Main Cast: Carmen Maura, Ángel de Andrés Lopez, Verónica Forqué, Gonzalo Suárez, Chus Lampreave
Release Year: 1984
Country: ES
Run Time: 100 minutes
Plot
Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, the Luis Buñuel of the 1980s, cooks up another perversely funny descent into urban hell in What Have I Done to Deserve This? Carmen Maura plays a middle-class housewife hemmed in by her wildly eccentric relatives. Her principal purpose in life is a balancing act: to keep her head fastened on securely while all others are losing theirs. Film buffs will have a field day toting up Almodóvar's visual and verbal allusions to the works of Buñuel, Brian De Palma, Billy Wilder, John Waters, and even Andy Warhol. What Have I Done to Deserve This? was originally titled ¿Que He Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
What Have I Done to Deserve This? is a hilarious Pedro Almodóvar film about a spectacularly dysfunctional family living in Madrid. As is typical with early Almodóvar, the plot twists come thick and fast, and the entire film cheerfully teeters on the edge of insanity; indeed, this film is far more accessible and humane than many of the director's later works. Clearly, Almodóvar is drawing in this film to some degree on his own chaotic past. Born in the small town of Calzada de Calatrava, Almodóvar made his way to Madrid in 1968 and initially supported himself by selling used items in a flea market. Unable to attend film school, he took a job with the phone company, saved his salary, and eventually purchased a Super-8 camera. Almodóvar made a series of bizarre and entirely unconventional short films with his friends until he shot his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom y Otras Chicas del Montón (1980, aka Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom). Shot in 16 mm, the film was then blown up to 35 mm and became an underground hit, something like John Waters' breakthrough film, Pink Flamingos (1972). In What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Almodóvar chronicles the intersecting lives of speed-addicted domestic Gloria (Carmen Maura) and her husband, Antonio (Ángel de Andrés López), whose sons are prostitutes and drug dealers. Grandmother is mentally incompetent, Antonio is a Nazi sympathizer involved a plot of forge Hitler's nonexistent diaries, and the next-door neighbor is call girl Cristal (Verónica Forqué), who does little to ease Gloria's plight. All of this is played entirely for laughs, and somehow, it all works, making the characters in the film at once sympathetic, hilarious, and buffoonish, with the end result that the film resembles nothing so much as a live-action cartoon. Almodóvar's comic pacing never flags, unlike some of his later films, and he seems cheerfully at home in these lunatic surroundings, delivering one of the most satisfying and outrageous comedies of his long career. As he began to take his work more seriously, he lost much of his comic assurance; here, as a near-punk filmmaker, he creates a world of decadent exuberance that brims with contagious goodwill and absurdity. One of Almodóvar's best films, What Have I Done to Deserve This? is an excellent introduction to Almodóvar's work as a whole, and a reminder of a time when he did not take his work as seriously (often with unfortunate results) as he now does. ~ Wheeler Winston Dixon, All Movie Guide
What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Spanish: ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?) is a 1984 film by Pedro Almodóvar. The title is sometimes given with an exclamation mark at the end rather than a question mark.
The film is a slice of a housewife's life in 80's Madrid. Gloria (Carmen Maura) lives in a small and cheap apartment with husband and two children: the declared homosexual Miguel (12), who she sells to the dentist and the cocainepusher Toni (14). Her husband, Antonio, longs for a German woman he chauffeured around Germany before he married Gloria.
Gloria's mother-in-law, a frugal and unhappy woman who hides her magdalena cakes and desperately wants to move back to the country, is another addition to the poor woman's struggle. Crystal, a prostitute who lives next door, is Gloria's best friend and provides one of the few rays of sunshine in Gloria's life.
When Gloria's husband assaults her in the kitchen, Gloria accidentally kills him after hitting him with a ham leg. Her mother-in-law's lizard, Money, is the only witness to the crime. Gloria successfully evades the investigators and is never tied to the murder, although she confesses it to a policeman at the end of the film but isn't punished for it.
There are many subplots intertwined with the main narrative with characters including a writer, his beauty-obsessed wife and an impotent policeman frustrated by his lack of sexual power.
