One of my favourite scenes in this film takes place in the first few minutes. The grandmother (a magnificent Chus Lampreave, a “sort of female Buster Keaton”, as Almodóvar himself once said — subsequent in-line quotations are also his) offers to help Antonio with his homework. “Well”, he begins, “tell me which of these authors are romantics and which are realists. Ibsen?”: “Romantic”. “Lord Byron?”: “He’s a realist”. “Goethe?”: “Also a realist”. “Balzac?”: “Romantic. Isn’t this easy?”, says the grandmother. So why don’t we attempt the same exercise: Almodóvar, is he a romantic or a realist?

Pedro Almodóvar arrived in Madrid towards the end of Francoism. He originally came to study film, but Franco had closed the Escola de Cinema, so his (bad) education took place in the years following the end of the dictatorship, those of the movida madrileña, surrounded by people just like him: the outlaws, the punks, the cross-dressers. But he was nonetheless still a child of rural Spain. In What Have I Done To Deserve This? we meet that class of people again: rural families who have to leave their homes in search of a better life in the jungle of the cities. But what is that better life? Having arrived in the city, these families are thrown into hideous grey apartment blocks, in hideous grey neighbourhoods, which “[represent] power’s view of the basic needs of the proletariat. It was impossible to live in those places.” The interiors are claustrophobic: the camera hugs the walls, barely moves. But even in this drab world, occasionally, for no apparent reason and out of nowhere, there shines a pink light, like a filter or highlight, as in the social melodramas of Sirk and Fassbinder.

With this film, Almodóvar continued to distance himself from the raw, badly-behaved comedies of the early part of his career (and, according to him, his audience began to look at him with different eyes: “He’s modern, but he has feelings too”). “This film re-establishes the link with Italian neorealism, which I like a lot as a narrative form. For me, neorealism is a subset of melodrama whose specificity comes from the emphasis it places on social conscience, and (…) the way it removes all the artificial aspects of melodrama (…).”

“In What Have I Done To Deserve This? I replaced most of the codes of melodrama with black humour.” A grotesque humour, even surreal. There was already space for comedy in neorealism, but perhaps here we are closer to those directors who came later and who mixed in somewhat grotesque elements of comedy into their dramas of Italian life: Fellini, Scola, some Pasolini, films featuring “those domestic women (…) always shouting at their kids, badly dressed, unkempt, confronted by all manner of problems.”

But this affiliation with neorealism does not mean the film is any less omnivorous. Writing about a later work, one journalist would observe that its screenplay would be enough for ten Hollywood films. Almodóvar is always putting ten films in just one. But all of those genres, all of those narrative and visual codes, never come across as references: while he may be a voracious cinephile who writes so well about different films, these are not mere winks at other filmmakers. Films, songs and books appear here because they evoke something about his characters, because they were seen and heard and read by Almodóvar himself, who is in all of his characters: who is the film itself. For instance: Antonio goes to see Splendor In The Grass (1961) and the film evokes his state of mind; just like Warren Beatty, he also wants to leave school and go to live in the countryside. His escape is thus outlined.

Indeed, everybody here is trying to escape. The grandmother, fed up of the cold in Madrid, wants to move back to the village. Gloria’s husband listens obsessively to an old German song and daydreams about his old employer. Miguel, the younger son, sleeps with the father of a friend before moving in with a dentist (and here there is no hint of moralism). Cristal, neighbour and prostitute (Verónica Forqué, an embodied painting, the third side of the triangle in this film of actresses), is learning English to help her succeed in Las Vegas. Even the lizard climbs out of the window, but that’s another a story.

And Gloria? Is she allowed to escape at all? She is addicted to amphetamines, which she takes in order to cope with the housework, her many jobs, her sexual frustration, the collapse of her family, the hardship and ugliness of everything. Carmen Maura could easily fall into caricature amid such destitution, but she’s more intelligent than that. Gloria is the film’s centre of gravity: everything about her has to be tragic, as if all of her problems exist only to confirm the misery that is her lot in life. Almodóvar recounts that when Carmen Maura saw the film, she said: “My God, how cruel! How can people laugh at such an unfortunate person?” It’s a very Spanish sensibility, brutal like Goya or Buñuel. But when faced with a grotesque image reflected in a mirror, we may ask ourselves whether it is the reflection that is distorted, or whether the mirror is accurately reflecting a reality that is itself already distorted. The mirror is the question. All these worlds, all these reflections in Almodóvar’s mirror, appear to be both invented and meticulously observed. Or vice-versa. I asked earlier if Almodóvar was a realist or a romantic. I would accept both responses.