All About My Mother
Todo sobre mi madre
Pedro Almodóvar (1999)
Widely regarded as Almodóvar’s finest film, All About My Mother concludes with a dedication:
‘To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider… To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.’
The picture that supplied one of Davis’s most celebrated roles inspires the title of this one and features in it in several other ways. Understanding the specific references to Rowlands and Schneider depends on rather more movie knowledge[1]. Otherwise, the dedication couldn’t be clearer – and confirms what have emerged, no less clearly, as Almodóvar’s priorities in the drama we’ve been seeing.
Manuela (Cecilia Roth), who works in a donor organ transplant unit at a Madrid hospital, is the single mother of a teenage son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín). The night before his seventeenth birthday, they watch All About Eve together on television. The following evening, they go to the theatre to see A Streetcar Named Desire, starring the legendary Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) as Blanche DuBois. (Tennessee Williams’ play could well be described as the tragedy of a ‘woman who acts’.[2]) After the show, Esteban is desperate for Huma to sign his programme, even though the rain outside the theatre is much heavier than the drizzle at the start of All About Eve, when Karen Winters brings Eve Harrington in from her stage door vigil to Margo Channing’s dressing room (this is the clip used for Manuela and Esteban’s viewing the previous evening). As Huma and her co-star Nina Cruz (Candela Peña), who plays Stella in Streetcar, drive off in a cab, Esteban runs after them and is hit by another car. Almodóvar now references John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977), in which Myrtle Gordon, the famous actress played by Gena Rowlands, is shocked by the death of an autograph-hunting teenage girl, killed by a car in her pursuit of Myrtle. Manuela, whose work involves talking with the relatives of prospective organ donors, suddenly finds herself on the other side of the conversation. In great distress, she consents to her dead son’s heart being used for a transplant.
This isn’t the last melodramatic coincidence in All About My Mother: the ensuing plot sounds, on paper, ludicrous. Yet this film is a fine example of Almodóvar’s ability to move a story repeatedly out of bounds but compel acceptance of it thanks to film-making fluency, thematic coherence and the strength of his engagement with the characters. The last ensures too that, though he draws very obviously on other pieces of cinema and drama, the result is never smug or arch. Manuela remains the protagonist but she and Almodóvar move on from their starting point, to put it mildly. Manuela quits her job and travels to Barcelona, in search of her son’s father, a transgender woman called Lola (Toni Cantó, mostly glimpsed in photographs until the closing stages of the film). Manuela never told Lola about their son or Esteban about his father’s identity. Given the frank, intimate exchanges that Manuela and Esteban have in the early scenes, the latter is improbable – though it’s also a dramatic requirement.
In Barcelona, Manuela meets up with an old friend, sex worker Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transsexual woman[3]. Through Agrado, Manuela also becomes close to Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a young nun who works in a shelter for prostitutes on the receiving end of violence. It’s soon revealed that Rosa, in spite of her religious vocation, is pregnant, that she too is carrying Lola’s child and that, unlike Manuela, is HIV-positive as a result of sex with Lola. Streetcar has now transferred from Madrid to Barcelona. In spite of its profoundly traumatic associations for her, Manuela gets to know Huma Rojo and becomes her personal assistant. Huma is in an unhappy but, from her point of view, necessary relationship with the drug-addicted Nina Cruz. Manuela once played Stella in an amateur production of Streetcar; one night, she deputises in the role when Nina’s in too bad a state to perform.
Rosa dies giving birth to her son; at her funeral, Manuela and Lola finally meet again. Now caring for the orphaned baby in the home of Rosa’s parents, Manuela tells Lola about the son they had together and introduces her to her second son. Rosa’s mother (Rosa Maria Sardà) happens to witness the meeting and is appalled to learn from Manuela that Lola is the person who fathered the baby and ‘killed my daughter’. Manuela returns alone to Madrid with Rosa’s son. Two years later, she and he attend an AIDS convention. Doctors have confirmed the little boy is now HIV-negative. Manuela meets again with Huma, now appearing as the Mother in Lorca’s Blood Wedding, and Agrado, who has taken over as her assistant. Manuela learns that the affair between Huma and Nina has broken up. The film ends with Huma leaving her dressing room, where the three women have been talking, to go on stage.
Almodóvar was years ahead of the game in passing with flying colours the Bechdel test and All About My Mother is, in more ways than one, a women’s picture. There are plenty of minor male roles – the actors in A Streetcar Named Desire, various doctors, a pharmacist – but next to no significant ones in terms of screen time, at least once Esteban has died. The ‘first’ Esteban, that is. Manuela’s son has the same (birth) name as his father – as does Rosa’s baby boy. Fathers in this film are particularly conspicuous by their absence, though in different ways. Now terminally ill with AIDS, Lola, who never knew Manuela’s Esteban, won’t be around long enough for Rosa’s to remember her. En route to the hospital where she will die in labour, Rosa catches sight of her own father (Fernando Fernán-Gómez), walking the family dog. She greets them both enthusiastically. The dog reciprocates but Rosa’s senile father doesn’t recognise her: he too isn’t there. Only two other men register in the story. When Manuela first returns to Barcelona’s red light district in search of Agrado, she finds her friend being attacked by one of her punters; Manuela intervenes by knocking him out with a rock. Later on, Mario (Carlos Lozano), the actor playing Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, asks Agrado for a blow job.
Lola is also known as ‘la Pionera’ and Almodóvar was unquestionably a pioneer in realising queer and gender-fluid lives on screen, in imaginative work that typically transcended the popular-arthouse divide. Although that’s a great achievement, it’s somewhat startling to realise how discriminatory his attitude towards the straight world can be. Cecilia Roth is so radiantly ordinary as Manuela that she largely conceals this in All About My Mother – largely but not entirely. For Almodóvar, marriage to a man who has no pretensions to changing sex seems to be almost a betrayal of womanhood and motherhood. Rosa’s mother is a nasty piece of work throughout: Almodóvar introduces her as an art forger; she eventually mutates into hysterical wrong-headedness about the threat of AIDS infection. Nina abandoned Huma in order to return to her home town to wed and have a child – a baby boy who is ‘fat and ugly’.
On the other hand, Almodóvar seems to regard members of the groups to which he dedicates his movie as inherently admirable. I don’t get that view or share key sentiments expressed here such as ‘you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being’. I don’t empathise much with the characters and I’ve found the film unusually difficult to write about. But it seems an almost perfect realisation of what its maker set out to do. All About My Mother – whose virtues include strong performances throughout the cast and a beautifully supple score by Alberto Iglesias – is a classic in the cinema of personal expression.
20 August 2019
[1] I had to trawl through Romy Schneider’s filmography on Wikipedia to discover when she played an actress. Schneider won the (inaugural) Best Actress César for Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important c’est d’aimer (1975) for her performance as a star of soft porn films.
[2] By the way, the name of the production company that Almodóvar set up with his brother Agustín in the 1980s and which has been behind all Pedro’s films since is called El Deseo (Desire).
[3] I’m distinguishing ‘transgender woman’ and ‘transsexual woman’, I hope correctly, to refer to Lola and Agrado respectively. The former identifies as female but is still biologically male. The latter has transitioned medically as well as socially.