Todo sobre mi madre (1999)

reviewed by
David Dalgleish


ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999)
3 out of ****

Starring Cecilia Roth, Antonia San Juan, Penélope Cruz, Marisa Paredes, Candela Pena; Written & Directed by Pedro Almodóvar; Cinematography by Affonso Beato

In the opening scenes of Pedro Almodóvar's ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, Esteban is preparing to write a story about his mother, Manuela (Cecilia Roth); we are shown excerpts from Joseph L. Mankiewicz's ALL ABOUT EVE; mother and son attend a performance of Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire" on Esteban's seventeenth birthday. These are all refererences to stories about women, written by men. And then Esteban is run over by a car. His story about his mother remains incomplete.

The rest of the movie belongs to women: other than Esteban, the only male characters of any significance are a senile father who no longer recognizes his own daughter and a stagehand obsessed with sex. There are also two transsexuals who have opted to become women. The suggestion is that the death of Manuela's son represents the termination of the masculine viewpoint: instead of men's stories about women, we will be given access to a film about women, seen from the vantage of women. It's a rather disingenuous suggestion on the part of Almodóvar (LIVE FLESH), who is of course a man--and the author of the movie--but what follows represents an admirable attempt to represent the complexities of women.

A bare bones outline of the plot might suggest the flamboyant nature of the director's earlier work. Woman's son dies in freak accident. Woman abandons her job and heads to Madrid. Woman meets a transsexual friend (Antonia San Juan), befriends a pregnant nun (Penélope Cruz), becomes assistant to an aging actress (Marisa Paredes) and has to deal with her young, sullen, self-destructive, heroin-addicted mistress (Candela Pena). But Almodóvar treats the material as straight melodrama, more or less, not as farce.

The movie has a sense of humour and is sometimes provocative, but the tone is rather sombre. The emotions it reaches for are undistorted by irony. We are asked to accept these women just as they are given to us--prone to extravagent emotional outbursts, their lives governed by far-fetched coincidences. In this respect, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER resembles soap opera, which likewise expects to be taken at face value (and whose audience is primarily female). Soap opera itself is a form which descends from the sentimental fiction of the 18th century, when novelists like Samuel Richardson wrote mammoth serialized novels--about women, for women.

All of which is to say that ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER makes use of fictional forms that are traditionally associated with women, and has fun with them. It's a fascinating film in terms of its manipulation of ideas about gender, but as a viewing experience it is perhaps too languorous and comfortable. The urgency and effrontery of Almodóvar's earlier work is missing. Despite the playful approach to gender roles, the movie relies on the clichés of sentimental fiction to the point where it at times seems no more than a humdrum melodramatic tearjerker. There is an instance of the tired routine in which a woman throws up for no apparent reason--and, of course, it later turns out that she's pregnant. Almodóvar makes use of this cliché without ironizing it or putting it to the service of the film, and so it remains no more than a cliché, a shortcoming.

The women in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER represent most of the customary female roles and stereotypes: mother, daughter, nurse, actress, lesbian, prostitute, nun. What is most complex and rewarding about the movie is the manner in which the various women slip from one category to another, inhabiting numerous roles, wearing them like an endless succession of masks. We learn, for example, that a young nun (Penelope Cruz) is pregnant, and that she was impregnated by an older transsexual; our preconceptions become worthless. At the end, we are told that one of the lesbian characters has married a man and had a child. Manuela herself, the emotional centre of the movie, is mother, friend, confidante, nurturer, and much more besides. She can be vulnerable, tough, bitchy, playful: she cannot be pinned down. By fostering slippages and tensions, by undermining conventions and expectations, the movie allows the intricacies of personalities which resist stereotyping to emerge.

The notion that women's social roles represent a series of performances is fundamental: two characters are actresses, Manuela performs in a play one night, and Manuela's transsexual friend gives a theatrical monologue about herself which verbally duplicates the construction of female identity she has undertaken through surgery, make-up, implants, hormonal treatments, etc. He has become she: the result of her own constructs and not those of society or biology. Almodóvar's underlying message seems to be that a woman is what she makes herself out to be, irrespective of what others would impose on her. One female stereotype is notable for its absence: woman as victim.

Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)


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