Actress Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura) tries to track down her flighty lover (Fernando Guillén) in Pedro Almodóvar’s tall glass of crazy from 1988.

We meet the theatrical characters at work dubbing old Hollywood movies into Spanish, immediately setting the tone for a screwball comedy laced with European eccentricity, like the sedative-spiked gazpacho Pepa prepares for her ex. The ensuing 90 minutes are like watching Joan Crawford on a bender, as variously spurned women face an increasingly absurd yet interconnected turn of events that include a mambo-loving taxi driver, a bed that catches fire and a Shiite terrorist cell.

The madcap farce only works in a world where regular outbursts keep driving the plot, and Almodóvar’s colourful Milan characters match his pop-art aesthetic pound for peseta. Clashing reds and kitsch decor amplify their unapologetic personalities, their emotions flying like objects through windows. The director throws chauvinistic men (“Women are not dangerous if you know how to handle them.”) and liberated women (“What do I need a man for if I have a bike?”) into a blender of sexual politics, but a feminist lawyer (Kiti Mánver) proves no help in matters of love.

With its retro style, gun-toting chase sequences and apparent frippery, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown piles on the artifice like heavy layers of makeup, but the ingredients come together with a warmth missing from the tomato soup.