Though still trading in kinky characters and aberrant behaviour, Women on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown is at heart a farce in the tradition of Billy Wilder.

Distraught by the break-up with her actor boyfriend Ivan, pregnant actress Pepa prepares a gazpacho laced with sleeping pills. She is however saved from suicide by her best friend Candela, a fugitive from justice. Pepa's ex-lover's gown son arrives with wife-to-be Marisa in answer to Carmen's "room to let" newspaper ad. Marisa inadvertently ingests the gazpacho and as she blissfully snoozes, her fiance inaugurate's an affair with Carmen's fugitive friend.

Garnering Almodovar an Academy Award nomination, Women is stylish and consistently ingenuous cinema that showed the director daring to depart from his previous feature, the wildly successful Law of Desire.