Pedro Almodovar Takes A Serious Stab At The World Of Women In Love. By Stacey Richter THE FIRST TEN MINUTES of almost any movie contains some sort of conflict--it's a filmmaking rule, designed to hook the audience. Usually it's a murder, a fight, a kidnapping, a car chase or an explosion, but in The Flower of my Secret (La Flor De Mi Secreto), the latest film from Spanish golden-boy director Pedro Almodovar, the story begins with a refreshingly mundane problem: Leo (Marisa Paredes), a middle-aged wife pining for her absent husband, has put on a pair of boots he gave her, and she can't get them off. Almodovar, known for his unconventional, rule-breaking style, has almost gone normal with The Flower of my Secret. He's suppressed his customary unpredictability in favor of the conventional elements of melodrama--love, betrayal, a woman in tears--all with a disquieting undercurrent of illogic. For example, after Leo struggles with her boots for a while, she tries in vain to contact someone to help her out. Her maid has the day off, her husband is in Bosnia, so she goes to her friend Betty's workplace to ask for aid. There, Betty (played by Carme Elias) scolds her for being so fragile and unable to take care of herself, a characterization that sticks to Leo for the rest of the movie, though all evidence points to the fact that Leo is practical, not fragile. Her boots hurt, she couldn't get them off so she asked a friend to help: What's so unsteady about that? The Flower of My Secret continually stacks well-observed and arresting bits of everyday life next to melodramatic moments and illogical turns of character so that it becomes tempting at times to lose patience with the trials of the heroine. Leo is desperately in love with her husband Paco (Imanol Arias), a sexy but cold fellow who joined the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia to escape the rubble of his failing marriage. Though his wife still loves him to distraction, he's pretty much sick of her. On his only day of leave he drops by just long enough to tell her their marriage is finished. The next day her best friend drops some more devastating news. Much of the story chronicles Leo's journey from a frightened, dependent wife to a confident and self-sufficient woman, and the ride can be a jerky one. Her initial self-hatred takes many forms, including drinking and drugs, but the most interesting dig involves her dual identity. She writes romance novels under the name Amanda Gris, and one of her first tasks at her new job as a literary critic is to pen a scathing critique of her own work. Here, again, we are met with illogic, or at least a significant gap in the world of the film. Leo's repulsion at writing "pink" love stories with happy endings is understandable in light of her failing marriage, but her stubborn need to remain anonymous as the enormously popular author of the Amanda Gris novels is never explained. Almodovar is fascinated by the idea of dual identity, and the theme of hiding oneself, or having a secret self, is threaded throughout the film without ever addressing the central question: Why on earth is Leo so adamant about maintaining her secret identity? We never get close to learning, though a friend of hers, an Amanda Gris fan, does find out who she is--"the flower of her secret" he calls the discovery, quoting Amanda Gris. The way this phrase is a perfect romance novel, euphemistic double-entendre for all things vaginal, is never really dealt with, in the same way that the melodramatic aspects of the film are never really processed. With all the love-sickness and betrayal, Almodovar is clearly taking his cue from the great Hollywood melodramas of the forties, but it's unclear if The Flower of My Secret is an homage to the form or a take-off on it. Almodovar's comic sense is suspiciously absent here, and it's difficult to tell just how serious he is about all this. This question might not come up with any director other than Almodovar, who is known for portraying a ribald, out-of-control world in films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Now that he's strayed into serious territory, it's difficult to decide whether to take him seriously or not. The Flower of my Secret opens Friday at The Loft (795-7777) cinema.

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