REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)

By: Vanessa Berry
May 21, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? | PEDRO ALMODÓVAR | 1985

In the apartment building, beside the busy motorway, the elevator is out of order. That means there are five flights of stairs to climb, carrying the heavy shopping bags. Once inside, despite the bright patterned wallpaper and ornaments decorating the rooms, the apartment feels dingy and claustrophobic.

The occupants — mother, father, two teenage sons, grandmother — all have a particular dream of how life could be different. For now, their desires have been funnelled into vices: popping NoDoz, forging Adolf Hitler’s handwriting, or hoarding bottles of mineral water. In the barren park beside the apartment building, the grandmother takes her drug-dealer grandson foraging for sticks, to add to a collection she keeps in her wardrobe.

This high weirdness was as intoxicating to me as the bubbles in the grandmother’s Catalan mineral water. A story of unhappy families and transactional relationships, What Have I Done to Deserve This? was a wild combination of camp, depravity and suburban entrapment. I saw it on television, my chance late-night introduction to Almodóvar. It was broadcast on SBS, the network that screened ‘world movies’, courting Australian cinephiles and teenagers like me, restless for glimpses of other ways that life could be. Bizarre, taboo-shaking, digressing into subplots like a soap opera, this was unlike any other film I’d seen before. I both wanted to be in that world, and couldn’t think of anything worse.

Poor Gloria, the mother, her every exasperated movement seeming to ask the question of the film’s title. She mops the floor, loads the washing machine, does the shopping, and goes to cleaning jobs in which she continues the same round of domestic chores in bigger, grander apartments. Her husband, the forger taxi driver, incessantly pines after his long-ago employer/girlfriend; the sons sell drugs or turn tricks. The neighbours are also ruled by obsessions: the dominatrix next door dreams of a life of stardom in Las Vegas; upstairs, Juani fixates on domestic order but is thwarted by her daughter Vanessa, who uses her telekinetic powers to break vases and wreak revenge on her mother for her lack of love.

To escape a bad life, you need something extra. A dream of future fame, or a drug to deaden things for a while. Failing that, you could develop telekinesis, and I took no small amount of delight in the fact that the girl with these powers shared my name (later, re-watching, I’d press pause on Gloria’s subtitled line ‘Vanessa, you’ve got powers!’). Ultimately, it is the grandmother who makes the best of her situation. A wiry figure in widow-black, her eyes magnified behind thick glasses, she finds delight in a unique set of comforts. “I like fairy cakes, the cemetery, plastic bags, money…’ she says, a statement of purpose for the benefit of her grandson as they walk back to the apartment from the desolate park where they go to search for sticks. It works, too, as a material summary of this film, that is all at once a fairy tale, murder mystery, and kitchen sink melodrama.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)

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