The Flower of My Secret (1996)

Just perfect...

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Fantastic!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Pedro Almodóvar can't deal with the middle-ground. He likes to speak only in the high or the low, drenching his films in vibrant, Sirkian style that has to decide whether it's dressing an emotionally tumultuous drama or a light-speeded comedy. His career, beginning in the 1980s, has been long but equipped with as many misses as hits. Almodóvar's best make for startling unison between style and substance, deliberately artificial atmosphere turning more flaming as the goings get rough; his worst still look great, but they sometimes ramble, never going anywhere and never giving the style a place to grab onto. The red trench coats, red lipstick, and red pumps of Almodóvar's distinctly feminine characters are buried in catty conversations, Joan Collins schlock tears, leaving more of an image than an impression. "The Flower of My Secret" is a quintessential example of an Almodóvar miss, absorbing in its aesthetic but distant in its ability to capture the imagination. Heavyweights like "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "Broken Embraces" rip our throats out with their passion towards screwball zeal/Technicolor noir cynicism. But lightweights, "The Flower of My Secret" being a prime example, don't allow us to think about anything besides how scrumptious everything looks. There is nothing wrong with an obsession toward visual materialization, but one can only stare at a painting before they want to move on to something that knocks them off their jaded feet.Marisa Paredes portrays Leo Marcías, a bestselling romance novelist who writes under the pseudonym Amanda Gris. Leo, though, doesn't take pride in her work like Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts. She hates it, desperate to be taken seriously but unable to publish anything meaningful thanks to a paralyzing authorial contract. It's becoming impossible to write such fantastical material, considering her husband (Imanol Arias) has no interest in solving marital problems and her closest friends seem ready to betray her at any waking moment. Finding no other way to fix the cracks that rough up her life, she decides to take a job at local newspaper El Pais as a literature critic. Well aware that she will have to eventually attack her own book, Leo finds unsettling excitement in the idea of publicly diminishing her work after years of painful gloating."The Flower of My Secret"'s story sounds ready for screwball comedy treatment, but in execution, its plot feels rather haphazard and messy, taking more time to ignite itself through speedy small talk than conversation that actually moves the plot forward. Consider the film opens with a false lead: we think we're about to watch the tragic story of a middle- aged woman losing her son in a motorcycle accident, but it turns out to be a organ donation center training video in production. Scenes like this are amusing, yet they don't go anywhere. As a whole, "The Flower of My Secret" has no problem when it comes to being compulsively watchable. Cohesiveness, identity, authenticity — those are the issues that make the film so unmistakably flawed. The characters spend a whole lot of time gabbing and tearing up, but we never find ourselves entwined in their conversations, moved by their sudden outbursts of emotion.Almodóvar, though, is incapable of making a movie that isn't stunning in its artistic vision. Photographically and directionally, "The Flower of My Secret" is visionary and eye- poppingly deliberate in its color; missing is interest that makes its look have meaning. But Parades gives a wonderful performance and Almodóvar sustains maturity — there are diamonds to be found in the candy colored rough.

Sweet, and very well acted. This is much less wild and outrageous than earlier Almodovar, but compensates by having more real emotion. Still, this has two of his usual key elements -- dramatic use of intense color, and a melodramatic, almost soapy, story. It's clear he loves melodrama at the same time he gently pokes fun at it. But in 'Flower of My Secret' the soap has more underpinnings in humanity, with subtler behavior and humor. Technically he gets even better with this film. It's beautiful, shot in a more subdued style than his earlier work. Not a great movie, but a good, entertaining, human one that paves the way to his later fully 'real' and moving masterpieces like 'Talk to Her'. Lovely performances.There seem to be two distinct groups among Almodovar fans. Those who prefer his earlier, wilder, more genre busting work, and those who prefer his more recent, subtler films. I'm in the second group, but can completely understand those who feel differently. And where you fall on that scale is likely to have a big impact on your reaction to this film.

In a very short period of time I've seen several of Pedro Almodóvar's movies and I've become a fan of his work. I love his style of mixing drama with (sometimes absurd) humor and music. I like the fact that he always knows to make you feel as if you know the characters personally after seeing the movie... Having said this, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed by "La flor de mi secreto".The characters aren't as well developed as I'm used to see in his movies and it's sometimes very hard to care for his main character: Leo Macías (Marisa Paredes). As Amanda Gris (her pseudonym), she is a writer of very successful sentimental novels who deal about love, sex and happy endings. But her personal life is a complete mess. She doesn't want to write this kind of novels anymore and she gets an assignment from a magazine to write a review on the work of... Amanda Gris. Her relationship with her man isn't any good. He works for the Nato, is more abroad than at home and when he's at home he wants to leave as soon as possible. She drinks too much, her mother is a cause of many concerns... She wants to change her whole life, but it isn't as easy as she hoped it would be.Even though the story isn't bad or boring, it doesn't really succeed to be as captivating as I would like it to be. The positive thing about this movie is that you already can see Almodovár's talent for the use of humor and music, great camera work, interesting story telling... sipping through. Things that became more obvious in his later work. This movie may not be the best example of his work, but it is worth a watch. I give it a 6/10.

In a hospital doctors announces to a woman her son is dead... She goes through a phase of denial and refuses to donate his organs for transplant. After awhile, the spectator understand all that was a training simulation. In how many of Almodovar films was this sequence repeated?Name at least two.