In Spanish with English subtitles. At the Kendall Square and West Newton theaters. A single hospital worker involved in organ transplants, she is about to experience emotions so big they can only be conveyed as a kind of baroque opera. Her story is tragic, glorious, kinky, perverse, strangely like a movie and absurdly funny.
Transplanted organs are only one of the film's wacky motifs.
Also worth noting is Almodovar's use of the color red as visual punctuation. But it ends tragically when he is killed in an accident on a rainy street in Madrid. The event sends a numbed Manuela on a journey to Barcelona in search of her former husband, a man who became a transvestite known as Lola. But Almodovar's handling of them is virtuosic. Before the end of her journey, Manuela will have another unforgettable rendezvous with death.