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A different way of telling a story

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Released internationally as 'High Heels', the actual title of this Pedro Almodóvar comedy translates as 'Distant Heels', an idea of significance towards the end of the film as events take a sharp dramatic turn. Whatever the case, summing up what exactly this film is about is not easy as it is an unpredictable ride throughout (in the best sort of way) with lots of surprise revelations and plot twists and turns; the characters also often do what we least expect of them. In short, the film might be best thought of as Almodóvar's take on 'Autumn Sonata' - which even gets explicitly mentioned - as the plot focuses on a successful television news anchor and her resentment of her diva mother who traumatised her as a child. As the plot unfolds, we learn that she married one of her mother's former beaus. Did she do it for revenge or to humiliate her mother or was it simply a coincidence? As the plot thickens and something happens to her husband, even further questions arise with regards to her intentions, and it is perhaps best not to say more to avoid ruining a fresh experience of the film. While the narrative sometimes feels all over the place and not everything that occurs is especially credible (especially the jail that seems more like a summer camp!), the film has an undeniable charm to it. Miguel Bosé also has one surefire interesting character that raises questions about personal identity and role-playing, which is part of what the film is about: the two female protagonists coming to accept their roles of mother and daughter, career aspirations and other concerns aside.

Generally considered "lesser Almodovar" by many writer/critics, "Tacones Lejanos" is, in fact, one of the director's most stunning works. This film's true themes/motif pays tribute to "Golden Age Hollywood" and it's mythic lore. Aldomovar deliberately crafted this film as "homage" to Douglas Sirk's "Imitation Of Life" and, more importantly, it's star -Lana Turner."Douglas Sirk's celebrated maternal melodrama "Imitation Of Life" also begins with a child lost at a holiday location... And the multiple parallels between the two plots are clear: both focus on the life of a mother-performer, on maternal neglect, mother-daughter strife, and incestuous rivalry over a man: in "Tacones Lejanos" Rebeca will marry Becky's ex-lover. And in the murder of a male lover shared by two women, Almodovar may also be drawing on press accounts of Turner's real-life drama which, famously and ambiguously, fed into one of her most commercially successful screen roles. When Almodovar has Rebeca tell Becky "stop acting, mother!", he is signaling a quite explicit reference to "Imitation Of Life".When Victoria Abril's Rebeca opens her handbag, Almodovar cuts to a loving close-up of its Chanel label. English-language critics have used this attention to costume and detail to attack the supposed triviality of "Tacones Lejanos", obsessed as it would appear to be with accessories. Almodovar is paying homage here to a Hollywood tradition. The production notes for "Imitation Of Life" also stress the importance of Lana Turner's gowns and jewels, valued at over a million dollars.At first sight, however, Almodovar seems merely to have retained and intensified Sirk's formalism while jettisoning his broader concerns but... Aldomovar is insistent on the lack of irony in Sirk's films; curiously so when Sirk himself and most modern critics take ironic distance to be his most characteristic response to the melodramatic material he handled so skilfully." (From: "Critical Studies in Latin American and Iberian Cultures- Desire Unlimited, The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar") "La Lana" Turner was many things to many people- but here's the "self-referencial" in Madame's "Trash Yourself" oeuvre that Almodovar pays tribute to: LANA TURNER: The Lady & The Legend- "She started in Andy Hardy kid's stuff but soon dazzled audiences in films like "Ziegfeld Girl" & "Johnny Eager". As a top WW II pin-up girl, she inspired many a man to come back home to Mama. After the war, MGM turned up the heat, transitioning her to full-on glamorous movie star in films like "The Postman Always Rings Twice" & "The Bad And The Beautiful".In 1958, Lana picked a real doozie (of a lover): small-time hood and big-time ladies' man, Johnny Stompanato, a henchman for mobster Mickey Cohen. On April 4, (her daughter) Cheryl, 14, was home from school, lucky for Lana. Johnny slapped Lana and told her ...he'd ruin her face so she'd never work again. Cheryl, hearing everything outside the bedroom door, ran downstairs, terrified, and grabbed a kitchen knife...When a movie star is involved in a crime, the last person they want to see is a cop ..."Attorney to the stars" Jerry Geisler rushed to Bedford Drive. Some say Johnny was still alive and Geisler let him bleed out. The rumor that won't die is that Lana killed Johnny and Geisler convinced her to let Cheryl, a minor, take the fall. The next day the world heard the news...The press build-up was pure Hollywood: Stompanato's funeral; Turner's insistence that he was an unwelcome presence in her life; his brother's announcement that Johnny was stabbed lying down. The coup de grace came two days before the inquest when "Lanita's" love letters to her Johnny, filled with burning desires, were plastered across front pages worldwide -a little payback from Mickey Cohen, Stompanato's pal.Geisler got Cheryl excused from the inquest and that made Lana the star of the show. And what a show. The morning of the inquest, as hundreds of fans gathered downtown, Lana's make-up and hair people were giving her the works...She entered that courtroom "camera ready" for the greatest performance of her life. In the hushed, sweltering L.A. courtroom, Lana Turner breathlessly explained how her teenage daughter came to murder her gangster boyfriend.Only the clicking of cameras could be heard during Turner's anguished 62 minute testimony... The hearing lasted three hours. The jury returned a verdict in less than 20 minutes: justifiable homicide. Mickey Cohen griped to the press, "It's the first time in my life I've ever seen a dead man convicted of his own murder. So far as that jury was concerned, Johnny just walked too close to that knife." So go figure.After all the negative publicity, Lana's career was barely affected. As the 50's neared a close ...the public created the happy ending they needed to see.And the world had one less cheap hood in it.And Lana Turner would carry on... and continued to star in films of the 60's ...two of which, "Imitation Of Life" & "Madam X", drew shamelessly on her real-life troubles.P.S. the public loved them." (condensed from an article by Laurie Jacobson.) "Life With Lana": Three generations of women lived together, on and off, for a long time. Both "Lanita" and her mother were big-league drinkers and would "go at it" at the dining room table while little Cheryl looked on. Often, diamond rings, bracelets and invective slashed the air as dinner plates flew- "Don't EVER forget who pays the bills around here -and if you don't like anything I do ...you can GET OUT!" Impotent and powerless, respectively, against that force of Nature, "La Lana" -they shut up and ate their din-din.This family dynamic (and it's consequences) is played out in variation to devastating effect in the Aldomovar film.HIGHLY recommended as a double-feature with the Sirk/Turner opus!

In our Spanish Cinema class we have watched many Spanish movies. Most of these movies were boring and had horrible endings, but Tacones Lejanos wasn't bad. Pedro Almodovar is a good director and both High Heels and Women on the Board of a Nervous Breakdown held our class' interest, and did not disappoint us too badly with their endings.

It might seem incredible to believe now that in the early 1990s Pedro Almodovar, now firmly one of the great directors, was thought to have lost his way. The films had become excessively formal they said, squeezing out character, comedy and narrative; the sexual daring had stepped over the line and become gratuitous and nasty - there is one sequence here in which a rape is treated as comic, becomes enjoyable for the victim, and produces a redemptive conception. With films like this and 'Kika', Almodovar was accused of believing his own hype, of taking the grand claims of auteurism too seriously, and forgetting about the things that had made him precious in the first place, the audacity, the iconoclasm, the fun.Now we can appreciate 'HIgh Heels' as a dry run for his masterpiece, 'All About My Mother', with which it shares some startling similarities - the daring colours, the rich compositions, the masterly camerawork; the central parent/child relationship; Marisa Parades as a performer; the themes of identity and imitation. But, while hugely flawed, 'Heels' is also an entertaining film in its own right, full of (naturally) astounding acting, perverse plotting and a gloriously full, melodramatic score.What hampers the film is its reliance on genre. Although ostensibly a typical Almodovar melodrama, visualising the emotional and sexual lives of his female characters, the plot is underpinned by a murder mystery. His remarkable 'Live Flesh' shows how genre can be used for complex, non-generic ends, but he hasn't quite got there with 'Heels'. The crime story is useful as a springboard, offsetting and bringing various crises and themes together, but just as the film is about to hit an emotional crescendo, it is weighed down by the need to tie up loose plot ends, so that a climax that should be moving and cathartic ends up in a grotesque haggling over guns and fingerprints.None of this is thematically irrelevant - the characters are as emotionally trapped as they are by generic circumstances; Paredes claiming Abril's murder, her transferring her fingerprints on the murder weapon, her dying for her daughter's sin in a religious parody, explicitely revealed in the final composition, framed and coloured like a sacred painting, all form part of the film's variations on family, the past and present, tradition and individuality, responsibility, anti-Oedipal struggles, and, especially, imitation, this latter embodied in the figure of the Judge, a man representing a monolithic institution, run by men (while the women languish in prison), who is in fact three (or more) people, his very existence a rejection of dogmatism, of the stable, certain, repressive - in the end he will marry and (unwittingly?) shield a murderer. His imitation of Paredes mirrors negatively her daughter's feelings of inferiority, that she is a bad pastiche, can't even imitate her as well as a drag queen. This theme of artifice, visualised in the sets and colours, in the mirrors and reflecting glass that splits characters into multiple versions of themselves, does not suggest the world is fake, but that people have so many complex, often contradictory emotions and desires, that they cannot possibly be contained in one, whole, identity; single identity is here equated with death, in the case of macho reactionary hypocrite Manuel. Truth even manages to subvert the fabrications of the media, with Abril's on-air confession, although its status as truth is automatically made suspect (anything said on telly couldn't possibly be true, could it?).The film is full of wonderful flourishes, in particular the musical sequences, a thrilling dance scene in the prison, heartbreaking torch songs at moments of drama-overspilling crisis. In each individual scene, Almodovar's control of all his technical tools is faultless. Put together, though, and the thing doesn't seem to cohere. It must have been the script.