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All About My Mother

Starring: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes
Director: Pedro Almodovar
Genre: Comedy / Drama
Year: 1999
Rating: 4 / 5

Reviewed by Guest Scribe Legend

Warning. This film contains two tragic deaths, two transvestite whores, two lesbians (one a drug addict), and a pregnant nun with AIDS. If this is all too much to deal with in one movie, then one might be well advised to stop reading.

For the rest of you, All About My Mother is quite an interesting and entertaining watch. A film winning many accolades (including the 2000 Oscar for best foreign language film), this is probably the best effort yet of renowned Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, whose films, though offbeat and weird, routinely receive U.S. distribution. Anyone who has ever seen an Almodóvar film before knows that he is known for oddball comedy, completely off-the-wall, unbelievable, yet humorous, chains of events, and characters who are so peculiar they can only exist on the fringe of society.

This much is true regarding All About My Mother. The film begins its focus on young Esteban (Eloy Azorín) who dreams of being a writer and lives with his mother Manuela (Cecilia Roth). One is led to believe Esteban will indeed be the main character of the film, and will concentrate on the relationship he shares with his mother. Things go askew when Esteban and Manuela go to a theatre production which happens to be in town - A Streetcar Named Desire. Part of what makes this movie so interesting is that elements of Streetcar, as well as All About Eve (which Esteban watches with Manuela at the onset of the movie), appear in the movie itself. This is creatively brazen but works well for those willing to read into such subtleties.

But this film is not about Eloy Azorín's character, it is about Cecilia Roth's. She produces an excellent performance as Manuela, who is nearly in every scene. Due to a mishap outside the theatre where she and Esteban view A Streetcar Named Desire, Manuela's world is turned upside down. All of a sudden she must return to her past to find her old lover - Esteban's father, who happens to be a transvestite prostitute now.

Since her search is mostly fruitless, her story intertwines instead with Huma (Marisa Paredes) and Nina (Candela Peña), a pair of lesbians who play Blanche and Stella in the Streetcar production, as well as La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), another transvestite prostitute who is much of the comic focus of the film. Things get even more convoluted with the arrival of Penelope Cruz's character, Rosa, a nun whose work is dedicated to helping whores, when she finds herself pregnant by the unlikeliest of characters. Her story becomes integral to the plot in due course.

While this sounds completely wacky (and it is), this movie is remarkably entertaining. It seems to go along at a good clip and the viewer tends to really care about the characters and what happens to them. Bonus points for subtleties in the plot and direction which are surely what earned such a peculiar film wide international acclaim. However, I cap this at four stars since the material is a bit bizarre to win wide appeal among moviegoers.

Cast:

Certification: Rated R for sexual situations and language.
Running Time: 101 minutes.

Additional Info: Internet Movie Database
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