"The Flower of My Secret" is from 1995, written and directed by Pedro Almodovar. It's not his best, but even a weaker Almodovar is better than just about anything out there.The story begins strangely, with two youngish men, doctors, attempting to convince a woman to let her brain-dead son's organs be harvested. It turns out that it's some sort of training. Leo (Marisa Paredes) is waiting outside to ask her friend for help. She can't get her boots off and needs help.Leo's husband is in the military. She is a writer, a famous one, though not under her own name. She uses the name Amanda Gris. She goes to see the editor of a newspaper and asks to do a literature section for him. After he reads her unpublished novel, he hires her to write a story about Amanda Gris. Later on, he tells her that a film is being made and the story is similar to the novel. When Leo's husband Paco (Imanol Aris) shows up, it's obvious that though she has a great evening planned, he does not share her ardor. And he actually isn't on leave; he just has to leave, and he does. Leo is completely devastated.This is a more serious Almodovar and, though Leo does have a nutty mother, a maid who dances, and the maid's son (a dancer/filmmaker), this isn't a film studded with Almodovar's usual assortment of eccentric characters and situations.Almodovar ties up the theme with the training we see in the beginning -- acceptance and moving on. It's a lovely story of a woman unable to free herself from her life, in the same way she can't get those boots, but who ultimately breaks loose.Though it doesn't quite succeed, "The Flower of My Secret" is worth seeing.

I'd travel half a day to see one of his films properly projected. Even though some of his fantasies are hard to connect to, he would never fail to deliver on the cinematic front. Most viewers think the story here too melodramatic and simple. It does not seem so to me. It has multiple, contradictory nestings. It has metacharacters that temporarily settle on one character or another. It has deeply accessible feminine emotions (at least by film standards), and they are allowed to go down narrative blind alleys like life has it. It has inner film, here in the form of romance novels (and war).We never really know when we are swimming in life or an image of life created in one of the fictions of the characters.But the value is never in the story, it is in how the emotional space is conveyed visually. It is hard to carry a fresh impression of an Almodovar film over the years; those impressions saturate the soul as intended. So I cannot say with authority that this is at least as amazing as his best ("Talk"). It sure seems so; there are several shots that made me watch this three times in a row.Some are a bit too literal for my taste, like the scene that accompanies her madness (med students protesting about sex in the street), or her breakup (bouncing marbles). But I expect these from Pedro. Here is an example of the better kind, an amazing shot at about 55 minutes in. Our authoress leads a double, double life. In her first full dip, she encounters her second publisher (and later ghost) who himself has a pseudonym. The shot is through a staggered glass wall. She is out of sight but there are four reflections of her, two of which are superimposed on him and his reflection. (He invites her to a screaming contest.) It is astonishing. You should know that I see four distinct layers of her being in the narrative here; it is a standard for the women in his later films.Another shot: she has been rescued by her ghostwriter and wakes up in a strange place we don't initially know. It is his bed we later discover. Our establishing shot is through a window over the bed to a several story high billboard of her latest book on a famous store's front. This is a book that she does not yet know exists. Only later do we see that the location is through a window, over a bed in his apartment with him nearby watching her in precisely the way we saw the billboard. But the remarkable thing is not that progression as well done a reveal as it is, but how it starts, with a confusing black and white blur. Only later do we discover what it was: the zebra curtains framing the window. His vision and words do this throughout his films, moving from frame to background to immersion in a reality that merges the foreground and background situations.The next major scene is a performance. We see her maid, unexpectedly as an accomplished dancer, in a seductive dance with her hunky son! It is deep and full of captured motion, though I think it would take a real Spaniard to get the full impression.We soon learn that he stole her last manuscript, one she did not like, and a film is being made of it. We know also, as loyal Pedro viewers, that the film is one of the layers of his work, a few layers of which we have just seen.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Here we have another woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown; a key theme in Almodóvar's work, and one that is treated in this film with empathy and sensitivity, as opposed to the director's usual fondness for colourful farce. Nonetheless, the film can now be seen as a real turning point in the filmmaker's career; following on from the over-the-top stylisations and outré black-humour of the controversial Kika (1993), and pointing instead towards to the more commercial and acclaimed likes of All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002) and Volver (2006). For me, it's one of the director's greatest achievements thus far; a clever narrative attached to a complicated character filled with desires and anxieties that is all captured in such a way as to prove once and for all that Almodóvar is the rightful heir to the cinematic throne of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.There are a number of subtle Fassbinder touches littered throughout The Flower of My Secret (1995) that seem particularly attuned to a similar sense of spiralling melodrama; such as the constant reliance on self-aware film references to underline key elements of the plot, and the clever use of fragmented reflections stressing the dithering uncertainty of the character and the different components of her life as it crumbles into pieces all around. However, despite such similarities, Almodóvar's cinema is ultimately his own; and The Flower of My Secret is indicative of his more mature work in its use of colour, humour, energy and flair. Unlike Fassbinder, there is a real sense of warmth to the drama here, and a real sense of vigour and immediacy that will be recognisable to viewers already accustomed to the director's keen style and approach. In keeping with this, we have the sense of kitsch and knowingly melodramatic soap-opera clichés used and eventually subverted in order to bring the most out of both the character and her seemingly hopeless situation; as she struggles with the breakdown of her marriage to a young soldier, dysfunction between her mother and sister, an unfulfilled career as a writer of vapid romance novels, and a sense of stagnation as she strives to pull the separate elements of her life back together.It's all typical of Almodóvar's approach to storytelling; filled with numerous layers of self-reference and keen elements of meta-fiction; as the themes of the story and the thoughts and feelings of the characters are underpinned and eventually abstracted by secondary elements that comment on the story at hand - while ultimately remaining disconnected. Once again, we have an Almodóvar film about a writer - in which the project she is working on becomes interlinked with the story of the film - as well a separate framing-devise about the publication of a screenplay that is essential to the plot itself. It also begins, like the earlier masterpiece Law of Desire (1987), with a scene of abstraction; in which a scene that we believe to be part of the film itself turns out to be a separate element linked to the character's job, creating a further element of self reference that is really incredibly clever.Think about this opening sequence in itself; what are we seeing? The woman is concerned about the fate of her son, who she loves very dearly. The doctors tell her that worrying is useless; that her son - although still showing signs of life - is essentially dead. He is no longer responding to treatment and his brain is shutting down. This brief vignette - which later turns out to be a training video - encapsulates the central idea of The Flower of My Secret; with the predicament of the mother and her teenage son mirroring that of the central character and her relationship with her young husband. The relationship is dead, though the woman refuses to let go. She begs and pleads and prays for some kind of return to how things used to be, but it is ultimately hopeless. The sadness of the central character consumes her to the point in which her life becomes the antithesis of the generally accepted conventions of her trashy romance novels. There's also a continual reliance on the idea of performance - be it the dance, which suggests elements of the subsequent Talk to Her, or the acting that opens the film - and how this relates to the subtle shading of the characters, their attitudes and relationships, the characters as cineasts and the importance of the pseudonym.So the film works on a number of levels, with the various shades of reference and interpretation adding to the overall effect of the story, which is closely linked throughout to the feelings of the character. It is also worth noting the truly exceptional performances from the cast, and in particular the lead performance of Marisa Paredes; one of the most affecting, heartbreaking and subtly complex portrayals of any Almodóvar work to date. It is, without question, a great ensemble piece - as is often the case with the director - but the feelings of this character, her hopelessness and the general turmoil of middle-age, loneliness and creative dissatisfaction all resonate on a completely profound level. Some viewers have found fault with the film, and that's clearly a difference of taste; however, for me, this is one of Almodóvar's best and brightest; a film filled with pathos, humour, character and emotion, all jostling for our attention within a clever script, and the always inventive direction of Almodóvar himself.

In a very short period of time I've seen several of Pedro Almodóvar's movies and I've become a fan of his work. I love his style of mixing drama with (sometimes absurd) humor and music. I like the fact that he always knows to make you feel as if you know the characters personally after seeing the movie... Having said this, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed by "La flor de mi secreto".The characters aren't as well developed as I'm used to see in his movies and it's sometimes very hard to care for his main character: Leo Macías (Marisa Paredes). As Amanda Gris (her pseudonym), she is a writer of very successful sentimental novels who deal about love, sex and happy endings. But her personal life is a complete mess. She doesn't want to write this kind of novels anymore and she gets an assignment from a magazine to write a review on the work of... Amanda Gris. Her relationship with her man isn't any good. He works for the Nato, is more abroad than at home and when he's at home he wants to leave as soon as possible. She drinks too much, her mother is a cause of many concerns... She wants to change her whole life, but it isn't as easy as she hoped it would be.Even though the story isn't bad or boring, it doesn't really succeed to be as captivating as I would like it to be. The positive thing about this movie is that you already can see Almodovár's talent for the use of humor and music, great camera work, interesting story telling... sipping through. Things that became more obvious in his later work. This movie may not be the best example of his work, but it is worth a watch. I give it a 6/10.