BFI - page title here for accessibility

All about My Mother

Spain/France 1999

Reviewed by José Arroyo

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

Manuela is a single mother living in Madrid. She takes her son Esteban on his seventeenth birthday to see a production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Huma Rojo. Moved by the performances, they wait for autographs. Manuela, who has told Esteban nothing about his father except that he died before Esteban was born, confesses she once played Stella to his father's Stanley. She promises she will tell him more once they return home. Huma and her co-star Niña appear and board a taxi. Running after Esteban is hit by a car. He dies and Manuela donates his organs. Later, she decides to honour Esteban's last wish by going to Barcelona to find his father and tell him about his son.

While looking for Esteban's father at a pick-up place, Manuela helps a transvestite being beaten up by a punter. The transvestite turns out to be La Agrado, who 20 years ago had lived with Manuela and Esteban's father - also called Esteban before he had a sex-change to become Lola the Pioneer. La Agrado tells Manuela she took in the sick Lola only for her to run off with La Agrado's belongings. While Manuela finds a job as Rojo's assistant, La Agrado decides to change her life and goes to see a nun, Sister Rosa, for counselling. Sister Rosa was impregnated and infected with HIV by Lola. Manuela nurses Sister Rosa through her pregnancy, the birth and eventually her death. Lola finally appears, ravaged by Aids. The child is born HIV+. Manuela decides to bring up the child, who is named Esteban. Before Lola dies, Manuela presents her with the newborn Esteban and tells her about the dead one. Later, the third Esteban has neutralised the virus naturally.

Review

The title of Almodóvar's latest film is inspired by All about Eve. Like Eve, All about My Mother is about actresses and relationships between women, but its focus is on mothers. Here mothers are like actresses in that they can symbolise, embody, educate, improvise and bring characters to life. At the beginning of My Mother Manuela reads to her son the opening lines of Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons: "When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation." Manuela was a good actress but her greatest act of creation was giving birth to and bringing up her son.

Almodóvar's talent has always been acknowledged as unique, but All about My Mother demonstrates how great it is as well. The storytelling is complex but not confusing; the large number of characters who anchor, explain and propel the story are individuated and fleshed out to such a degree that, without distracting from Manuela's adventures, we get a sense of their lives beyond their relation to her. The decor and music are as effective as ever but less obtrusive (the decorating tips one usually expects from Almodóvar are not the first thing you notice). His trademark mixture of humour and emotion is still evident here but with a greater accent on emotion, evoked with insight and delicacy.

Almodóvar is also a great director of actors (each gets a chance to shine and all do, Marisa Paredes and especially Cecilia Roth with particular brilliance) and a master of mise en scène. But the complexity of his most recent work seems to come from a better understanding of human behaviour, accompanied - tempered some might say - by greater compassion, generosity and even optimism. In the hands of a lesser director All about My Mother might have poked fun at La Agrado's condition, pitied Huma for being hooked on a junkie or blamed Lola for the havoc she's wreaked. But although he holds his characters duly responsible for their actions, Almodóvar enables his audiences to understand, forgive and even like them. As precisely pitched, variegated and intense as the film's depiction of loss, mourning and pain is, nevertheless it is wittily optimistic. While acknowledging that even when parents are there for their children, they can't always protect them, the film posits mothers who not only love but take the care to care afterwards.

Almodóvar's detractors will also find ammunition here. The two good mothers have no active sex lives and work in traditionally feminine and caring occupations (Manuela is a nurse, Rosa a nun - significantly Rosa's more selfish mother is a forger; she doesn't create, she merely reproduces). Fathers (so noticeably missing in Almodóvar's oeuvre) are absent. Esteban was erased from his first son's life when he chose to become Lola; he will die before his second son learns to say "papa". Sister Rosa's senile father can't even recognise his daughter, much less help her.

All about My Mother explores vividly the universal theme of motherhood and its performance in and through a particular, and appropriate, matrix of references from a broad range of queer cultures: twentieth-century classics (Truman Capote, Federico García Lorca, Tennessee Williams), a tradition of queer interpretative communities (the use of the clip from All about Eve with particular reference to Davis as a queer icon) and the combination of low camp and high melodrama. That a paean to motherhood should be so queer might be a commonplace. That such a queer film dramatises a general condition with formal elegance, nuanced observations and emotional resonance is rare indeed.

Credits

Producer

Agustín Almodóvar

Screenplay

Pedro Almodóvar

Director of Photography

Affonso Beato

Editor

José Salcedo

Art Director

Antxón Gómez

Music

Alberto Iglesias

©El Deseo S.A./Renn Productions/France 2 Cinéma

Production Companies

Agustín Almodóvar & Claude Berri present an El Deseo S.A./Renn Productions/France 2 Cinéma co-production

Associate Producer

Michel Ruben

Production Supervisor

Esther García

Production Manager

Tino Pont

Unit Managers

María RodrÍguez

Barcelona:

Jorge Perez

Assistant Directors

Pedro Lazaga

Alvaro de Armiñan

Covadonga R. Gamboa

Susana Fernández

Luis Fernando Machi

Nacho Charrabee

Script Supervisor

Yuyi Beringola

Casting Director

Sara Bilbatua

Camera Operator

Joaquin Manchado

Special Effects/Digital Post-production

Molinare

Inferno Operator

Aurelio Sanchez-Herrero

Graphic Design

Oscar Mariné

OMB (Madrid)

Set Decorator

Federico García Cambero

Storyboard Artist

Marcos de Aguilar

Costumes

José Maria de Cossío

Sabine Daigeler

Seamstress

Inma Artigas

Make-up

Juan Pedro Hernández

Hair

Jean Jacques Puchu

Technical Director

Alfonso Aguirre

Optical Effects

Storyfilms

Music Performed by

The City of Prague Philharmonic

Conducted by

Mario Klemens

Soloists

Clarinet:

Enrique Perez

Trumpet:

Patxi Urtegui

Guitar:

Fernando Egozcue

Drums:

Patrick Goraguer

Electric Bass:

Paco Bastante

Vibraphone:

Alfredo Anaya

Piano:

Alberto Iglesias

Flute:

Manuel Tobar

Music Producer

Lucio Godoy

Recording/Mixing Engineer

José Luis Crespo

Soundtrack

"Gorrion", "Coral para mi pequeño y lejano pueblo" by Dino Saluzzi, performed by Dino Saluzzi, M. Johnson, J. Saluzzi; "Tajabone" by/performed by Ismaël Lô

Sound

Miguel Rejas

Re-recording Mixers

José Antonio Bermúdez

Diego Garrido

Sound Effects

Luis Castro

Stunt Co-ordinator

Antonio Lemos

Film Extract

All about Eve (1950)

Cast

Cecilia Roth

Manuela

Marisa Paredes

Huma Rojo

Candela Peña

Niña

Antonia San Juan

'La Agrado'

Penelope Cruz

Sister Rosa

Rosa María Sardà

Rosa's mother

Toni Cantó

Lola, 'la Pionera'

Eloy Azorin

Esteban

Fernando Fernán Gómez

Fernando Guilleen

Carlos Lozano

Manuel Morón

José Luis Torrijo

Juan José Otegui

Carmen Balague

Malena Gutierrez

Yael Barnatán

Carmen Fortuny

Patxi Freytez

Juan Márquez

Michel Ruben

Daniel Lanchas

Rosa Manaut

Carlo Ga. Cambero

Paz Sufrategui

Lola Garcia

Lluis Pascual

Certificate

15

Distributor

Pathé Distribution

9,115 feet

101 minutes 17 seconds

Dolby digital

In Colour

Anamorphic

Subtitles