What Have I Done to Deserve This? |  | Actors: Ángel de Andrés López, José Manuel Bello, Beni, Diego Caretti, Verónica Forqué
Studio: Fox Lorber
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.95
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Rating:  18 reviews
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: Spanish (Original Language), English (Subtitled)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 101 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.5 x 0.6
MPN: FLVD5387D
ISBN: 0794203914
UPC: 720917538723
EAN: 9780794203917
Theatrical Release Date: March 30, 1985
Release Date: September 9, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Studio: Genius Products Inc Release Date: 05/08/2007 Run time: 101 minutes Rating: Nr
Amazon.com
Pedro Almodóvar scored his first international hit with What Have I Done to Deserve This?, cementing his reputation as Spain's bad-boy director of darkly comedic melodramas. Many of the themes that dominate Almodóvar's later films are evident here, especially his sympathetic affection for downtrodden women like Gloria (Carmen Maura), an exhausted housewife who's addicted to No-DÅz tablets and spends 18-hour days cleaning apartments and tending (just barely) to her teenage sons (one deals drugs, the other offers sex to local perverts), neglectful husband, and looney-tunes mother-in-law--all of whom have a particular knack for getting on her nerves. Toss in a prostitute neighbor, an accidental murder, and a pet lizard named "Money," and you've got the makings of a soap opera by way of Luis Buñuel and John Waters, served up with Almodóvar's distinctive blend of compassionate humanity and kinky outrageousness. --Jeff Shannon
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
 Black humor, but not very funny January 7, 2009
Bradley F. Smith (Miami Beach, FL)
This satirical film goes by with no laughs while posing as a comedy. It's only when you think about what's on the screen, that you see the darkness. Aldomovar hits a lot of vices here: sex, drugs, child molestation, prostitution, murder. Yet, none of these normally titillating topics seem to go very far here. The film sits there and washes past you. What does it all mean? That's up to you, but it's a typical European film with ambiguities and things left unsaid that seem momentous, but which may not be, in reality. Interesting views of working class life in Madrid that tourists don't see.
 A brief comment November 23, 2008
magellan (Santa Clara, CA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am new to Spanish absurdist films, having come to this film through a recommendation from a more knowledgeable friend.
This is one of Almodovar's earlier films, but you can already see he truly has a gift for outrageously dark comedy. In this completely demented portrait of a wacked out working class family, Almodovar shows a deft and original touch with his material. He never slips into moralizing or into pathos, although a lesser director easily could have with such a tragic, dysfunctional family. But Almodovar never veers from the dark humor and absurdity of the situation.
The movie revolves around a desperate, harried mother who works as a cleaning woman, unsuccessfully trying to help support her family when her husband's income as a cab driver isn't enough to make ends meet. She is the only normal person in the film, being surrounded by family, neighbors and friends who are dysfunctional, perverse, criminal, or just plain nuts, as in the eccentric granny who keeps a pet lizard named "money" and who lives with the family.
The movie weaves together a number of bizarre side plots, such as a forger with a kleptomaniac wife who wants to fake some of Hitler's letters to a mistress, and who wants to enlist her husband's help with this scheme. An impotent policemen investigates a murder, and her two sons are up to no good, also. The older is a drug dealer who makes more than both of his parents combined, while the other doesn't mind being peddled to a local dentist in exchange for a far more luxurious way of life than his family can afford. Almost everyone in the family is trying their best to drive the hapless mother crazy.
Despite the flawed nature of most of the movie's characters, Almodovar shows a great deal of sympathy for them, even the neglectful husband who is still obsessed with a relationship in his past, and the prostitute neighbor who shows up at all hours in ever more outrageous outfits.
I enjoyed this film and look forward to exploring Almodovar's filmography in more detail. He is a skilled and perceptive observer of the human condition with his own unique and darkly satirical slant on things.
Definitely Worth Watching June 16, 2008
Michael LaRocca (Chiang Mai, Thailand)
One reviewer has reassured me that I was not alone in one experience here. After I'd seen the whole thing, parts that didn't make sense came into focus. That's a very enjoyable experience. In between, it's manic and clever and just fun. It's very different from the usual Hollywood fare, and it's wonderful.
Quirky Pedro Almodovar flick! May 2, 2008
John P. Ward (New York, NY United States)
This is one of Pedro Almodovar's earlier efforts from the 1980's and it is weird and quirky and funny! I loved seeing it again after all these years!
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Una familia dysfunctionala February 23, 2008
Gregor von Kallahann
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Black comedy doesn't necessarily have to be "about" anything in particular: it really just needs to express a certain cynicism (healthy or not) about contemporary life and culture. Pedro Almodovar's earliest films have often been described in such terms, but I'm not entirely sure that's correct. Absurdist, to be sure, skeptical--if not completely cynical--certainly, but even at his bleakest, there is a basically loving spirit on display. He shows genuine affection for his characters, even the ones who don't seem to actually deserve it (the chauvinistic husband in this film, for instance, is still shown as a basically principled and decent-in-his-way sort).
It may well be that Almodovar's affection for, as well as his compassion toward, his characters is what grounds his absurdist comedies and what serves to make them more "grey" than completely "black." I've read that he refuses to pronounce judgment on his characters, no matter what kind of trouble they create for themselves or others. One senses that much in this relatively early film (his first international success). Individual viewers may draw their own conclusions (as we all do in real life) about individual characters in the film. I find it a strong point, rather than a weak one, that different viewers will come away from this film with differing impressions of the dramatis personae.
One of Almodovar's favorite leading ladies Carmen Maura appears here as the harried working class housewife Gloria, who's struggling (pretty much in vain) to maintain her family and her dignity by working 18-hour days (the drudgery of "women's work" has seldom been more graphically displayed). Her husband and two sons are anything but supportive, each aware of Gloria's plight on some level but each choosing to remain demanding and difficult and capable of driving this particular woman towards a nervous break-down.
As readers of previous reviews may know, Gloria's husband is a taxi driver whose meagre earnings are not enough to support the family (although it may just be that he refuses to give his wife the money she needs to run the household, it's never made 100% clear). Her adolescent son is already pushing drugs and her pre-teen son is hustling older men. Theirs is a dysfunctional family with a capital "D."
The film's very absurdity would seem to guarantee that most viewers would NOT take its characters actions TOO seriously. But it is interesting to see how some reviewers have commented on Gloria's willingness to hand over her son to the "care" of an obvious pederast (his dentist, who promises him enough to eat and music lessons--to say nothing of free dental work--in exchange for, well, you know). That little plot twist, as well as the neighbor child's CARRIE-esque psychokinetic abilities should make it clear that we are entering the realm of the absurd here.
One of the most intriguing elements of Almodovar's work is his ability to create a zany alt-universe that has its own internal logic and sort of makes sense while we're viewing it. That's certainly the case with this early work (although I could have done without the psychokinesis myself, an effect which almost undermines the bizarro logic of the film). If Almodovar had never gone on to better things, this effort would be a fairly entertaining, quirky indie flick that might have some cult following. It probably would not have been required viewing in anyone's book, however. Given the significance of Pedro Almodovar's later work, though, it can certainly be considered essential viewing for scholars and admirers of the "bad boy" of Spanish cinema.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
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