Dark Habits (1983, Pedro Almodovar)

54/100

Avoided this for many years because it looked like non-stop Fallacy of the Profane Granny. Nuns snorting coke and shooting heroin! A convent decorated with Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch pin-ups! There's a tiger roaming around for some reason! And all of that's not not somewhat tiresome for me, truth be told. But I was surprised to discover that Dark Habits isn't especially comedic, that its sinning Sisters aren't really played for laughs. Julieta Serrano maintains the Mother Superior's dignity throughout, and her character arc is essentially...well, "tragic" is too strong, but it certainly ends on a flat-out despairing note (that to me bordered on needlessly cruel). Marisa Paredes radiates grim severity even while Sister Manure (speaking of which, those names become less cutely "transgressive" when it's revealed that they serve a mortifying religious function) is tripping balls. And while Carmen Maura and Chus Lampreave are allotted theoretically wacky business—the latter's sideline as a pseudonymous writer of trash novels comes closest to producing detectable jokes—Almodóvar directs them to be much more naturalistic than outrageous. (I confess to being fearful for Maura's personal safety a lot of the time, despite knowing that she went on to star in numerous subsequent Pedro joints, and that might have stepped on the intended humor. Was that tiger declawed? If not, the feeding scene appears to have been genuinely dangerous, no matter how well-trained the kitty. It keeps grabbing at the bowl and by extension her!) Hints of Almodóvar's future maturity, which I'd say truly kicked off with The Flower of My Secret, keep cropping up, but mostly this early effort just seems oddly noncommittal. File under unsuccessful but interesting.

ANAL-RETENTIVE DIACRITICAL CORNER: Strangely, Almodóvar's surname is unaccented in this film's credits (opening and end). I initially assumed that they'd decided to eschew diacritics for that wacky font, but no, the very next credit includes the word "producción," and there are numerous accented lowercase o's (and other letters) thereafter. Did he add it after hearing too many foreigners refer to him as Almodovar? That used to be a common mispronunciation when he broke out in the U.S. with Women on the Verge (and his earlier films flooded into theaters as well).