By Coral Gables Gazette staff

Before Pedro Almodóvar became one of Europe’s most internationally celebrated filmmakers, he was a provocateur from La Mancha making small, gaudy, deliberately outrageous films in a newly democratic Spain still testing the limits of its freedom.

The film that changed that — turning a cult figure into an international name and introducing wider audiences to a young actor named Antonio Banderas — screens Saturday, June 20, at Coral Gables Art Cinema. Nearly four decades later, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown remains the moment Almodóvar arrived.

A comedy born of a new Spain

To understand the film, it helps to understand the country that produced it. By 1988, Spain had spent little more than a decade as a democracy, emerging from the 36-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco into an explosion of color, nightlife and personal freedom centered on a newly liberated Madrid.

Almodóvar captured that release more vividly than almost anyone. His riot of reds and pinks, sexual frankness and affection for characters living outside respectable convention amounted to a kind of national exhale.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was his eighth feature and the film in which his visual style fully crystallized for international audiences. Much of the story unfolds in Pepa’s penthouse apartment, a built environment of reds, oranges, glass, telephones and improbable urban views. The apartment is not just a setting. It is a pressure cooker, a theatrical stage and an emotional weather system.

Madness, mayhem and a pot of gazpacho

The plot is screwball farce wired to melodrama. Pepa, a voiceover actress played by Almodóvar’s frequent collaborator Carmen Maura, is abandoned by her lover Iván with little more than a message on her answering machine. Distraught — she has already set the bed on fire — she resolves to confront him.

Her apartment soon fills with an escalating parade of eccentrics: Iván’s ex-wife, newly released from a long stay in a mental institution; his grown son, played by Banderas, and the son’s fiancée; and Pepa’s best friend Candela, who has discovered that her own lover belongs to a Shiite terrorist cell. Somewhere in the chaos sits a pitcher of gazpacho spiked with sleeping pills.

The result is a comedy of romantic panic, missed calls, mistaken identities and women trying to retain control while the men around them prove unreliable, absent or beside the point.

The critic Pauline Kael, an early American champion of Almodóvar, called the film “one of the jauntiest” war-of-the-sexes comedies. The opening, in which Pepa and Iván dub the Spanish voices for Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Western Johnny Guitar, announces the film’s method from the start: movie love filtered through melodrama, camp, speed and color.

Why it endures

The film became a phenomenon. It won five Goya Awards, including Best Film, earned Almodóvar his first Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and helped launch Banderas toward an international career. It also cemented the rotating company of performers — Maura, Banderas, Rossy de Palma, Julieta Serrano — who would populate Almodóvar’s world for decades.

What keeps it on screens is the thing critics have kept returning to: the women drive the film, even as chaos consumes everything around them, while the men recede to the margins of their own drama.

Seen now, Women on the Verge is both a time capsule of a country remaking itself and a comedy that has lost little of its velocity. The phones may be landlines, the answering machine may be central to the plot, and the colors may belong unmistakably to the late 1980s. But the emotional machinery still works: rejection, performance, friendship, jealousy, embarrassment and the desperate need to be heard before the next disaster arrives.

If you go

Coral Gables Art Cinema will present Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as part of its repertory programming, screening the film in Spanish with English subtitles. The showing offers a chance to see Almodóvar’s breakthrough in the form that best suits it — on a large screen, in saturated color, with an audience.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988, 88 minutes, rated R, in Spanish with English subtitles). Saturday, June 20, 5:45 p.m. Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Tickets $8 for members, $11.75 for nonmembers. CoralGablesArtCinema.org.