Taglines: Every woman has a secret…
The Flower of My Secret movie storyline. Marisa Paredes is Leocadia (“Leo”) Macías, a woman writing popular romance novels under the pen name Amanda Gris. Unlike her romantic (“pink”) novels, her own love life is troubled. Leo has a difficult relationship with her husband Paco (Imanol Arias), a military officer stationed in Brussels and later in Bosnia, who is distant both physically and emotionally.
The film starts with Leo writing about the feeling of having lost her lover, a feeling that she compares to the pain of a tight pair of boots that she can’t take off. Almodovar took for this first part of the film strong plot elements from Dorothy Parker’s short story The Lovely Leave.
Leo begins to change the direction of her writing, wanting to focus more on darker themes such as pain and loss, and can no longer write her Amanda Gris novels. However, her publishers demand sentimental happy endings, at least until her contract is up. She begins to re-evaluate her life through her relationship with her publishers, her husband, her best friend Betty (Carme Elías), her “crab-faced” sister Rosa (Rossy de Palma) and her bickering elderly mother (Chus Lampreave). Only her maid (played by flamenco dancer Manuela Vargas) appears steadfast. She also meets Ángel (Juan Echanove), a newspaper editor who quickly falls for Leo and her writing.
After having signed a contract with the newspaper El País, Leo tells Ángel that she can’t write romances anymore, and that she has written a dark (“black”) novel about a young mother whose daughter kills her husband because he tried to rape her. After that, the corpse of the dead man is hidden in a refrigerator. Although Leo throws this story out, she later learns that someone is turning it into a movie. (In fact, Almodóvar himself created a movie based on this same plot, “Volver”, released eleven years later in 2006.)
The Flower of My Secret (Spanish: La flor de mi secreto) is a 1995 film by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. The film was selected as the Spanish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 68th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
The Flower of My Secret (1995)
Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Marisa Paredes, Juan Echanove, Carme Elías, Rossy de Palma, Chus Lampreave, Kiti Mánver, Joaquín Cortés, Gloria Muñoz, Manuela Vargas, Nancho Novo
Screenplay by: Pedro Almodóvar
Production Design by: Esther García
Cinematography by: Affonso Beato
Film Editing by: José Salcedo
Costume Design by: Hugo Mezcua
Set Decoration by: Miguel López Pelegrín
Art Direction by: Wolfgang Burmann, Miguel López Pelegrín
Music by: Alberto Iglesias
MPAA Rating: R for language and brief sexuality.
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Classics
Release Date: March 8, 1996
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