CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
THE brilliantly coloured and designed credit titles for=20 High Heels (1991) are shots of high-heeled shoes which=20 in the film come to be associated with the world of=20 fashion and show business, as well as with=20 impersonation and performance. These are replaced with=20 shots of revolvers, and so murder and mayhem are=20
A third series of shots shows a viewfinder and camera=20 which announce that this is a film by the Spanish=20 director Pedro Almod_var. His presence as a movie-lover=20 is constantly felt in the film which may be read both=20 as a biting commentary on the media and as an exercise=20 in intertextuality.
The most obvious reference is to Alfred Hitchcock’s=20 Rebecca. Through the use of extensive flashbacks,=20 Almod_var describes the rivalry between a mother and=20 daughter: Becky (Marisa Paredes), a nightclub=20 entertainer, and Rebecca (Victoria Abril), a television=20 announcer who has married her mother’s former lover.=20
As Almod_var explores a rivalry in the present which=20 has its source in the past, so his treatment of the=20 transference of guilt is Hitchcockian in thrust. To her=20 mother, the daughter says: “I’ve spent my life=20 imitating you.”=20
In one of several confrontation scenes, there is an=20 explicit verbal reference to Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn=20 Sonata and there is also a death bed sequence which=20 echoes Bergman’s film. A murder is preceded by sinister=20 shots of an unattended hosepipe and rustling leaves in=20 an amusing imitation of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
When the mother tells her daughter that “nobody’s=20 perfect”, the memorable last line of Billy Wilder’s=20 Some Like It Hot is recalled. These words are=20 particularly apt in the context of Almod_var’s concern=20 with sexual role-playing and identity.=20
One of the film’s important settings is the Villarosa,=20 a bar where a transvestite called Lethal, dressed in=20 glittering shades of red and in high heels, does a=20 deadly imitation of Becky.=20
Closely associated with this alternative society is=20 Judge Dominguez, who is in charge of the murder case.=20 In a number of hilarious scenes, he is assisted by his=20 invalid mother who is convinced that she has Aids, and=20 who avidly keeps a photo album of famous stars and=20 descriptions of their activities. Almod_var draws=20 attention, as he does in so many of his films, to the=20 intersection of law and impersonation.
The murder investigation is entangled with television=20 studios, the theatre, newspaper reporters and=20 photographic shops. The murder weapon itself is hidden=20 in a TV set and the murderer makes a nationwide=20 confession in a news broadcast.=20
The film is extravagantly funny: Becky exchanges an=20 earring for one of Lethal’s falsies; Rebecca discovers=20 that Lethal has “got a mole on his cock” — this detail=20 is important in the murder investigation — and she=20 gets more than she bargained for. To one character who=20 has a tendency to murder the men who get in her way,=20 another character says, without a trace of irony: “Find=20 another way of solving your problems with men.”
Almod_var has stated that it is his intention to reach=20 audiences through “their hearts, their minds and their=20 genitals”. He is successful enough in the last two=20 categories, but High Heels fails to touch the heart.=20
Many of the scenes between mother and daughter are=20 mawkish rather than moving, but the film’s high style=20 and wit are more than adequate compensation.