The Flower of My Secret

What a strange film this is for a provocateur like Pedro Almodóvar. The Flower of My Secret is so tranquil and subdued that it nearly tips into the middlebrow provincialism that he so proudly flaunted before. There’s still a series of great female roles, populated by some of his favorite actresses, and here is a transitional film that would make a way for his richer, more mature works like All About My Mother, Volver, and Bad Education.

What really manifests throughout is how the entire film feels like an artist doing warm-up exercises for those later films. While it’s always a joy to watch Marisa Paredes tear into Almodóvar’s words, there just isn’t enough energy elsewhere to match her Douglas Sirkian heroine cracking up under artistic unfulfillment and sexual repression. The ways those two ideas combine is disappointingly left underdeveloped.

Where is the enfant terrible of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown that would’ve mined the ways in which Paredes’ Leo needs to both orgasm and escape her fluffy romantic novels as not dissimilar goals? Hell, in the future, Almodóvar would find ways to combine his anarchic jokester with the melodramatic artiste and still manage to stick in subversive bits in the glossy crying scenes. The Flower of My Secret finds the auteur nearly embarrassed by his past irreverence and trying for something more “artistic” but forgetting his major gifts along the way.  

We love the films of Douglas Sirk for their ironies not in spite of them. We love Almodóvar’s cinema for similar reasons. It’s in the ways he finds the humor and black heart in the outlandish, in the ways he deflates the seriousness of society with joyful cynicism and psychosexual provocations. This muted character piece remains one of his lesser works.