Film
All About My Mother
- Director
- Pedro Almodovar
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 99 mins
In 1999, Pedro Almodovar returned to his old stamping ground (pregnant nuns, mouthy transsexuals, transvestite prostitutes – you know the score), bringing his newfound maturity to bear on a moving tale of female solidarity and maternal grief.
Manuela (Cecilia Roth) works as a transplant co-ordinator in a Madrid hospital, often playing the role of a bereaved mother in workshops showing doctors the most tactful way to get permission to harvest organs. She enjoys a particularly close relationship with her 17-year-old son Esteban, but has never been able to satisfy his curiosity about his father. In a cruel twist of fate, Esteban is run over and killed while waiting to meet actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), who stars as Blanche DuBois in a touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire, leaving Manuela to play her familiar role for real. Unable to continue in her work, she returns to Barcelona for the first time in 18 years to tell Esteban’s father Lola about the son he never knew existed. The journey takes Manuela back to her – and, indeed, Almodovar’s – past as she hitches up with flamboyant former best mate/chick-with-dick prostitute La Agrado (Antonia San Juan) and lands a job with Rojo, whose production has reached Barcelona. But the trail that eventually leads to Lola is littered with emotional devastation.
In earlier years, Almodovar would have used these characters as mere vessels for his curiously unshocking, frenetic cartoon “outrageousness”, which rarely failed to amuse. Here, the openly gay director’s familiar theme of sexual confusion receives a more thoughtful, empathic treatment, acting as a springboard for an ambitious exploration of love and friendship, sex and death. That he does this without making sacrifices in the humour department, or getting all pious on us, is a testament to the directorial skill his detractors always claimed he lacked. None of this would have been possible without a bunch of universally excellent performances, Cecilia Roth’s determined mother, Antonia San Juan’s resilient transsexual and Penelope Cruz’s vulnerable nun taking the honours. You might balk at the plot’s coincidences, find the ending a little too neatly symmetrical, and be astonished when Lola turns up looking like a refugee from Velvet Goldmine, but you’d need a heart of granite not to be swept along by the emotional intensity of it all.
is needed now More than ever
It’s back on screen in the Anglican Chapel as part of Arnos Vale Cemetery’s Life, Death (and the Rest) festival. Go here for tickets and further information
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