All About My Mother Spain, 1999 Director: Pedro Almodóvar Stars: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penelope Cruz, Antonia San Juan

All About My Mother Spain, 1999 Director: Pedro Almodóvar Stars: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penelope Cruz, Antonia San Juan Our Rating: (see more films with this rating) The Birds, ET or The Apartment are precious examples of synergetic auteur’s masterpieces executed with magic, breathless flair. All About My Mother is another. Everything you need to know about Almodóvar's ideas, themes, and aesthetics you can find in this one film, and nowhere else in his body of work does everything seem to come together with such organic, alchemic perfection. This is a divine film. Cecilia Roth plays Manuela, a single mother who works in the organ transplant section of a Madrid hospital. Her son Esteban, a film buff and aspiring writer is about to turn seventeen. To celebrate his birthday, Manuela takes him to a travelling production of "A Streetcar Named Desire", and promises to tell him all about his father, a shadowy figure whose identity she has concealed. After the show, Esteban seeks the autograph of the star, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), who ignores him and drives away. Chasing after her, Esteban is struck by a car and killed. After seeing his heart transplanted into a stranger’s body, Manuela heads for Barcelona, where she lived with Esteban’s father, to track him down and give him Esteban’s diary. There, she encounters Agrado (Antonia San Juan), an old friend who works as a hooker on the outskirts of town, and Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a HIV-positive nun. Streetcar and Huma come to town, and the film’s All About Eve subplot kicks in with a vengeance as Manuela gets a job as Huma’s backstage assistant, who just happens to know the play off by heart. Huma, a chain-smoking diva in the style of Bette Davis, doesn’t seem to distinguish between her offstage self and her role as Blanche duBois, while Manuela becomes, for a moment, a fusion of Eve Harrington and Stella Kowalski. Womanhood as performance is the key theme here. The masks the ladies wear, and their knack of discarding them for new ones whenever necessary is a recurring motif. Even the ex-male characters can rattle off lists of their step-by-step acquisition of femaleness, and their understanding that woman is a kind of permanent, self-reflexive role. In this film about women, men are relegated to the faintest of supporting roles. Manuela’s controlling ex, Esteban’s father, has ceased to be a man, while Huma is a lesbian, announcing in one of the film’s warmest scenes that it’s “been ages” since she last sucked cock. Agrado’s male clients can't seem to tell the difference between male and female, or at least, they'd like to pretend they couldn't: they want their hookers to be “pneumatic and well hung” – big fake breasts and big hard dicks. Sister Rosa’s father is in the last stages of Alzheimers, and doesn’t remember or recognize a thing. The woman-centred melodrama of Tennessee Williams and Douglas Sirk predated Almodóvar by putting the imperilled, tumultuous female on a deliriously reverent pedestal. The heroines and anti-heroines of "Streetcar", Suddenly, Last Summer, or All That Heaven Allows are glamorously flawed: their tragedy is key to their dramatic agency. All About My Mother is gleefully part of this line, but it is a superior text. Neither Williams nor Sirk ever came up with the line “I think Prada is fine for a nun” and the main characters of this movie resonate at least as deeply as their stage and screen ancestors. Circular patterns on Manuela’s wallpaper echo the circular tracks worn by preening hookers around a bonfire at the cruising ground, and Manuela’s red raincoat is later picked up by Huma’s penchant for red suits, and the dripping blood of the many IV drips that feature in the films medicinal prologue. Agrado’s tutti-frutti wardrobe provides the perfect backdrop for Antonia San Juan’s once-in-a-lifetime performance. Alberto Iglesias’ beautiful music is one of so many highlights and it is never as seductive as when Ismael Lô sings “Tajabone” when Manuela arrives back in Barcelona (itself a prelude to Roth and Paredes' cameo in Talk To Her, when Caetano Veloso sings "Cucurrucucu Paloma"). Retrospectively, All About My Mother can be seen as a fulcrum in Almodóvar’s career and his artistic development, the movie that turned him from Video-8 Spanish sex comedian into major international film maker. Before All About My Mother, we had the scatterbrained zaniness of Kika, High Heels and so on, but after, we’ve had Talk To Her and Bad Education, increasingly rich and complex movies that are light years ahead of the work being done by Almodóvar’s contemporaries, such as Todd Haynes, Quentin Tarantino and Wong Kar-Wai. Perhaps Mullholland Drive era David Lynch is the only working film maker who can now compete with Almodóvar as a film artist. Ang Lee may be another. All About My Mother won Almodóvar the directing award at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s a dazzling and glittering ode to motherhood, and we feel its every kiss, cuddle and tear. Review by Mark Adnum Related Reading: Dark Habits Bad Education Law of Desire Labyrinth of Passion Outrate.net: Homosexuality and Movies ... Re-Viewed home/film reviews/interviews/features/info contact: mark @ outrate.net