‘¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?‘ (or ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?‘) made in 1984 is one of the films of the first decade of Pedro Almodóvar‘s film career, if I did not miss the count it is his fifth feature film. The director, who in his youth had no money to study film and any way had nowhere to do it because Franco’s regime had closed film schools, was trying in the early 1980s his talent and was satisfying his thirst to make films, experimenting with forms of artistic expression and was testing the limits of the freedom recently acquired together with his country just out of the deep sleep of the dictatorship. ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?‘ does not look at all like a beginner’s film, and even if it does not yet have the fullness and artistic perfection of his best films later it undoubtedly looks like an Almodóvar film: bold, human, funny, colorful, autobiographical, and in plus the main characters who catch the director’s interest and win our hearts are women. All the signs of his immense talent are already present.
The main heroine of the film is Gloria (Carmen Maura), a married woman who lives in a crowded suburb of Madrid and works from morning to night in housework to support a family composed of a lazy taxi driver husband who is interested in all kind of scams and fakes, a cultured and illiterate mother-in-law (yes, there are such people, at least at Almodóvar), two boys, one of whom is a drug dealer and the other is gay, to whom a lizard is added for a while. Gloria’s only friend is Cristal (Verónica Forqué), a creative prostitute (another Almodóvar brand). Also part of the plot is a writer who dreams of publishing Hitler’s fake diaries and a few cops. An overworked, hysterical, grotesque, pathetic, disoriented world, in which everyone seeks her or his own happiness, refuge or simply tries to survive. Only some of them succeed.
Nothing happens as we expect and as we know it in our everyday universe. Almodóvar‘s world has its own logic. The director takes us in an absurd and colorful cinematic experience and an emotional one, perhaps naive but permanently authentic. The heroes of his films are characters that we can rarely meet in everyday life, but with whom we can identify without problems. The acting interpretations are magnificent, especially that of Carmen Maura who seems to be descended directly from one of the Italian neo-realist films made two or three decades before. ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?‘ it is a film that we can enjoy even today, whether it is the first viewing, or we see it again 36 years after its production. It still keeps evident (in music, in cinematography) many of the elements of popular cinema from which Almodóvar was inspired, but it filters them, processes them and offers them to the spectators in a form not yet seen on Spanish and world screens. A recommended viewing.