ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) ****

Reviewed 11/19/99

The melodrama in Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother could make even Almodovar's idol Douglas Sirk blush. All About My Mother however is no mere wallowing in tear-jerking. Its emotional power is earned by a great cast under Almodovar's precision direction. The film is a welcome return to form for Almodovar, whose 1990s films, while being more than passably watchable, have never felt truly inspired. The Flower of My Secret and Live Flesh were stiltingly self-serious while Kika and High Heels were just doddering. With Mother, Almodovar returns to the lighter and more colorful tone of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown while attaining a level of poignancy that film never reached. Mother is both funny and touching.

After attending a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, thirty-eight year old Manuela (Cecilia Roth) watches in horror as her seventeen year old son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), is mowed down by a car in the rain. (The tragedy is heightened by Almodovar's decision to shoot the boy's last moments from his POV.) Deciding to tell Esteban's father, whom she hasn't seen in eighteen years, about his son, Manuela sets out for Barcelona. There she meets her old friend Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transexual prostitute, who introduces her to pregnant nun Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz) to help Manuela get a job. However, without Rosa's aid, Manuela becomes the personal assistant to Streetcar actress, Huma (Marisa Paredes), earning the ire of her fellow actress and lesbian lover, Nina (Candela Peña). Before Manuela can even find Esteban's father, now a transexual called Lola, she finds herself a surrogate mother to all those around her.

The material embodies Almodovar's John Waters-like respect, if not outright love, for society's outcasts. Roth is brilliant as Manuela coping with tragedy, never letting the performance descend into cheap schmaltz. San Juan is the primary comic relief as Agrado who gets to detail all her plastic surgery for an audience after a cancelled Streetcar performance. The adorably beautiful Cruz, who seems to be one of the hardest working actors in Spain right now, is wonderful as the nun who fights with her mother and struggles with the fact that her Alzheimers-ridden father no longer remembers her. Rarely has a work of art that invokes so much tragedy simultaneously generate so much joie de vivre. And Almodovar does it not so much with his old outrageousness as with little glances and subtle reactions by the actors and the all-encompassing compassion that is the theme of the film. It is a film that venerates women, perhaps too ideally (though not as much as in Marleen Gorris' Antonia's Line), but it does so not for what is but what is hoped for. Mother does have trouble finding an ending, but considering all that has come before it, that is forgivable.