For years, Pedro Almodóvar’s films have deployed variations on the same narrative device: a prevailing sombre tone is carefully established, and then punctured by unexpected yet striking bursts of humour.
This is evident throughout his oeuvre: the bourgeois lady who scolds her nun daughter for interrupting her while forging Marc Chagall paintings in All About My Mother; the receptionist who phones a friend to recount the consistency of her bowel movements in Talk to Her; the father and son who go to a second-hand shop to sell everything the mother left behind when she fled the family home in The Skin I Live In.
