High Heels (Spanish: Tacones lejanos) is a 1991 melodrama film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes and Miguel Bosé.
The plot follows the fractured relationship between a self-involved mother, a famous torch singer, and her grown daughter she had abandoned as a child.
He had spent the evening first with his mistress, Isabel (Rebeca's sign language interpreter on the news), and then with Becky, who came to break up on discovering his infidelity to her.
A social worker, Paula, takes a special interest in Rebeca; like her, she is heartbroken, grieving the loss of her boyfriend, Hugo.
Rebeca confesses that fifteen years ago, as a child, to be closer to Becky, she murdered her stepfather by switching his medications.
They rush to the hospital, where Becky asks for Rebeca’s forgiveness for her selfishness and determines to take the blame for Manuel’s murder as redemption.
High Heels was a tour de force for two essential actresses of the "Almodovarian universe": Marisa Paredes and Victoria Abril.
His idea was to find songs that would correspond to a singer such as Becky del Páramo, both at the start and at the end of her career.
[5] "Piensa en Mí" is a very famous song in Mexico,[5] composed by Agustín Lara and sung by Lola Beltrán.
"Un año de amor", which Letal sings in playback during his performance, is a French song by Nino Ferrer.
[5] "Piensa en mí" and "Un año de amor", the songs that Casal performed for the film, were both included on her album A contraluz, released in 1991.
For the title sequence and Rebeca's second confession, Almodóvar used pieces composed by Miles Davis in the 1960s, which were inspired by flamenco.
[6] After her second confession to Judge Dominguez, when Rebeca goes to the cemetery to throw a handful of earth on her husband's coffin, we hear the second piece, "Saeta", by Gil Evans, from his Sketches of Spain album.
High Heels, Almodóvar's ninth film, was co-produced by El Deseo and Ciby 2000 and released in Spain on 19 October 1991.
[9] It eventually came second, in terms of box-office takings, to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) among Almodóvar's films released up to that point, with a gross of €5.2 million.
[13] Writing in Dirigido Por, Antonio Castro felt that Almodóvar's desire to create a more straightforward narrative had merely led to a greater loss of vigor.
[13] Angel Fernandez Santos, in El País, concluded that, in comparison with Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), which he regarded as an Everest, High Heels was a mere hill.
[13] David Thomson of Sight & Sound concluded that in general, High Heels did not measure up to much of Almodóvar's earlier work.
[13] For him, the homage to the other films – including Autumn Sonata – "is counter productive, for it merely suggests the inferiority of High Heels".
[16] The New York Times' critic Janet Maslin wrote that "High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively.
The intended film would have been a variation on the classic play The House of Bernarda Alba by García Lorca, and would have been set in rural Spain, not in Madrid.
[20] With its tense mother–daughter dynamic, it also pointedly nods to Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), though in that film it is the mother, a businesswoman, who obsessively loves her daughter.
[22] The narrative charts the reuniting of a long-absent mother with her daughter, and their competition over men (one man in particular) and professional success.
[22] The omniscient narration, typical of melodrama, allows suspense only in terms of how other characters react to revelations the viewer anticipates.
The investigative role of Judge Dominguez is further undermined by the fact that his motivation is love for the murderess Rebeca, rather than solving the crime.