Roses He Read

La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of my Secret)
Dir: Pedro Almodovar, 1995

Good, maybe not great. Insightful.

Leo (Marisa Paredes) is a successful romance novelist, under the pseudonym Amanda Gris, with an absentee husband and a cracked marriage. Her publisher refuses to publish her uncharacteristically dark new novel — about a woman who hides her husband's/boyfriend's body in a freezer, after her daughter kills him when he tries to molest her (Almodovar later used the fictitious novel's plot in Volver) — because it's not the sort of thing readers want from Amanda Gris. Leo, all but decimated by her personal and professional rejections, takes the advice of her best (and only) friend, Betty, and begins writing for a newspaper, where her first task is to review Amanda Gris's latest femme fluff. Her earnest and kind-eyed editor, Angel, develops an instant crush on her and finds her new novel brilliant.

The Flower of my Secret is almost a case study of life crisis; the main plot unraveling as Leo moves through the stages of grief. She spends more than half the film in denial, with frequent visits to anger, and depression looming throughout. There is the sense that Leo's biggest hurdle is her own willful ignorance of what's very plain to almost everyone else. Her obliviousness stretches beyond her own immediate problems, as she ignores her devoted housekeeper's theatrical pursuits and the hilariously volatile relationship between her mother and sister. I'll be honest and say that I didn't really get the purpose of some of the subplots as I was watching, and only realized later that they were important to the film because they seemed so unimportant to its protagonist, thereby underscoring how disconnected Leo was from everyone's pain but her own.

Even though I wasn't as emotionally invested as I would have liked, Almodovar's direction and Paredes's nuanced portrayal did a great job of making me root for Leo. I spent the movie passively hoping she'd pull her head out of her own ass — all the while understanding why it was so hard — because I liked her, flaws and all, and wanted her to be happy. But, I didn't really ache for and with the characters the way I've done with Almodovar vehicles like Broken Embraces and Talk to Her.

The highlights, for me, were the vibrant colors of Almodovar's signature palette, which celebrate life, even as they help hue the story of a life in shambles. I also loved the mother-child bickering and the warmth and openness of Angel's character.