the hall that reassures the child. The
distance of those heels is important because it is only out of the mother’s
all-enveloping shadow, that Rebeca can return to normal life.
While she speaks, she soon discerns her
mother has died. And perhaps it is only now that Becky has retreated for the
last time, that in a marriage to Dominguez the daughter may come into her own.
We can only have some doubts, however,
given the fact that her new fiancé has a strange relationship with his own
rather overpowering mother, who spends her days in bed creating celebrity
scrapbooks, while complaining of all the illnesses she has imaginatively contracted—the
most recent one being AIDS, which worries her about her son’s undercover
activities. It’s a sly reference to the fact that perhaps this family tale is
only a hiatus from this director’s usual concerns. A few years later, in All
About My Mother Almodóvar, in fact, made one of his best films that might
almost be described as oddly connected to High Heels.
Although popular in Spain and Italy, High
Heels was highly unpopular in the US and elsewhere.
Los
Angeles, July 16, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
The
day after writing this review, while scrolling through my Facebook friends, I coincidentally
came upon a still of yet another female child murderer, Patty McCormack with
her director Mervyn LeRoy during the shoot of Bad Seed. Evidently
some of my friends were playing a sort of cinematic game, posting actors with
their directors without name to see if their friends might be able to identify
them.
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