崩溃边缘的女人1988

认识电影

8.9

[美] 路易斯·贾内梯 [瑞典] 英格玛·伯格曼 [日] 黑泽明 等供图 / 2007 / 世界图书出版公司

第十章 意识形态

坎普趣味(Camp sensibility)尤其和男同性恋文化有关尽管并非该文化所独有。异恋女星如梅·蕙丝、女丑星卡露·柏奈( Carol Burnett）和贝蒂·米德勒( Bette Midler)都有这个层面。它也不是所有同性恋的特质,如爱森斯坦、茂瑙、让·维果( Jean Vigo)和乔治库克都是同性恋,但他们的电影可一点不“坎普”。(嗯,也许库克的《女人们》算吧!)阿莫多瓦则是个中翘楚,他的喜剧如《斗牛士》( Matador)、《崩溃边缘的女人》和《关于我母亲的一切》都富含“坎普”趣味。

坎普电影最喜欢用喜趣嘲讽常在片中放些古怪、大胆的角色,比如邪典(cult)影片《洛基恐怖秀》中的角色,坎普喜用过度艺术化、人工化的处理,媚俗、华丽——比如顶着大筐香蕉在《高朋满座》中跳舞的卡门·米兰达，她的舞也是坎大师柏士比·伯克利所编。

坎普也用了很多舞台隐喻:扮演角色、爱抢戏的表演和人生如戏的比喻,比如索妮亚·布拉格在《蜘蛛女之吻》中所的受折磨女主角。此外,华丽俗气的布景和服装(品味粗鄙的)也是坎普趣味，坎普高举某些女星为“小众迷“偶像,尤其是琼·克劳馥和拉特纳演的花哨女人电影,原本严肃的角色被她们弄得匠气十足,并且都是受苦的牺牲者角色吃尽苦头却又生存下来,重要的是她们除了吃苦,还都穿着设计师的华服住在奢华的大厦中。

Author: Coconuttree666, a Chinese student who wants to be a serendipper in film studies and capture a kaleidoscope of colors in each frame

崩溃边缘的女人 (1988)

7.8

1988 / 西班牙 / 剧情 喜剧 / 佩德罗·阿莫多瓦 / 卡门·毛拉 安东尼奥·班德拉斯

The 1988 movie Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown movie, directed by Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, is described in the academia as highly stylized with the “colorful characters, vertiginous plotlines and rich intergeneric allusions” (Acevedo-Muñoz, 2006, p. 173). Just as West (2013) stated, Almodóvar is among those filmmakers who insert personal experiences as motives and features within their films. Although tons of critics have discussed the film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, I intend to specifically underline two idiosyncratic attributes of it in this film blog, namely the color and the references to Hitchcock’s work, within the biographical context of Pedro Almodóvar.

To start with, as the artistic director Antxón Gómez observes, “Pedro works with a very definite range of colors. He has trouble working with white, for example. He always says, ‘I don’t understand black and white.’” According to Oliva (2009), the recognizable use of color constitutes a dominant trademark in Almodóvar’s movies, frequently acting in concert with a neo-baroque aesthetic style that is prominent in Hispanic culture. From my point of view, the most astonishing aesthetical achievement in this film should boil down to the various outfit of the leading actress, Pepa Marcos cast by Carmen Maura (see the screenshots below).

In terms of semiology, the color can function as a signifier, which will denote deeper significance namely the signified, the process of which helps us to deconstruct the film as an aggregation of signs. In the first several scenes featuring Pepa, she is wearing a gray suit, which signifies professional and formal; yet after she feels extremely disappointed at her relationship with Iván, the frequent show-up of the color red could manifest that Pepa is the woman “on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, except for once she chooses to wear a blue suit pairing with a white shirt with black polka dots when she needs to be the adult for solving Candela (Maria Barranco)’s problems when seeing the feminist lawyer, where blue delivers a sense of calmness and intellect here (it can be somehow interestingly confusing with the same color constructing different meaning-making —— Candela, the character who represents irrationality and obtrusion, also wears a blue outfit when she shows up in the film for the first time). Furthermore, it is demonstrated by Oliva (2009) that the distinctive understandings of colors of Almodóvar might be triggered by his mother, Francisca Caballero, who made many cameos in his films before her death in 1999; as “bookish” as he could be, Almodóvar shows a sense of sensitivity through repeatedly claiming that his unlimited passion of narrative in the form of colorful visual compositions comes from his mother ——

As he said in a speech: “I like to think that my passion for color is not merely a function of the baroque style of my characters, but that it is also my mother’s answer to so many years of mourning, in which black was the dominant color. I was her extravagant reaction to the stultifying and excessive tradition of La Mancha (where Almodóvar grows up —— from the author)”.

…

“My mother was the territory where everything happened. I learned boldness from her, and something more: the need for certain doses of fiction so that reality can be better digested, better narrated, better lived… It was not a question of complacently accepting things, but of perfecting reality by adding a little bit of fiction.”

According to Zurian (2013) that when Almodóvar was eight, his family moved to Orellana la Vieja, a village with few traces of modernity, where he received the primary education under the religious supervision; at 17 he came to Madrid but never enrolled in the Official Film School since it ceased giving classes and gradually closed, then Almodóvar became an assistant in Telefónica, the national telephone company. Albeit lack systematic cinematic studies, he seems to be capable of expressing himself without any established rules; in the universe of narrative and film, his family, especially his mother seemingly leads him to a bigger illusionary world full of vivid colors that are conveying complicated connotations.

Moreover, it seems to have become a consensus in the sphere of film critics that Hitchcock should count as the primary textbook of Almodóvar, aesthetically and industrially; you can still tell new traces of the presence of Hitchcock in the form of appropriation in Almodóvar’s movies after accomplishing global success (Acevedo-Muñoz, 2007; Kercher, 2013).

Brill (1988) contended that many characters in Hitchcock’s films are victims of the inevitable and fatal traps of their past; conversely, Acevedo-Muñoz (2007) specifically argues that Almodóvar’s approaches are based partly on the unstable genre as a metaphor for national identity through direct quotations of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, but as a therapy to damage the social diseases from cultural and religious repression in Franco’s Spain.

For instance, at the end of Women on the verge, Pepa ultimately reach some emotional firmness when facing Lucía, the crazy mother, who also actively asks to be taken back to the mental hospital after the failed attempt to kill her ex-husband, which is allegorical of the nation’s process of recovery; therefore, Almodóvar determined to establish stability and positivity out of the melodrama’s natural chaos by making the women exactly be “on the verge” of insaneness, just as the title reads. To sum up, he is trying to pass the positive message that the national trauma could be cured ultimately, or at least offset by presenting that the negativity can be, “paradoxically, a redeeming force”, as Almodóvar himself mentioned in an interview: “I don’t want to let even the memory of Francoism exist in my films”.

(Word count: 942)

References

Acevedo-Muñoz, E. R. (2007). Melo-Thriller: Hitchcock, Genre, and Nationalism in Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. In D. Boyd & R. Barton (Eds.), After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (pp. 173-194). Texas: University of Texas Press.

Allinson, M. (2001). A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar. London: I.B.Tauris.

Brill, L. (1988). The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kercher, D. (2013). Almodóvar and Hitchcock: A Sorcerer’s Apprenticeship. In M. D’Lugo & K. M. Vernon (Eds.), A companion to Pedro Almodóvar (pp. 59-88). Chichester: Blackwell Publishing.

Oliva, I. (2009). Inside Almodóvar. In B. Epps & D. Kakoudaki (Eds.), All about Almodóvar: a passion for cinema (pp. 389-445). London: University of Minnesota Press.

Townson, N. (1988). The Spanish Labyrinth. New Statesman & Society, 1, 40.

West, D. (2013). A companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Choice, 51(4), 644.

Zurian, F. A. (2013). Creative beginnings in Almodóvar’s work. In M. D’Lugo & K. M. Vernon (Eds.), A companion to Pedro Almodóvar (pp. 39-59). Chichester: Blackwell Publishing.

一直要走，最后却选择不走，就像一直想要改变，最后发现不变才是最好的一样。1.镜子中人物再转现实镜外的那个镜头很赞

什么都有的性情中出租车司机也很赞，这种容易共情的人也最容易让观众共情。一定要凑齐，关键的人物要在关键点出现多次。暂时凑不够140字了，景深的确用了许多次，用来展现“错过”是最好的。

继“阿莫多瓦爱．慾．罪”、“阿莫多瓦in 90’s”经典数位修复作品相继重返大银幕后，2022年将迎来阿莫多瓦导演生涯初期的作品，展现其创作意识的自由、不羁，将各式狗血又禁忌的剧情揉杂，是对于情感的礼讚与对传统价值的反叛。

《濒临崩溃边缘的女人》（Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown）是阿莫多瓦于1988年执导的作品，叙述女演员佩佩遭到同居人伊凡以电话留言分手，她疯狂寻找对方未果，更导致生活严重失序。当佩佩为爱渐趋疯狂打算出租自己的房子时，前来看房的竟是伊凡的儿子卡洛斯与其女友玛莉莎，同时好友康德拉因收留恐怖份子情郎惹上麻烦来避难，伊凡精神异常的老婆露西亚也上门理论，使得佩佩紧绷的理智几近断线。

声音和语言带来的隔阂与沟通

阿莫多瓦的电影向来以鲜豔、强烈的色彩闻名，透过观察人物衣著、佈景颜色便可略窥剧中人心境。《濒临崩溃边缘的女人》除了衝击视觉的大面积鲜艳色块之外，更探讨了声音和语言如何同时呈现隔阂与沟通。片头佩佩与伊凡为《强尼史塔奇诺》配音，但由于佩佩未准时前来，因此由伊凡先为男主角配音，完成后佩佩才补上女主角的台词。

儘管佩佩与伊凡共同完成了一场戏，但他们却没有机会听见对方，一如《强尼史塔奇诺》中男女主角说著敷衍了事的情话。人们所说的任何话语几乎都富有意义，却不总是代表那人心中真正的想法，单向的爱没有回应，正如同少了对手配音员的口白，这是银幕外的单向言说，而导演在佩佩的台词裡，再加上一层单向的喃喃细语，佩佩富含真意的话语，与银幕上女主人的唇形叠合，又是一份无法送达、不被签收的爱。

透过银幕内外虚构与真实的对比、配音员与电影剧情相反的心意，以及无声、有声的情意传达，阿莫多瓦在片头便著力刻划爱情带来的伤痛，并以“听觉”，而非视觉来呈现。传递“声音”的各种媒介贯串全片，呈现旧情人不再能互相传递的心绪，例如：录音带、答录机、电话留言、经人传话等等。佩佩几乎未能与伊凡接上话，两人的对话总是透过留言、传话，扩大了理解的难度和时间。

这正是最令人心碎之处，一旦感情不复从前，任何的言语、关心与沟通都会来得更迟一些。有时是未来得及追上，有时是刻意延迟，因为无法承受对方最直接的反应，或是争取思考的时间，避免对方察觉言语之间的破绽，甚至有人会关紧心扉，不再接收对方任何的试探与辩解，一如佩佩将电话摔出窗外。她拒绝再受到对方的束缚，重新掌握主导权，如此心境转变很难立刻达成，就像她捡回电话、修好后又再次摔毁它，人们经常经历反覆思量，将自己的不捨与不甘与对方带来的苦痛相衡，才可能走出自伤的漩涡。

藉崩毁的爱情歌颂女性

有些创作者会透过刻划职业女性不屈于传统思维的性格，来打破女性形象过于单一的问题，然而阿莫多瓦镜头下的女性经常为爱做出许多糊涂事，种种荒谬事蹟成为喜剧基底；又或者与家庭、与爱人、与母亲、与孩子的关係成为其主人公一生必须面对的母题。

在佩佩的住处裡，聚集了四个为爱所困的女性，她们各自呈现了女人面对情感危机时的不同面貌，是近乎疯狂的真诚，也是近乎真诚的疯狂。

佩佩看似最为癫狂，但她内心的混乱与疼痛全都转换到外在事物上，她的床被烧毁、电话被摔得解体，还冰了一壶掺入大量安眠药的冷汤，但她却在言谈间安抚所有人的心神。

康德拉则是为爱懊悔的女人，她视自己的爱为错误，甚至差点为此轻生，她无法负荷爱情的代价，更因为这份爱与法律、道德相违，而不断凌迟著她，她担心自己甚过于担心爱人，因此这份懊悔不但是对于陷入爱情的悔恨，更掺杂了对于自身无法谅解的悲伤。

玛莉莎容易吃醋，对于卡洛斯经常与其他女人搭上线感到不悦，却误食加了安眠药的冷汤，最后在一场梦裡满足了性慾。

露西亚则是活在过去的人，她凭藉著声音记起伊凡曾经属于她，并扒著过往不放，她将愤怒投射在所有抢走伊凡的女人，她急于寻找她们，最后却将枪口对准伊凡，癫狂与杀戮成了觉醒的前奏。

这些为爱所苦的女人，都在最后找到了归处。佩佩与露西亚都在片尾提到了“回家”，前者回到住所，后者回到医院，她们归来仅仅是因为这些场所适合自己，在那裡她们将感到舒适，而不是因为那儿有谁，或谁能与她一起。她们都摆脱了过往，佩佩放下与伊凡相伴的年月，露西亚放弃她记忆裡理当呼唤自己，但早已远去的声音，他们都不再被伊凡左右，而是真正地安放了自己。康德拉不再纠结于昔日“错误”，玛莉莎对自己的身心状态有了全新、更全面的认识。四个曾被爱情燃烧得几尽成灰的女人，对于前路又有了希望。

即使是著重于爱情刻画，聚焦女人抢夺男人的过程，阿莫多瓦拼贴出各种执著、认真活著的女性神态，光是认真面对爱情、面对自我，即使是可怖的也变得可爱。相较之下，男主角伊凡则显得懦弱，甚至被逐出女人们的生命，从此于她们的人生中隐形。

小结

如果爱恨情仇是人生之必经，何不放大每个细节，连结每一次戏剧性的巨变？透过台词、服装加成，爱情的悲剧变得幽默滑稽，观众似乎更能理解“濒临崩溃边缘的女人们”的歇斯底里、暴怒或抑鬱，但却也因为聚焦于每个女人的幽微情绪，拆分“崩溃”面具下的种种巧妙的差异，使得我们对于女人的想像和理解不减反增。又，因爲理解了爱情之于这些女人们曾如何沉重，更能感受到在狂烈的剧情铺陈中，阿莫多瓦如何珍视女人夺回自主权的光彩。