Pedro Party: The Outrageous "Dark Habits"
Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 12:07AM We're celebrating Pedro Almodóvar all week. Here's Nathaniel R on Dark Habits (1983)
Julieta Serrano and Marisa Paredes in DARK HABITS (1983)
It's a Pedro Party! For the next week we'll be celebrating the career of the great auteur Pedro Almodóvar. We were just discussing which male actors we'd love for him to work with but let's let the official party begin with one of his nearly all-female efforts Dark Habits. His 1983 "pelicula" is about a cabaret singer Yolonda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) who is hiding out in a convent of wacky nuns. But let's not confuse the movie with Sister Act because it would eat that 1992 comedy and then apologize sheepishly over a cake and acid dessert...
The nuns are of a renegade order known as The Humiliated Redeemers where the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano) is a lesbian heroin addict. Her nuns have taken self-deprecating names like Sister Rat (Chus Lampreave), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), and Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes) and that's just the Almodóvar regulars! Though this was only the director's third feature his repertory was already forming.
The order is obsessed with the fallen nature of man and Christ's love for sinners. They feel intense nostalgia for the days when their convent was a haven for prostitutes, murderers, and addicts.
Like most of Almodóvar's later work, Dark Habits is novelistic in its approach, positively teeming with page-turning incident, multiple character arcs, and elaboratedly conceived minor characters -- there's no such thing as a small part in an Almodóvar picture (unless the character has a penis).
a mysterious letter from Africa arrives...
Character stories rub up against other character's stories fighting for dominance, and within each story lay other stories like nesting doll traps. Some characters become storytellers during their own drama to fill us in on previous stories we weren't privvy to. Other histories or offscreen subplots are referenced in hilariously matter-of-fact fashion no matter how outrageous. Dark Habits has a doozy in the fashion of the latter: the nun's convent is under financial duress because their primary beneficiary has died and his wife doesn't feel as sentimental about the convent which once housed her daughter who became a nun and was eaten by cannibals in Africa. 'You know how these things happen,' I type with a deadpan shrug.
a young Cecilia Roth appears in a stunningly suggestive cameo
In truth I found the barrage of character perversions, backstories, and darkly comic fatalism fairly dizzying, as if I needed a crash course in Spanish cultural history to understand exactly which socioeconomic, sexual, and religious buttons it was pushing. But apart from lacking cultural context (I didn't live through the early 80s in Madrid and can't hope to understand the Franco era's aftermath) a lot of Dark Habits more surface dramatics and comedy are easily understood. In addition to the outrageous black comedy of nuns shooting up or moonlighting as trashy romance novelists, Dark Habits has plentiful pleasurable actressing. Though Cristina Sánchez Pascual (in her third and last Pedro picture) is frustratingly blank in some key moments, there's nothing quite like a nun's habit to frame the pure cinema of faces like Julieta Serrano's (the film's MVP as the repressed lesbian junkie). Maura, Lampreave, and Paredes are all typically terrific and never funnier than when playing bongos and backup in the film's deeply silly climax.
Though Dark Habits lacks the jawdropping beauty and dramatically satisfying finesse of Almodóvar's later work it's still entertaining in its own raggedy outrageous way.
P.S. And frequently bandaged Carmen Maura shares her scenes with the convent's pet tiger because why not?
Reader Comments (7)
Oh, one of his very best, it resonates with sheer truth and love for its characters
Lampreave's full name is Sister Alley Rat. I don't understand why the translator omitted that.
Cristina Sánchez Pascual was the wife of the producer. That explains everything, right?
The boy in the picture is Micky Molina who will later appear in Law of Desire.
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It's funny that, being spanish and living in Spain, my "Dark Habits" DVD is the UK one, so I can show it to my foreign friends when visiting us. This is the turning point movie for Almodovar, to my taste, the one that made him clearly start an artistic career beyond the "spanish John Waters" stigma. Great performances all around, and a huge step forward, on all fronts, over "Pepi, Lucy, Boom" and specially over the horrid "Labirynth of Passion" which seems a mess, to me. Haven't seen that in 20 years, so maybe I should recheck it, with newer eyes... never got the cult following of "Labirynth of Passion", but certainly I love "Dark Habits" for what it is, the promise of a great filmmaker with ambition.
Easily one of my favorite Almodovar films. It's offbeat but so entertaining from start to finish as I think it's the first great film in a series of greatness from Almodovar.
This is actually one of my favorites of his! I hope only that Criterion gets around to releasing it, even if it's a triple feature with his previous two efforts.
Something about this one that hooks me every time... And that final shot of Serrano is just godly. He knew what to do with gifted actresses even then, though I agree, with this and What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Pedro was starting to truly come into his own.
The "tripping" scene in the kitchen and the discovery of the sleazy romance novels make me urinate from laughter every single time. That and Manure's introduction as she's eating the cake. Hahahaha!
Perfection.
One of the greatest films of the 1980's and most certainly the absolute very best nun picture since BLACK NARCISSUS!