All eight reviews are favourable, and the praise gathers in the same two places. Most critics describe the film as a fast, free-wheeling farce, and nearly all of them dwell on the colour, which they call garish, rich or so saturated it looks edible. Carmen Maura’s Pepa is singled out in almost every review as the performance that holds the scattered plot together, admired for her glamour, her resilience and her refusal to fall apart completely.
The spread is narrow and the reservations are mild rather than structural. The cooler notices find the film slighter than its admirers do. Time Out calls it looser and dream-like, a picture in which a great deal happens while little actually occurs, and The New York Times finds it deliberately benign, charming rather than shocking. Variety, reviewing at the festival stage, praises it chiefly as the most coherent film Almodóvar has made to that point. Nobody dislikes it; the disagreement is over how much the fizz adds up to.