Reinforcing the links between life and art, Ada's mother has left Tina to elope with a photographer. Stage life and real but through law of desire Cocteau monologue talks of the separation of the expressive pore. Almodóvar cited American painter Edward Hopper as an inspiration for the way in which his cinematographer Ángel Luis Fernández photographed Madrid. Tina's revelation of her torrid past to her amnesiac brother, although narrated but not shown, recalls Elizabeth Taylor's outrageous claims in "Suddenly, Last Summer", Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play.