What Have I Done to Deserve This?

A darkly comic tale of female victimisation and retaliation.

Pedro Almodóvar's fourth collaboration with Carmen Maura finds her playing against type (and almost unrecognisable) as Gloria, the shattered glue-sniffing housewife. Set amidst Madrid’s towering council estates, Gloria is flanked by a stingy mother-in-law, a beastly husband, a Barbie doll prostitute neighbour, and rent boy and drug dealer sons. Little wonder she’s driven to murder – with a ham bone!

On release the New York Times noted that the film “has something of the dark comedies of Buñuel, Berlanga and Italy's Mario Bellocchio, but its flavour is really all its own. And Carmen Maura is Mr. Almodóvar's secret weapon: grave, put upon, curious funny, Woman Outraged, she carries the whole picture.”

Almodóvar's take on urban family life remains one of his most naturalistic work by far, alternately criminal, funny and moving.

– Kristy Matheson, Director of Film Programs