It was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown that cemented Pedro Almodóvar’s reputation as one of the great European filmmakers. The film manages to combine the technical brilliance of the director Almodóvar was becoming with the emotional seriousness of the director he had once been.

The first thing to understand about Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is that it is not just a comedy but a traditional farce involving people making passes at each other, people getting mysteriously drugged, and people entering into a wealth of more-or-less plausible romantic misunderstandings. Almodóvar regular Carmen Maura plays Pepa as a woman of incredible strength and intelligence who is just about managing to keep herself sane as her emotional universe begins to implode. Indeed, much of the film’s comedy comes from the way that Pepa deals with her problems by allowing her internal chaos to spill out and begin infecting the real world.

Aside from being incredibly funny and full of lovely little moments, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is also a supremely well-made film in which the camera is always swooping across sets, peering through broken glasses and generally borrowing everything from Hitchcock’s toy box. It is here that we really see Almodóvar’s progression as an auteur, as while his previous film Law of Desire showed a similar level of technical sophistication, it seemed to have been achieved at the price of the emotional sophistication and moral seriousness that characterised his earlier films. In this respect, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a true return to form as the film develops all of its supporting characters and revels in their intersecting lines of passion, desire and madness.