Screen:

...The lead is Carmen Maura, who plays the first mistress, assertive, mature, thirtyish, but still prancing about in tight skirts and desperate enough over her desertion to try anything...

...Like a Dickens novel, Pelle seems to have an unfocused middle...

...Toss in several pistols, the police, some ducks (pets of one of the characters), then add gazpacho (laced with a dose of sleeping pills...

...On the other hand, the penthouse view also supplements the high-spirited giddiness that results when every possible catastrophe is narrowly evaded...

...Besides the fine screenplay, the film has a strong cast and production design...

...As the 'mother of the killer' I can tell you, nothing gets clothes whiter," she says, then holds up some bloodstained shirts...

...A wildly carpeted and outfitted taxi keeps showing up, and characters keep wandering to the edge of Maura's airy terrace, which literalizes the "verge" between their rational and irrational behavior...

...A deliciously absurd comedy of errors...

...TOM O'BRIENess...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...The emotional force of the movie is sporadically intense-a result of moving back and forth from identification either with the father's consciousness of failure or the son's brave dreams...

...Like Babette's Feast, another Danish production, Pelle the Conqueror's photographic style is at once stern and splendid...

...These shots, symbolic but not heavy-handed, become the stuff of Pelle's dreams of flight-as a hearty farmhand worker who becomes Pelle's father-substitute tells him-to "the real world, America, China, negroland.'' August also photographs a blonde, blue-eyed Danish girl (Kristina Tornqvists) wrapped in blue-and-white neckerchiefs and scarfs that make her natural frailty seem more delicate...

...Pelle, his son (Pelle Hvenegaard), is a spirited lad who has to make his way in this harsh world, fully loved but hardly protected...

...Despite his comic view of female jealousy, he also provides sympathy for the women, satire on machismo, and evena "feminist" end-though the word itself is exploited for one of his best laughs...

...The pathetic desire of this former mountain of a man is simply "coffee in bed on Sunday mornings...

...She is supposed to work as a TV actress famous throughout Spain as ' 'the mother of the killer" on a ludicrous pop serial...

...Her skirts are always red, and so too that potent gazpacho...

...but, lumped together, they sometimes disperse the feel of the film...

...Maura's face matches Almodovar's pace: she's so deadpan, almost lazy, you never expect her next absurd caper...

...At first, Almodovar is slow at developing the story, but a hint of the bizarre humor to come occurs early, when Maura, depressed, watches herself on a TV commercial...

...The film was awarded best screenplay at the 1988 Venice Film Festival...

...Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown shines as one of the best comedies of 1988...

...There is some truth to the comparison and the charge...

...The secondary characters are sketched with swift precision...

...Pelle has been compared to long novels by Dickens, what Henry James snooted at as "loose, baggy monsters...

...Its center is Max von Sydow, roughhewn and red-faced, as a weak, aging Swedish immigrant struggling to make a new life as a farmhand in nineteenth-century Denmark...

...Despite the beauty, the film often feels diffuse, especially when other subplots involving tensions between the estate owner and his alcoholic wife, and the bestial life of one of his illegitimate sons who cowherds nearby are drawn into the film...

...Scarlet dominates, perhaps for symbolic purposes...

...Timing is all in such affairs, and Almodovar provides it with plausible but uproarious misdirections, accidents, and coincidences...

...surely few films since Tootsie have blended such art, insight into the sexes, and engaging silliness...

...It's a gorgeous little piece of blackly humorous mock-heroic, a tone that dominates the entire film...

...Strongly acted, exquisitely shot, Pelle is a powerful ode to time and the north wind, which you almost feel blowing through the screen...

...In the ad, she attests to the power of some new detergent...

...This double-jointed sympathy is diluted by a screenplay that, faithful to a novel by Danish writer Martin Anderson Nexo, sometimes contains too many tangents...

...The plot of the film covers the day she is jilted and stays pretty much in her penthouse apartment where everyone sooner or later shows up, spinning off little chain reactions of mock-disasters and mini-explosions...

...The color is a strong key for the film-not only with bloodstained shirts, but glitzy bright appliances such as Maura's ominous red telephone that she waits by, hoping for a last call from her lover...

...But Almodovar avoids a one-note repetition by using other strong visuals...

...Beginning with the first scene Director Bille August also employs evocative shots of ships coming in and out of ocean mists, as if from a Nordic seascape by the Romantic master Friedrich...

...The farm is set in a cold, but beautiful setting of wide fields surrounded by desolate forests and a forbidding coast...

...The result...

...There he endures prejudice and hard labor on an estate owned by a philanderer and managed by cruel taskmasters...

...it also brings its multiple subplots to a grand, climactic narrative closure...

...A moment later, they are sparkling clean...

...SCREEN ICE & FIRE 'PELLE' & 'WOMEN ON THE VERGE' Pelle the Conqueror, winner of the 1988 Cannes Festival Palme D'Or, is an old-fashioned, classically made film that risks boredom for the sake of conveying a deep richness...

...Spanish Director Pedro Almodovar, who also wrote the screenplay, here concocts a stylish highbrow farce made up of an odd collection of eccentrics: a middle-aged womanizer, his wife, his most recent mistress, his brand new mistress, his son, his son's fiancee, and a girlfriend of mistress number one who falls straight from the arms of an amorous terrorist into the lap of the already engaged son...

...Maybe Almodovar's humor should be termed red, not black...