All About My Mother

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Eurovisions (Spain) / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 18 of 100

The opening scenes of Pedro Almodovar’s Oscar-winning ‘All About My Mother’ sketch out a close and affectionate relationship between single mother Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her 17-year-old son Esteban (Eloy Azorin). Manuela works as a nurse; the studious and intellectual Esteban harbours ambitions of being a writer. Esteban is a fan of old movies – he and Manuela watch a TV screening of ‘All About Eve’ – and has a passion for theatre. For his birthday, Manuela takes him to a performance of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, headlined by his favourite actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). Esteban has one other request for his birthday – he wants to know, notwithstanding that Manuela has stringently withheld the details from him thus far, what became of his father.

For the first ten minutes, the sensitive Esteban seems to be developing into that rarest of things in the Almodovar canon: a male protagonist (‘Talk to Her’ and ‘Broken Embraces’ are the only Almodovars I can think of with male protagonists – and even then the narratives are set in motion by the women in their lives), then tragedy strikes and Manuela, faced with the worst thing that can happen to a parent, is forced to reassess her life.

Relocating from Madrid to Barcelona, Manuela goes in search of her errant husband – a transsexual who now goes by the name of Lola (Toni Canto). She meets an old friend from way back when (also transsexual), truck driver turned hooker Agrado (Antonia San Juan). [Insert your own trucking-to-hooking gag or double entrende about delivering a load.] Agrado introduces Manuela to her friend Hermana (Penelope Cruz), a good-natured but sadly naïve young twenty-something who works at a women’s centre. Hermana and Manuela have something in common: they’ve both had relationships with Lola, who left both of them without realising they were pregnant. Manuela, though, had the luckier escape: Lola is now HIV positive, and has passed the virus to Hermana. Still, a friendship develops between the two women. Between Agrado and Hermana, Manuela gains an ersatz family to fill the void left by her son.

Manuela also re-encounters Huma, who is touring with ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. Huma is playing the part of Blanche du Bois, with her lover Nina in the role of Stella. Nina is unpredictable and driven by a drug habit; when she temporarily deserts Huma, Manuela steps in. Having played Stella in an amateur production years ago (it was there she met the pre-sex-change Lola; he was playing Kowalski), Manuela takes Nina’s place to some acclaim. Later, when circumstances dictate that neither Nina or Huma can go on, Agrado takes everyone’s place and performs an impromptu one-woman show.

The themes and narratives of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and ‘All About Eve’ are woven into ‘All About My Mother’ to such a degree that the highest kudos are due to Almodovar for achieving a nigh on impossible feat: crafting a supremely entertaining film that doesn’t necessarily require familiarity with the Tennessee Williams play or the 1950 Bette Davis-starrer directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. (Although it goes without saying that a basic knowledge of these two works adds layers to the construction, subtext and appreciation of Almodovar’s film.)

For a film so character-driven and picaresque – there’s no real plot, simply a wryly-observed overlapping of the characters’ relationships – the pace is sprightly. Almodovar keeps track of a melange of connections, coincidences, ironies and mirrored scenes with such dexterity that it would be easy to underestimate how complex things become. For instance: at one point, Manuela is acting as surrogate mother to Hermana (pregnant and terminally ill by Manuela’s transsexual former husband) while jointly fulfilling the role of companion and co-star – ie. surrogate for Nina on both counts – to Huma, acting the role of Stella, a character heavily pregnant for most of the play, thereby reliving the circumstances in which she met her husband as well as being costumed to appear pregnant when she has recently lost her only child. When you break it down, this is melodrama so top-heavy that even Douglas Sirk would have backed off, shaking his head and going “no waaaaaaaaay”; Almodovar, by whatever directorial alchemy it is that he seems to have been gifted, turns in a light, frothy concoction that neither overburdens its audience or condescends to its characters.

‘All About My Mother’ is about many things – loss, acceptance, reconciliation, friendship, motherhood – but its overriding theme is a celebration of the feminine and accordingly it showcases some of Almodovar’s most productive director/actor relationships: Cecilia Roth makes the fifth of her six appearances for him, Marisa Paredes the fourth of five and Penelope Cruz appears for the second time (following a space but pivotal role in ‘Live Flesh’) and has since appeared in ‘Volver’ and ‘Broken Embraces’. It’s Almodovar himself who puts it best in the dedication that closes the film:

“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.”

PERSONAL FAVES: Matador

Diego (Nacho Martinez) gets his jollies masturbating over video nasties; instructing his fashion model girlfriend Eva (Eva Cobo) to play dead during lovemaking; and committing the occasional sexually motivated murder.

Maria (Assumpta Serna) gets her jollies picking up men for sex and killing them, by the application of a stiletto-length hairpin to the back of the neck, at the point of orgasm.

Diego is a former matador, his leg damaged in a goring, who now teaches bullfighting. His least promising student is Angel (Antonio Banderas), who faints clear away at the sight of blood. When Diego taunts him as to whether he's gay, Angel responds by trying to rape Eva. From trying to menace her with a Swiss army knife (he fumbles with the scissors and the corkscrew before he finds the actual knife blade) to ejaculating prematurely, he makes a complete hash of it and the only injury Eva suffers is a small cut when she slips on the rain-slicked pavement as she walks away. Predictably, it's enough to make Angel black out.

Nagged into taking confession by his sanctimonious and domineering mother, Angel continues at the police station what he commenced in the confessional. With a major fashion show imminent and a lucrative overseas modelling contract in the offing, Eva doesn't press charges. Still consumed with guilt, desperate for some form of expiation or punishment, Angel confesses to Diego's murders.

Maria is a high-flying lawyer who takes Angel's case. She and Diego soon become drawn to each other, kindred spirits for whom sex and death are interlinked.

'Matador' drips eroticism and perversity from every frame. Assumpta Serna smoulders so intensely you begin to worry that she's a walking case of spontaneous human combustion. Nacho Martinez is a study in death-haunted libido, a cross between a matinee idol and the Marquis de Sade. Eva Cobo is sultry and lovelorn as the third point of the triangle.

Elsewhere, Eusebio Poncela does good work as the world-weary and moderately confused cop trying to make sense of it all, Carmen Maura makes the most of a slightly underwritten role as a case worker sympathetic to Angel, and Chus Lampreave is a hoot as Eva's cluckingly disapproving mother.

The melodrama is writ large - Almodovar explicitly references King Vidor's histrionic slab of masochism 'Duel in the Sun' - but so, frequently, is the humour. Angel's attack on Eva is the kind of thing that really shouldn't be funny (so too the rape in Almodovar's most maligned film, 'Kika') but the scene plays out so absurdly that it's not until Angel's fumblings with the Swiss army knife have incited laughter that you stop to wonder whether you should have laughed.

I'm put in mind of the "Singin' in the Rain" sequence in Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' (still to come on the personal faves list): Alex (Malcolm McDowell) joyfully doing his song and dance routine as he viciously administers a kicking to one victim and gets ready to sexually assault the other is not normally the stuff of comedy; but the unexpectedness, the patent absurdity of it makes light of a horrible and reprehensible moment. It also thoroughly implicates the audience, because who up till this point hasn't guiltily been enjoying Alex's arrogant swagger, casual egomania and sarcastic dialogue?

'Matador' doesn't quite make the same point about audience complicity, but it still has the cojones to see things through to the end. The have-sex-and-die ethos, usually applicable to randy teenagers in generic stalk 'n' slash flicks, here provides an amoral, arousing, aestheticized finale.

Alongside 'Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down', 'Matador' is Almodovar's most sexually charged film; like that slightly less successful work, what could easily have been an another anonymous title in the "top shelf" section of the rental shop (what a mate of mine would call "a trouser arouser from the erection section") comes to life through the director's provocative humour.

And praise be for that! Were it not so funny, 'Matador' would be a despairing film. None of the characters are aware of what's important in life, so consumed are they by their wrong decisions: Diego and Maria are hellbent on symbiotic self-destruction; Angel is in denial of his sexuality and tries desperately to "be a man" (he trains as a bullfighter even though blood makes him faint); Eva gets sidetracked from her career because she can't get over Diego; Eva's mother tuts judgementally at every aspect of her daughter's life without ever treating her like a daughter; Angel's mother is so obsessed with religion that she, too, fails to treat Angel like a son. The backdrop to the film is as shallow as the characters are wrong-minded: a bullfighting academy, awash with machismo; a fashion show, where image is everything. It's fitting that the finale occurs during an eclipse, a red haze descending as all-pervasively as that which agitates Diego and Maria's minds.

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

A fairly early Pedro Almodovar feature, made between 'Dark Habits' and 'Matador' (up soon on the personal faves list), 'What Have I Done to Deserve This?' showcases the director's preoccupation with madcap plotlines, eccentric characters and kitschy, cluttered mise-en-scene - a preoccupation that would reach its zenith with his international breakout hit 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' a few years later.

'What Have I Done to Deserve This?' (hereinafter referred to as 'WHIDtDT?') is also characterised by a strand of melancholy - a trait it shares with 'Dark Habits'. Both are specific in their setting (a convent in 'Dark Habits', a housing estate in 'WHIDtDT?') and seldom stray outside of them (although 'WHIDtDT?' does take a quick detour to Berlin); and both are peopled with characters whose lives are compromised or burdened.

In 'WHIDtDT?', Gloria (Carmen Maura)'s burden is her family.

There's her husband, Antonio (Angel de Andres Lopez): a taxi driver who barely makes ends meet, requiring Gloria to take on a succession of grubby cleaning jobs, and yet expects good food, wine and dessert on the table when he comes home. An accomplished forger who nonetheless refuses to profit from his "talents", he still carries a torch for Ingrid (Katia Loritz), a German torch singer who he used to chauffeur.

There's her two sons: the eldest is a small-time dope dealer, the youngest has a penchant for older men. (In the film's most questionable scene, Gloria foots a dental bill by "selling" him to the dentist - a slavering paedophile.)

There's her mother-in-law, Abuela (Chus Lampreave), who's given over to impulsive acts such as bringing a lizard home. Some of the characters love the lizard. Some hate it. It comes and goes and is witness to a killing. It is eventually stamped on and thrown out into the rain. The lizard is called Money. Draw your own conclusions.

Gloria's neighbours include Cristal (Veronica Forque), the very definition of a happy hooker, and the highly-strung Juani (Kiti Manver) whose daughter Vanessa (Sonia Anabela Holimann) is telekinetic. One of Cristal's clients is Lucas (Gonzola Suarez), a down-on-his-luck writer who cooks up a plot to forge Hitler's diaries after he gets a ride in Antonio's cab and Antonio lets slip about his "talent". Lucas's brother is a psychiatrist who's treating an impotent cop who hires Cristal to pose as his girlfriend and later agrees to let her off the small matter of possession of narcotics in return for a more direct programme of sexual therapy.

Lucas, desperate to get the forged diary project off the ground, inveigles Ingrid's help in persuading Antonio. But things don't go according to plan. For anyone ...

Boasting a melange of intertwining subplots and character interrelationships that make 'Short Cuts' seem like an exercise in linearity and minimalism, 'WHIDtDT?' has all the ingredients for slice of screwball silliness infused with bad taste and served with an extra helping of high camp and hold the disbelief. Wringing laughs from exhibitionism, drug abuse and reptile evisceration is one thing, but Almodovar has the chutzpah to throw in a scene where Vanessa uses her telekinetic abilities to redecorate Gloria's kitchen, and any sense that the glum housing estate and backdrop of marital disharmony betoken a Ken Loach style approach to social realism disappear.

In fact, 'WHIDtDT?' comes across as such a grab-bag of ideas, homages and wacky set-pieces that it's hard to classify. Comedy? Kinda, but laced with the aforementioned melancholy. Drama? In places, but undercut by some bizarre comedic touches. A satire? Yeah, but of what exactly? 'WHIDtDT?' seems to take a swipe at everything. Is it a morality tale about how Gloria is liberated of her burden? Yes and no; sort of; kinda. Neo-realism? Most of the reviews I've read online seem to think so but, seriously, put 'WHIDtDT?' on a double bill with 'Germany, Year Zero' or 'The Bicycle Thieves' and see how long the argument holds up.

There's a case to be made, at a stretch, for 'WHIDtDT?' as a pastel-coloured work of surrealism: a Madrid-set David Lynch prototype except without the backwards-talking dwarves and the blandly sanguine types in rabbit costumes.

Aw hell, it's easier just to say it's an Almodovar film. One of the earlier, crazier ones.

New Year's resolutions

First and foremost, a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all.

Here’s to a 2009 that gives us better news (enough with the ‘credit crunch’ doom and gloom, already; I’m convinced this any-minute-now recession would evaporate and the economy take an upswing if only the media would shut the fuck up about it) and better movies.

Here on Planet Agitation, I think I’ve just about got myself into a writing discipline that balances work on my novel-in-progress (about 22,000 words completed thus far) with new material for the blog. And with a few dirt-cheap January sale DVD acquisitions, I won’t be short of things to write about.

My aim is to post at least two articles a week (although I’m giving another shout to anyone who wants to contribute anything: any and all cinema related musings to opentosuggestions.neil@lycos.co.uk, please), with the weekend article given over to Personal Faves. Next up: cinema’s finest claymation double-act.

Later this month, on January 22nd to be exact, I’ll be celebrating the birthday of one of my favourite actresses – the oft underrated Diane Lane – by kicking off a three-day Diane-Fest (or a four-dayer if I can get hold of a copy of ‘The Big Town’ by then).

In February, the Second Annual Hitch-Fest will include ‘North By Northwest’ from the Personal Faves list. File under ‘fest’ during the following months these luminaries: Werner Herzog, Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar; not to mention, during the latter stages of ’09 the obligatory Third Annual Dirk-Fest.

Just let me recover from this hangover and deal with going back to work tomorrow, then it’s back to business …