Four years before breaking through to the world stage on a big time basis with his 1988 Oscar-nominated film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed a chunk of cinematic eccentricity about a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown. For those who Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is the ultimate expression of the filmmaker’s general weirdness, What Have I Done to Deserve This? cannot be anything but a shocking revelation.
And yet, despite the elements which may come across as questionable in taste for some and the mind-bending twists in logic and the free-wheeling elasticity of conventional storytelling ingredients like plot and character there is, underneath it all, a distinct vision. Perhaps in keeping with the eccentricity of the story, that vision is not Almodóvar. Boil down the tangential existential properties to the films primal distillation of plot and what is left is a vision plucked straight from the pages of Roald Dahl. In fact, if one were to flex some impressive biceps in the anatomical structure of their definition of “adaptation” one could make an argument that What Have I Done to Deserve This? is basically just a cinematic adaptation of one of Dahl’s most perversely ironic short stories for adults, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”
That story tells the tale of an obedient and devoted wife whose husband one day comes home from work as a cop to tell her he is leaving her. In the fog of shock at this news, the trip to the larder to fetch a frozen leg of lamb for dinner becomes a saunter to independence and revenge. The lamb becomes the weapon with which she kills her husband and the serving of the cooked lamb to his cop friends who are there to investigate the crime and are particularly baffled regarding the what and the where of the fatal blunt instrument become the mechanism of her sweet vengeance served warm.
A lot of typical Almodóvar strangeness is going on around the periphery of What Have I Done to Deserve This? including forging Hitler’s diary, a teenage son who prostitutes himself to older men, a housewife hooked on amphetamines, a taxi driver who was once chauffeur and lover of a famous singer and, because, well, of course: a neighbor’s daughter possessed of telekinetic powers. Despite all this, in the end the film comes down to a nearly identical playing out of Dahl’s plot. The nervous breakdown of our protagonist which consumes the entire film climaxes in a fit of jealousy over the husband seemingly resuming his former relationship with the singer. The biggest difference is that instead of a leg of lamb, the weapon that becomes the instrument of her wrathful vengeance is a ham. (And the fact that he’s a taxi driver rather than a cop.) Nevertheless, the cops who do arrive to investigate are baffled as they enjoy some warm soup.
It is, of course, unfair to jettison all those tangential elements surrounding a plot device created by Dahl which constitutes just a fraction of the film’s running time. The meat of the story is all Almodóvar’s, no pun intended. And, in fact, the point of engaging Dahl’s edible weaponry trope is organically related to the revolution that the husband’s death marks. One remains unsure of just what lies in store in the future of Dahl’s heroine, but in the film the husband’s death at the end of that hambone represents the end of tyranny. It is a moment that not only frees his wife, but everyone associated with him. In the absence of a man who was already an outdated model needing to be junked, the other characters are finally allowed to catch up with the passage of time and join the ranks of modernity.
Dahl gave his story a title which puns on its theme of redemption, but Almodóvar’s title cuts through the redemptive hurly-burly to get right to the point of it all. Why do some people insist upon making themselves sacrificial lambs for the redemption of others when it would take less effort just to be decent?
