All about my mother 1999

All About My Mother (1999)

Though nearly every scene feels as if it could break into camp at any moment, Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother instead stays firmly rooted in masterful melodrama. Sure, there are drag queens, fake breasts, heroin addicts, and nuns who stray from the convent's calling, but Almodóvar somehow brings these elements together like a latter day Joseph Mankiewicz — delivering a film that finds remarkable poignancy in the most unsuspecting ways. Forget Steel Magnolias and Hope Floats; Mother represents a level of intelligent, female-centered storytelling that hasn't been seen since John Cassavetes' time.

Mother follows the story of Manuela (Cecilia Roth from What Have I Done to Deserve This?), a transplant unit nurse in a Madrid hospital. Almodóvar introduces her on the 17th birthday of her son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), who wants nothing more than for her to reveal his father's identity to him. Manuela resists … until Esteban's life is tragically cut short. Even with him gone, Manuela decides to fulfill Esteban's wish — she will find his father and tell him of the son he never knew he had. But in her return to Barcelona (from which she made an exodus many years before), she becomes more than just a messenger — she turns into something of a missionary, mending the souls of the women she meets (the organ-donor analogy is made quite clear here). She first finds her old friend Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transgender prostitute whose thoughts on the sexual authenticity that plastic surgery brings are hilarious. And there's Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz of the brilliant Open Your Eyes), a nun whose break from convent tradition sets her life down a difficult track. There's Huma Rojo (Flower of My Secret's Marisa Paredes), an actress that Esteban once revered, as well as her drug addict lover Nina (Candela Peña).

Each of these women is given vibrant life by these marvelous actresses (Roth, especially, is amazing) and Almodóvar's screenplay and direction. There's a mad glee to scenes like the one in which the women briefly talk about the word "cock," and Sister Rosa, with delight, exclaims that she also loves the word "prick." Almodóvar's balanced, three-dimensional portraits of women bursting with vitality cleanse the viewer's mind of the patriarchal themes of Runaway Bride and the histrionic caricatures of The Story of Us.

In the States, at least, audiences favor the stereotype-dependent "chick flicks" of Nora Ephron and her ilk over challenging, authentic looks at the female sex. Almodóvar is the anti-Ephron, a man whose understanding of women is far deeper and vastly more intelligent than any female director in Hollywood.