Pedro Almodóvar | Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) / 1983

beloved obsessions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits) / 1983

 

What’s a seedy cabaret singer to do when, after bringing her lover a new batch of heroin, he immediately drops dead? Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) pulls out a calling card left her by the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano) of an eccentric religious mission, Redentoras humilladas (the Humiliated Redeemers) and seeks entry to the order to escape the police.

 

    If the set-up might remind you a little of Barbara Stanwyck’s situation in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire (1941) or even of Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act (1992), be not afraid. These sisters, having a long history of offering shelter and redemption to fallen women have picked up the “dark habits” of the previous prostitutes, drug addicts, and murderers who have made their home previously in the little convent in which they reside, a place now very much in disrepair. And the Mother Superior, a great admirer of Yolanda, provides her with the order’s very best room, formerly inhabited by another wayward girl, Virginia, who became a nun and ran off to Africa only to be eaten by cannibals.

      Virginia was apparently the daughter of a wealthy man who for years subsidized the convent, but he has died and his wife, the totally selfish and mindless Marchioness (Mary Carrillo) is just announced her attention to stop their subsidy, which along with the significant drop in their number, will surely doom the convent. Those who remain, having given themselves ugly names to remind them of their sins—many of which they still actively participate—Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave), Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), and Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas) are delighted to have since an obvious sinner among their midst, their first new visitor in a long while.

      The Wikipedia entry very nicely summarizes the sisters’ contributions and perpetual moral turpitudes.  

“The nurturing Sister Damned compulsively cleans the convent and coddles all the animals under her care, including an overgrown pet tiger that she treats like a son, playing the bongos for him.  The ascetic Sister Manure is consumed by thoughts of penitence and corporal self-sacrifice and cooks between LSD hallucinations. She murdered somebody and as the Mother Superior lied under oath to save her from jail, she is very devoted to her. The over-curious Sister Sewer Rat gardens and secretly, under the pen name Concha Torres, writes lurid novels about the wayward souls who visit the convent. She smuggles the novels out of the convent through her sister's periodic visits. The unassuming Sister Snake, with the help of the priest, tailors seasonal fashion collections for dressing the statues of the Virgin Mary. Her piety is a cover up for her romantic love for the chain-smoking chaplain. The mother Superior is a heavy drug user and a lesbian, whose charitable work is a means of meeting needy young women. She admits, ‘From admiring them so much I have become one of them.’”

       Yolanda quickly makes friends of the nuns and, as one might expect, the Mother Superior almost immediately falls in love with her. They enjoy their time together consuming coke and heroin until one day Yolanda determines to free herself of drugs, which for the Mother Superior only confirms her sinfulness.

      During her withdrawal, Yolanda turns to Sister Rat for friendship, trying to keep the Mother Superior out of her bedroom and, a bit abstractly, out of her private affairs.

       Now faced with Yolanda’s rejection and more threats of closure, having failed with a blackmail letter revealing information regarding Virginia and the Marquise, the Mother Superior decides to go on an even greater mission of drug trafficking to order to keep her order up and running.

       In danger, now, of losing the order, the nuns determine to throw a special celebratory party of their Mother Superior, convincing Yolanda to sing at the affair. In a far less traditional manner than in Sister Act Yolanda and the other sisters sing in honor their leader, with the Marquise herself in attendance.

       Having helped the Marquise to obtain a letter from Africa informing her about her long-lost grandson who has been raised by apes, the selfish old woman has become fond of Yolanda and Sister Rat, grateful for their help. And when at the end of the party The Mother General, visiting the order, announces that the convent will be dissolved, the Marquise invites Rat and Yolanda to live with her.

       Sister Damned decides to retreat to her native village, leaving her pet tiger to Sister Snake and the Priest, who now openly in love, determine to start their family with the tiger as their son.

       Only Sister Manure remains behind to help Mother Superior to recover from all of the disasters facing her, the end of the order and the loss of Yolanda. But then, it appears, she soon has larger matters regarding to drug smuggling to attend to. Perhaps she will find a new vocation which might put her in a better financial state.

       Originally, so the story goes, Almodóvar was asked by multimillionaire Hervé Hachuel, to create a film starring his current girlfriend, Cristina Sánchez Pascual. Setting up a new production company called Tesauro Production, he commissioned the Spanish director to produce a film. In Frederick Strauss’ book, Almodóvar on Almodóvar (Faber and Faber, 2006), the director himself has described what story he had created:

 

“I came up with the story of a girl who drives both men and women wild, a girl who sings, drinks, takes drugs, occasionally goes through periods of abstinence and has the extraordinary experiences one would never have, were one to live a hundred years....”

     And later: “While writing I had in mind Marlene Dietrich's work with Josef von Sternberg, especially Blonde Venus (1932), where she plays a house wife who becomes a singer, spy and prostitute, who travels the world living a life of never ending adventure.”

 

     Dark Habits was Almodóvar's third film, a work rejected by the Cannes Film Festival and treated as a scandalous affair by both members of the Italian and Spanish press for it’s supposed sacrilegious treatment of religion as well as its blasphemous and anti-Catholic views. From the director’s point of view, it represented a change in tone from his two previous films, wherein the characters’ emotions, by which they are fully driven, are presented more clearly. Yet he did not see the film as anti-religious as much as a representation of figures who had moved away from God, directing their energies more towards those suffering and in misery, particularly women—the major subject of numerous Almodóvar works. Their actions, the director argues, in some respects echoing the views of Luis Buñuel and even Robert Bresson, is closer to the original and truer visions of religion both in their ability to love and even become themselves sinners in order to fully appreciate the nature of sin. And like Buñuel, in particular, Almodóvar chose the comic, clothed in lurid Douglas Sirkean color, as the best representation of their extreme and eccentric undertaking.

     Today, many critics, including myself, feel it to be one of the best of Almodóvar's early works.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).