Carmen Maura
Bea is a successful architect who lives in Barcelona (Catalonia, northeast to Spain) with her boyfriend and boss, Víctor, a CEO of an important company. During a night celebration of an important contract signed to make a skyscraper designed by Bea, in the bar appears the famous TV reporter and anchorwoman Rebecca Ramos, Victor’s personal erotic fantasy. Not measuring the consequences of her actions due to the alcohol she drank, Bea makes a meeting between Víctor and Rebecca. When to the next day she wakes up, Víctor proposes to wed Bea and she accepts, but after she arrives to the job, Bea learns about a videotape where Víctor and Rebecca make the love in a car that it’s in all TV channels. In front of all CEOs during a full meeting, Bea slaps Víctor and destroys her design, being fired from the job. Looking for a break, she travels her natal coastal town, Santa Clara, just to discover that her rest isn’t so easy as it seems: her eccentric, free-spirited and eternal smiling mother …
Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) works and lives Madrid with her husband Paco and daughter Paula. Her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) lives nearby and they both miss their mother Irene (Carmen Maura), who died several years ago in a house fire along with their father. A former neighbor from their hometown reports that she has seen the ghost of Irene and both daughters do not believe her. After a murder and a family tragedy, Irene’s spirit materializes around her daughters to help comfort them.
Julia finds 300 million pesetas hidden in a dead man’s house while selling an apartment. She’s a 40-ish real estate agent now forced to face the wrath of a very peculiar community (of neighbors), headed by an unscrupulous administrator. Black humor gives way to suspense, closely followed by horror that doesn’t take long in coming to a head in undisguised pandemonium.
A young American writer completes his service in WWI and travels across Europe with his wife and her attractive Italian girlfriend. Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway.
Paris, in the early 1960s. Jean-Louis Joubert is a serious but uptight stockbroker, married to Suzanne, a starchy class-conscious woman and father of two arrogant teenage boys, currently in a boarding school. The affluent man lives a steady yet boring life. At least until, due to fortuitous circumstances, Maria, the charming new maid at the service of Jean-Louis’ family, makes him discover the servants’ quarter on the sixth floor of the luxury building he owns and lives in. There live a crowd of lively Spanish maids who will help Jean-Louis to open to a new civilization and a new approach of life. In their company – and more precisely in the company of beautiful Maria – Jean-Louis will gradually become another man, a better man.
Pepa resolves to kill herself with a batch of sleeping-pill-laced gazpacho after her lover leaves her. Fortunately, she is interrupted by a deliciously chaotic series of events.
