High Heels (Spanish: Tacones lejanos, meaning "Distant Heels") is a 1991 melodrama film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Marisa Paredes, Victoria Abril and Miguel Bosé. The plot follows the fractured relationship between a self-involved mother who is a famous torch song singer and the grown daughter she had abandoned as a child. The daughter, who works as TV newscaster, has married her mother's ex-lover and has befriended a female impersonator of her mother. A murder further complicates this web of relationships.

The film has the feel of other mother-daughter melodramas like Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life and particularly Autumn Sonata, which is quoted directly in the film.

Plot

Rebeca, a TV news broadcaster, is at Madrid’s airport anxiously awaiting the return of her mother whom she has not seen since she was a child. Her mother, Becky del Páramo, a famous torch song singer, is coming back to Spain after a fifteen-year stay in Mexico. While waiting, Rebeca recalls a holiday incident, which took place in 1972, when Becky bought Rebeca a pair of earrings and told her that she looked very pretty, the child and mother embraced. Shortly afterwards however, Rebeca found herself separated from the adults; when they found her, her stepfather jokingly suggested that she be sold to the locals. A second incident occurred two years later at home in Madrid. When Becky revealed her intentions to pursue her career in Mexico, her husband opposed her plans. Rebeca then engineered her stepfather's death by replacing his stimulants with tranquilizers just before he drove off so that he would die and leave his wife free to live her life. The girl’s expectation that, after her stepfather’s death, her place in her mother’s heart will be assured was soon dashed by Becky's decision to travel to Mexico alone, leaving the daughter behind under the care of the father. For fifteen years Rebeca has longed for her mother to come back and for the love and affection of which she had been deprived. Nevertheless, her love is accompanied by a deep resentment.