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?
