When I first encountered Pedro Almodóvar’s work, I was
instantly fed up with it. To my eyes, he had all the makings of someone trying
too hard to brand themselves as an auteur without necessarily doing the work to
earn the title: showy cinematography, meta-narratives, and obtuse storytelling
devices. I noticed, too, that he had dropped his first name from the credits of
his films; “A Film by Almodóvar,” the titles read, eliciting an immediate groan
from me. He, like several other directors that I actively dislike, seemed more
focused on inserting himself into his movies than actually giving them the life
that they needed.
And then, by the good graces of a college professor, I was
forced to watch All About My Mother. I loved it. I love it. It
immediately made me reconsider his filmography and what I didn’t like about it,
somehow turning the issues I had with his other work into positive qualities
here. All About My Mother is indeed showy and has a stubbornly meta-narrative;
worst of all, it uses my most-hated cinematic device, voiceover narration.
Every instinct in me tells me to hate All About My Mother. I can’t.
All About My Mother
follows Manuela, a single mother that loses her teenage son Esteban in the film’s
early minutes. Following his death, Manuela moves to Barcelona in an attempt to
reconnect with her son’s father Lola, a trans woman who never knew about
Esteban. In the process, Manuela meets other trans and queer characters, many
of whom have contracted AIDS, and All About My Mother suddenly shifts
from being about encountering grief to working past it. Manuela becomes a
mother figure to a few other characters, and we start to understand how Almodóvar
envisions matronly characters: as saints. In particular, Manuela meets Rosa, a
young nun that is pregnant with Lola’s next child; Manuela steps in to guide
her through the process, and ultimately help with Rosa’s newly HIV positive
lifestyle. In Almodóvar’s earlier work, one of my primary problems was how he
treated his characters with manipulative cynicism; here, he extends a humane
hand, using coincidence and luck as a guiding light that fosters genuine
emotional connection among his characters.
So much of my appreciation of this movie stems from how genuinely
Almodóvar handles questions of gender, sexuality, and identity; released in
1999, All About My Mother tackles these themes and topics with a
shocking grace, interrogating the complexities of parenthood, femininity, and
trauma with ease. But there’s more to All About My Mother than just its
thematic content; the film is bright and colorful, given a playful color
palette to juxtapose the immediacy of its gloomy narrative content. The
filmmaking is showy, but never in service of just the director; shots are
beautifully framed to underline the film’s thematic questions of identity and
lineage. Even the meta-narrative - which follows the very actress that Esteban
ran into the street to follow before dying - is likewise used to implicate the
viewer in compelling ways, ultimately dropping the curtains before the film’s
closing credits roll. 
There’s much to admire about All About My Mother - I
haven’t been able to hit at it all. I wouldn’t want to, even if I could. This
is a straightforward movie, one that gets to the point without squandering its
bluntness; it’s a celebration of motherhood, of femininity, and of women around
the world, and it handles the film’s political context with deftness and ease,
envisioning a more supportive world for individuals in queer and other
disenfranchised communities. I’m thankful that I was forced to watch it in
college - it made me reconsider Almodóvar’s work, which I now see as similarly
humane and warm, rather than the cold and austere perception I had of it going
into this film. All About My Mother, in other words, is deeply
empathetic. It’ll make you want to give your loved ones a hug in the moments
immediately after - and maybe you should.
-
Harry Todd
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