The Flower of My Secret (Spanish: La flor de mi secreto) is a 1995 film by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.
Plot
Marisa Paredes is Leocadia ("Leo") Macias, a woman writing “pink” romance novels under the alias of Amanda Gris that are very popular all across Spain. Unlike her romantic novels, her own love life is troubled. Leo has a less than happy relationship with her husband Paco (Imanol Arias), a military officer stationed in Brussels then later in Bosnia, who is distant both physically and emotionally. The film starts when Leo writes about the feeling of having lost her lover, a feeling which Leo compares with the pain of an uncomfortable pair of boots that she can't take off.
Leo begins to change the direction of her writing, wanting to focus more on darker themes such as pain and loss, and can no longer write her Amanda Gris novels, whose publishers demand sentimental happy-endings, at least until her contract is up.
She begins to re-evaluate her life through her relationship with her husband, her supposed best friend Betty, her "crab-faced" sister Rosa and her bickering elderly mother. She also meets Angel (Juan Echanove), a newspaper editor who quickly falls for Leo and her writing.
After having signed the contract with the newspaper El País, the editor realises that instead of a pink novel, Leo had written something very different from that. Leo, confesses that she forgot writing pink novels, and that her sentimental situation led her to write a black novel about a young mother whose daughter kills her husband because he tried to rape her. After that, the corpse of the death man is hidden in a refrigerator (It's casually the same plot as the future film "Volver", released eleven years after this film).
Leo went to the apartment where her sister Rosa (Rossy de Palma) and her mother (Chus Lampreave) live. There, Leo sees a very comical scene between them. After that, she went where her best friend Betty lives. There, Paco, her husband makes a phone call talking about his situation during the Bosnia and Herzegovina wars.
When she was writing at night, Leo received again, a phone call by Paco, who tells her that he had permission to see her for 24 hours. After hearing this, Leo's humour changed suddenly and starts preparing all for the visit. Once Paco arrives, Leo sees that her husband's behaviour is strange, and that he tries to avoid her. Finally, he tells that actually, he hadn't 24 hours of permission as he said before, In fact, he confesses that he had only two hours. After hearing that, Leo got really angry and sad. That sadness is bigger when Paco goes to his mission again, telling her that there's no way to save their relationship.
Drowned by an intense pain in her heart, Leo took an overdose of tranquimazil, and fell asleep in her bedroom. Three days later, she hears the voice of her mother who proposes her to go to Almagro, a little village to spend some weeks, but still possessed by an unbearable pain, she started walking alone in the street, being surprised by a doctor's strike. there, Angel saw her and he decided to take her to his home. After telling to Angel her sentimental troubles, Betty, her friend decides to tell her that she is the new lover of Paco, a traumatic revelation that Leo was suspecting.
Finally, Leo, decides to go to Almagro with her mother. There, she tries to recover from all what had happened, something that she partially got. In that village, she receives the phone call of her editor who tells her that a film based on her unpublished black novel was being shot. This fact made her return to Madrid, where she meets Angel again, with whom she starts falling in love. Then, after seeing an artistic representation starring by Joaquín Cortés, she returns to her home again. There, Leo receives the visit of the dancer, who confesses that he stole the papers from her unpublished novel, to give them to a film director.
Starting to feel recovered from her sentimental crisis, she goes to Angel's home, with whom she confirms her love for him.
