"THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET" (1995 ; R)

Director Pedro Almodovar has created a traditional “women’s picture” -- but with the sort of twists we expect from the "bad boy" of Spanish cinema. Marisa Paredes plays a writer of romantic best-sellers who finds her marriage falling apart and her career threatened.
This is Almodovar’s celebration of female maturity and old-fashioned romance. His heroine, fearing she’s over the hill sexually and creatively, engages in self-indulgent moping. But by movie’s end she has become a heroine in every sense of the word, a character in whom we invest our hopes, fears, and desires and whose happiness we desperately care about.