Film Review: All About My Mother

[da]

I've added All About My Mother to my list of highly recommended films. If you liked Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, you will probably like this [1]. It's less maniacally funny but it gets humour from unexpected coincidence, people laughing at themselves, and the film's general attitude. There are some great lines lines which are steeped in irony, which don't make good one-liners, but had both d. and I laughing aloud. (Both d's and my favourite of these, when someone asks Agrado, a prostitute, whether her Chanel outfit is real: "How could I buy a real Chanel with all the hunger in the world?") One good one-liner is "How could anyone act so macho with a pair of tits like that?") At the same time, it's got serious things to say about sexual identity, gender, AIDS, loss, love, perception and reality.

Broad plot brush-strokes (as spoiler-proof as I can make it): Manuela, a strong single woman travels to Barcelona in search of her ex, a male [2] prostitute who she left 18 years prior. She becomes connected with a theatre performance of "Streetcar Named Desire," which echoes a number of the film's themes; strong women, theatre, love, and doing the tough thing for oneself. There are some neat self-referential hooks involving gender and acting; Almodóvar dedicates the film "To all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act. To men who act and become women. To all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother."

As melted_snowball says, the plot's twists occasionally skirt the edge of unbelievable. It's a tightrope, and Almodóvar plays it like a master.

Also, there are beautiful scenes of Barcelona, and all-around great characters, including strong performances from the main character, who drives the story, as well as Rosa, a pregnant nun, and Agrado, the previously mentioned transvestite sex-worker, who ultimately serves as a Shakespearian fool, getting a laugh in almost every scene but under the spotlight, making some of the wisest lines. (""It costs a lot to be authentic — and one can't be stingy about these things. Because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being.")

[1] If you haven't seen Women on the Verge, see it. I didn't see it until last year, which is a shame; it might be my favourite film ever. (Which, possibly, you might have guessed if you saw my journal name).

[2] OK, I don't know what pronoun to use. He changed genders. The plot is complicated. Also, the movie doesn't talk about sex-workers, it talks about putas [3]. I don't like that word much, but "prostitute" seems the most appropriate.

[3] Which dan points out means whore, faggot (female), and also bitch; which the subtitles translated differently in different scenes. I said it was complicated.

[1/1/07, Edited to add: I just came across a scrawled note on a scrap of paper that I wanted to journal about Almodovar's use of artifice in his characters' lives, specificially in All About My Mother. I may eventually write a longer post about artifice; illusion and trickery instead of substantialness; this is one thing I treasure in fiction. It's one reason I loved to read Donald Westlake's "Trust Me On This"-- instead of cubicles, they had squaricles, tape on the floor to signify walls. Brilliant artifice. Fakery within art impresses me for some reason; Almodovar does it wonderfully.

This review hit it best:


The DVD's enclosed booklet offers Almodovar's explanation of the film's premise: "My idea at the beginning was to make a movie about the capacity to act of certain people who are not actors. As a child, I remembered seeing that quality in some of the women in my family. They faked more and better than men. And through their lies they managed to avoid more than one tragedy ..." He goes on to say that the subject of the film is "the capacity of women to playact. And wounded maternity. And spontaneous solidarity between women."
[...]

The women that she encounters and bonds with on her search all survive through artifice: Agrado (Antonio San Juan), a transvestite prostitute who says — when asked if her Chanel suit is real — "All I have that's real are my feelings — and these pints of silicone that weigh a ton"; Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a nun who works with battered prostitutes and is hiding her pregnancy from her mother; Paredes as actress Huma Rojo, a stage name meaning "Red Smoke" and inspired by Bette Davis's ever-present cigarette; and Huma's lover Nina (Candela Pena) who is hiding a heroin addiction. Even Sister Rose's mother lives a life of pretense, catering to the fantasies of her husband who is addled by Alzheimer's."]

[ETA: my post with additional thoughts on artifice.]

Comments

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

OK, I don't know what pronoun to use. He changed genders. The plot is complicated. Also, the movie doesn't talk about sex-workers, it talks about putas [3]. I don't like that word much, but "prostitute" seems the most appropriate.

puta, from the arcaic hideputa, does mean prostitute, and is often used as 'bitch' in the derogatory sense.

There was a woman named Susanna who lived in ca. 13th century Toledo. She was convicted of prostitution. Her head was hung over her doorway as an object-lesson. Her skull remained over that door until the 1920s. (That is, to me, the single most interesting bit of trivia from my years studying The Inquisition [not just the Spanish one], even allowing for all the fascinating, and creative, means of torture.)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Leads me to wonder how Spanish might translate the title of the feminist/pop-culture magazine Bitch. ("It's a noun. It's a verb. It's a magazine.")

Spanish Catholicism and its violent history gives me the heebie-jeebies. ;)

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

The first Inquisition was in 10th Century Avignon. Various smaller ones occurred in Germany, Italy, and Austria over the next 500 years, and the Church tried to establish one in Britain, but failed.

In 1492 the Pope gave his blessing to an Inquisition in Spain. The Spanish gov't/church so abused that authority that the Pope revoked backing of the Inquisition in Spain in 1512. The Spanish Inquisition continued until 1868, when Isabela II ended it. In the New World, it was introduced only to Mexico and Peru for some reason.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Edited on 1 January, to add notes about artifice and Almodovar.