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'My Mother': It's all about kitschy angst Joe Baltake
It's nice to report that, although Pedro Almod車var has been lauded for the "new maturity" of his "All About My Mother" ("Todo Sobre Mi Madre"), it's every bit as messy and disorganized as his more disreputable sex comedies. Almod車var himself has described this definitive women's film as "a screwball drama," an expression that accurately conjures up a movie in conflict with itself. "All About My Mother," titled after Joseph Mankie-wicz's "All About Eve" (1950) and modeled after the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, is a mournful affair that wears its mile-high emotions on its sleeve. Yet Almod車var has given "All About My Mother" the same quick pacing and bright coloring of his past hits, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (1987) and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" (1989). The suspicion is that maybe 10 years ago, he would have executed this same material as an antic comedy. As good as his film is, it's also a little disorienting -- like seeing a hard-core sex film with all the sex scenes cut out. The filmmaker has consciously -- or rather, self-consciously -- toned himself down here. The exquisite Argentine-born actress Cecilia Roth leads a first-rate ensemble of actresses as Manuela, a middle-aged, single mother who is devoted to her teenage son, Esteban (Eloy Azorin) and just about dependent on him. On Esteban's 17th birthday, he and Manuela watch "All About Eve" on TV and go to a performance of a touring revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," starring the great stage diva Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) as Blanche DuBois. Manuela also gives Esteban a copy of Truman Capote's "Music for Chameleons," tenderly reading the preface aloud to him. Tragedy strikes when
Esteban, chasing Huma for her
autograph, is struck by a car and dies. At first immobilized
by grief, Manuela decides to pull herself together and fulfill
one of Esteban's dreams: She travels back to Barcelona, Spain,
to find the father her son never knew -- an actor with whom
she once appeared in an amateur production of "A Streetcar
Named Desire," one of many links in this film. Curiously,
Esteban's father's name is Lola. Manuela doesn't explain why.
In Barcelona, Manuela almost accidentally forms a makeshift family made up of other wounded women. Her coterie comes to include Huma, who turns out to be a lesbian whose lover (Candela Peña) plays Stella in that traveling version of "Streetcar"; a former truck driver (the excellent Antonia San Juan) who is a woman from the waist up but still a man from the waist down; and a nun (Pen谷lope Cruz) who's been impregnated by Esteban's father, Lola (Toni Cant車), who is now a ... transvestite prostitute. The nun's confused mother (Rosa Marie Sard芍), meanwhile, is an artist who casually forges Chagalls in her living room. Life and art get twisted when Manuela first gets a backstage job with "Streetcar" -- reminiscent of the role Thelma Ritter played in "All About Eve" -- and then goes on stage (as Stella), a la Anne Baxter in the same film. Men are virtually absent from this world, which is not unusual for an Almod車var film. Esteban has been killed off, and the film's other men want to be women. It's camp stuff -- like a Douglas Sirk film that Sirk never made -- and you'll have fun trying to figure out who's playing Crawford and who's playing Davis, Ida Lupino, Lana Turner, Claire Trevor, Shirley MacLaine and Gena Rowlands. But it's all a good deal less fun than it sounds. Still, witty lines abound. Huma, who is addicted to cigarettes, quips at one point, "Smoke is all there's been in my life." And the former truck driver involved in the ongoing sexual reassignment notes that "it cost me a lot to be authentic" and that "all I have that is real are my feelings." The film ends with Almod車var dedicating it to Bette Davis and Gena Rowlands, among others -- "To all women who act, to men who act, to men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers, to my mother." That may sound impressive to read, but look at it closely enough and it's gobbledygook. So much for "new maturity." The film is gobbledygook, too -- well-done gook but gook nevertheless. It's too bad Almod車var didn't play it for laughs. Still, his actresses and the film's kitschy color palette provide enough snap to balance out all the relentless on-screen angst.
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