What Have I Done to Deserve This?, by Pedro Almodóvar

What Have I Done to Deserve This?, by Pedro Almodóvar. Spain, 1984. 101 min.

Gloria (Carmen Maura) is an unhappily married housewife suffering withdrawal symptoms from her addiction to amphetamines. She shares her forty-square-metre flat with her taxi-driver husband, mother-in-law, two wayward sons and a lizard, and is desperately unhappy. As well as zero communication with her husband, a shadow hangs over her in the shape of a German woman for whom her husband worked as a driver in Berlin fifteen years ago and with whom he is still in love. A nightmarish sequence of events unfolds. Verónica Forqué and Chus Lampreave complete the cast in a climate of neorealism.

Pedro Almodóvar (Calzada de Calatrava, 1949) grew up in La Mancha and Extremadura, where he attended secondary schools run by Salesian priests and Franciscans. At the age of 17 he left school and moved to Madrid to study filmmaking but was unable to enrol in the official film school because Franco had just closed it. He got a job with Telefónica, Spain's national phone company, which gave him an insight into the Spanish middle classes of the 1970s, material that would inspire his future screenplays. In the afternoons and evenings he wrote plays with the legendary indie company Los Goliardos, made Super 8 films (teaching himself, he never received any formal training in filmmaking), contributed to different underground magazines, and was a member of a punk rock parodic duo, Almodóvar & McNamara. In 1985 he created the production company El Deseo with his brother Agustín. They had just filmed Matador, and before that legendary movies like Pepi, Luci, Bom, Dark Habits, Labyrinth of Passion and What Have I Done to Deserve This? His 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown earned him worldwide acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Almódovar has since won numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards: Best Foreign Language Film for All About My Mother (1999) and Best Original Screenplay for Talk to Her (2002).