(2005; The Flower of My Secret, Spanish, French) After twenty years of churning out sentimentality, the successful writer of romance novels, under the pseudonym Amanda Gris, Leo Macías (Marisa Paredes) wants to break out from her stifling genre into "pain and grief," with a new title, Cold-Storage Room, a murder mystery, taking it to a different publisher, El País newspaperman Ángel (Juan Echanove), without revealing her famous identity.

A huge fan of Amanda Gris's fiction, Ángel, who has composed imitative romance manuscripts, initially dismisses what he assumes to be a middle-aged novice writer before recognizing she has talent and becoming romantically fascinated with her. He has a habit of quoting from cinema, such as The Apartment and Casablanca.

Meanwhile, Leo's marriage to Lt Col Francisco "Paco" Arcos (Imanol Arias), absent as a member of the NATO force in Bosnia - "There's no war that compares to you" - and emotionally distant, is on the rocks; she wears something belonging to him everyday as a reminder of him, but one day can't get his tight boots off her feet.

Director/writer Pedro Almodóvar's comedy, like a shoe several sizes too large, never fully took hold of my attention. However, the opening scene of two doctors attempting to convince the mother of a brain-dead teenager that the boy is for all intents and purposes deceased and that his organs could be harvested with her permission to save other lives is funny.

The bereaved mother is actually Manuela, a nurse, acting the part for a video being produced for an organ-transplant organization for which Leo's only friend Betty (Carmen Elias), a psychologist, consults. Betty has transplanted her heart into Paco's affections.

Also the acrimony between Leo's cantankerous mother Jacinta (Chus Lampreave), who is going blind - "lost like a cow without a cowbell" - and wishes to leave Madrid for her native village, and her other daughter Rosa (Rossy de Palma), whom she calls "crabface," in whose home she resides, is risible.

Threatened with a law suit by Fascination, her long-time former publisher (watch for an inside joke based on Juan José Otegui's name, playing the part of Tomas), for breach of contract, Leo also discovers that her manuscript has somehow become a script for a new movie.

Her Gypsy housekeeper Blanca (Manuela Vargas), formerly a professional dancer, and Blanca's son Antonio (Joaquín Cortéz) form a dancing partnership, endeavoring through their art to resolve the cruel and paradoxical conditions of life, as Ángel, in possession of Leo's secret, provides the ingenious, unexpected gift of disentanglement.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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