Pedro Almodovar is one of the greatest living film directors, the rightful heir to Hitchcock’s throne with his mix of psychosexual driven dramas and an innovative storyteller who delivers uniquely crafted narratives. When Hulu notified me that his films were going to expire and be removed on June 20, 2017, I decided to watch all his films, including the ones that I already saw. This review is the fourteenth in a summer series that reflect on his films and contains spoilers.
What Have I Done To Deserve This? is one of Almodovar’s early films before he and his brother founded a film production company. It is available to rent or buy on Amazon Video. It is a very rough draft of Volver, but ends instead of begins with a climactic turning point, and has elements from The Flower of My Secret (the morally questionable writer and suicidal woman). It is one of Almodovar’s weaker films and lacks a cohesiveness that is present in his other films. I would only recommend it to long time Almodovar fans that are way past the point of adoration to mind a weaker entry in his oeuvre. It is a less glamorous version of a woman on the verge of a breakdown after dealing with the daily psychological, financial and physical stresses of life.
What Have I Done To Deserve This? depicts the rich fantasy lives of the characters as contrasted with the familiarity breeds contempt nature of their closest relationships. The characters fetishize anything foreign. This is one of the few films by Almodovar where there is a scene filmed outside of Spain. The central character, a housewife and maid, surreptitiously exercises at a dojo that she cleans. Her husband, a taxi driver, is fixated on German culture based on a brief affair with a German woman and fancies himself a generous romantic. The neighbor is a sex worker and family friend. She wants to go to Las Vegas.
While the family is effusive and personable to outsiders, there is nothing but increasing acrimony among them. The housewife ranks lower than a lizard in her husband’s eyes. His interest in her is plummeting, and his demands are less reasonable and more violent. He has stopped financially supporting the family while deriding her reasonable requests as luxuries while taking an ethical high ground that he actually does not occupy. Her older son gaslights her by taking her over the counter drugs and pretending that she is forgetful and criticizes her cleaning while adding to the mess. The paternal grandmother only adds to the confusion of the household and does not help by hustling her family for money in exchange for food. The only positive family relationship is between the grandmother and the older son, and she is complicit in his drug dealing and truancy.
What Have I Done To Deserve This? portrays the complete corruption and brokenness of city life. The housewife encourages her younger son to make his promiscuity work for him and even gives him away to a pedophile dentist with his eager consent. The father is a forger. The writer is an alcoholic, and his wife is a kleptomaniac. Both have no compulsion about encouraging an alcoholic relative to drink so they can financially exploit him then flinch at the idea of making sure that he is not sick. The cop can’t even be honest with his therapist and solicits the sex worker. The older son is a drug dealer who will rarely dip into his own supply. The hooker buys drugs from the older, but underage son and tries to get a discount by getting him to accept sexual services. The housewife becomes a murderer. A dressmaker is verbally and physically abusive to her daughter.
Allegedly respectable institutions are dysfunctional and stubbornly ineffective. The medical profession is exploitive as the dentist blatantly sexually harasses his underage patient. The pharmacy gives drugs that should not have been distributed without a prescription then judges a customer who is addicted. The police refuse to solve a crime even with a confession. The therapist is disinterested in his patient and incapable of dealing with his personal relationships. The writers do not actually write.
People are unable to function. A virile looking cop has a disappointing and abrupt tryst with the housewife. Self-medicating is the only way that the sex worker and the housewife are able to keep up with the demands of daily life. It could be inferred that the husband is an alcoholic, and the therapist definitely hates being sober. The grandmother is humorously addicted to carbonated water and muffins. Even depictions of sex are equated as a chore or a disappointing fantasy. For example, the writer uses the sex worker as a writing surface.
There is one emblematic shot that shows the fallen world of life in Madrid. From one side of a long shot, the landscape shows a single tree as the older son and the grandmother discover a hibernating lizard. A viewer could mistakenly believe that they are in nature. From the other side, it reveals the crowded and oppressive landscape that is their neighborhood. Madrid is an inhospitable environment for a lizard and people. What Have I Done To Deserve This? seems to be an indictment of the environment which is too oppressive for nature and natural relationships to survive without becoming deformed and damaged. The cramped apartment is a constant microcosm of this hostile environment.
The seeds of Almodovar’s return to a home village as necessary to thrive are present in What Have I Done To Deserve This? An old woman from the family’s home village appears two times, in the dentist waiting room and at the bus depot, as a kind of guardian angel suggesting that life can be easier and better though still difficult. The answer to the question posed by the title seems to be, “You left your home and the love of your community. You don’t belong here. Stop running away.”
Even though this description may sound depressing, it is played for laughs and does not feel maudlin. The most amusing part of What Have I Done To Deserve This? is the contrast between how people overlook the housewife, but she defies their expectation, and they just don’t see her. She is bubbling over with turbulent emotions and secret desires that start with an awkward, anti-climatic shower sex scene and end with her murdering/defending herself from her husband by hitting him over the head with a ham bone. She self-deprecatingly says who would hire her to be a sex worker when that just happened moments before. Her family makes impossible demands of her as a mother and a wife, but she makes it work. Almodovar is clearly rooting for her and sees her fully, including her despair and anger then gives her what she wants—a quiet, less demanding home—and needs—someone to love so she won’t be lonely.
There is a lot that does not work in What Have I Done To Deserve This? Usually Almodovar’s movies’ include television program excerpts that are more overtly germane to the plot, but in this film, they add to the disjointed and skit-like feel of the entire film. The abused daughter of the dressmaker is randomly telekinetic and uses her powers to aggravate her mom. Only Almodovar would make Carrie use her powers to renovate a kitchen. When the husband has a drink with the writer, inexplicably a group of people is watching outside as if the conversation is a tennis match. These disjointed moments are amusing, but add to the lack of cohesiveness of the entire film.
There are no trans people in What Have I Done To Deserve This? The younger son is gay, independent and actively experimenting sexually with adult men. One is depicted unfavorably as a lecherous creep, a pedophile, but simultaneously the son is in charge and using him as a way to develop his artistic interests, which his family is implicitly unable to financially support. Even though he is not portrayed as a victim, but as savvy as the neighbor, who is almost an unofficial mentor, it still made me feel uncomfortable. I can intellectually understand that Almodovar was not trying to make me feel bad for him in contrast to Bad Education, but I subjectively still felt the same. In the end, he chooses to return home because he values an emotionally nurturing relationship with his family, specifically his mother, more than the prosperous, but mercenary relationship with a stranger who is only interested in sexually exploiting him.
What Have I Done To Deserve This? defies genre classification though it is definitely a comedy. Perhaps one could call it Almodovar’s early take on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the Madrid comedic edition. This movie is one of the few films that it feels like Almodovar was not in complete control of the plot threads and characters, but What Have I Done To Deserve This? was a strong early draft of themes that he would more effectively develop in his later work, particularly the solidarity and resourcefulness of women in precarious circumstances.