Dark Habits - Analysis

Analysis

Comparing Dark Habits with his first two films, Almodóvar has suggested there is a change of tone and that the emotions are expressed more clearly and the characters are driven by them.” In short, it is a deeper and more serious film; but he has denied that it is antireligious. The nuns, he has pointed out, have moved away from God and now direct their energies towards those people who live in misery- fallen women and the like. This, he implies, is true religion: to be able to love the sinner and, indeed, to become like the sinner, for only then can one appreciate the nature of sin. The implication of the film is that men and women have to be loved and accepted in all their imperfections – a view which links Almodóvar to Luis Buñuel, particularly in Viridiana, where the eponymous nun finds that, for all her idealistic intentions, she cannot change the nature of mankind.

Dark Habits has a variety of cinematic influences. The Franco regime, strongly supportive of the Catholic Church, had promoted sentimental films, such as Sister San Sulpicio and Marcelino, Bread and Wine, in which goodhearted priests and the like figured prominently. Together with musicals and light comedy in which nuns appeared, they were part of a propaganda attempt to make Spanish cinema feel good and new. The film was also influenced by the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The romantic and often sentimental qualities of his films are evident in Dark Habits. The film also owes something to the Hammer horror films of the 1960s and the 1970s, though Almodóvar has said he was influenced less by their subject matter than by their dramatic colors and their unsettling baroque atmosphere. He has also made the point that, for him, melodrama is a form in which love and passion are the driving force which oblige individuals to do the most extraordinary things, whether they be appalling or wonderful.

Music, as in all Almodóvar’s major films, also has a significant role. The bolero, regarded by him as expressive of great emotions, is used at key moments to underpin both the mother’s superior feelings for Yolanda and Yolanda’s feelings for her. They sing along with Lucho Gatica’s bolero: Encadenados (Chained together).

Reminiscent of Robert Bresson's Les Anges du Péché, Almodóvar's idiosyncratic fusion of highly formalized, often surreal visual imagery (saturated primary colors, muted and diffused lighting, kitschy interiors) and comedic melodrama serves as a thematic foil in order to explore crisis of faith and the innate hypocrisy and encroachment of secularism in institutional religion: the ironic reunion between the successful call girls and the destitute nuns selling an odd assortment of goods (cakes, flowers, and peppers) at the market; the melancholic and sentimental ballad of unrequited love and loss that covertly expresses the Mother Superior's spiritual crisis; the convent's crumbling structure that figuratively manifests the nuns' moral decay; Yolanda's facial imprint on a handkerchief that serves as a tawdry surrogate relic for the Shroud of Turin. Through the convent's bizarre and misguided attempts to spiritually reconnect through escapism, distraction, and illusion, Dark Habits reflects the inherent incongruence and corruption of seeking redemption and existential purpose in an increasingly chaotic, amoral, and hedonistic world.