Rapturously received when premiered at Cannes earlier this year, Pedro
Almodovar's All About My Mother is a moving melodrama with plenty of charm and humour. While not all of the latter is intentional, some of it is
truly inspired, and All About My Mother will doubtless delight Almodovar fans. Whether it will win over the sceptics remains to be seen.
Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her teenage son Esteban live alone in Madrid,
united by a special single mother-son bond. Esteban is naturally
inquisitive about his father who, he has been told by his mother, died
before he was born. On her son's seventeenth birthday, after a theatre
trip to see A Streetcar Named Desire, Manuela prepares to tell him the
difficult truth. But before she has the chance, Esteban is killed in a car
accident while seeking the autograph of Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), the
actress playing Blanche DuBois in the production they have just seen. A
transplant co-ordinator by profession, Manuela signs over Esteban's heart
so that, in some way, he continues to live on. But finding it impossible
to recover from her son's death, she makes a journey to Barcelona to
locate her son's father and inform him of Esteban's life and death.
At this point the plot begins to falter and, entering familiar Almodovar
territory, spins out of control. Manuela, it transpires, once lead an
extraordinary existence in Barcelona. Meeting up once more with her best
friend - a transsexual prostitute called La Agrada (Antonia San Juan) -
together they befriend the actress Huma Roja and a beautiful nun, Sister
Rosa (Penelope Cruz). And Manuela searches for her ex, once also called
Esteban - until he became Lola.
There is a powerful story in here somewhere, if only the editor had cut
more vigorously, and Almodovar kept a check on an artistry and imagination
which force the story beyond belief. Roth is dynamic, but not even she
cannot pull off some truly terrible lines and the farcical scene in which
she and the garishly made-up Lola share their grief over their dead son.
It is Agrada - sassy, witty and unstoppable - who steals the show.
Reviewed by Andrea Henry
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