What Have I Done to Deserve This?
Wed Aug 16, 2017
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
An ordinary housewife navigates the usual working-class suburban life of deadbeat husbands, mad mothers-in-law, sex-worker neighbors, and child pandering in Almodóvars taboo-smashing send-up of the social realist drama, redone as crazed, John Waterslike comedy. Whether crushing her husbands head with a ham bone, selling her youngest son to a dentist, or helping out the kindly dominatrix next door, Gloria (Carmen Maura) may not be a typical maternal figure, but its all she can do to survive. One of the eighties biggest cult hits, What Have I Done is an absolutely wonderful black comedy (New York Times).