All About My Mother (long synopsis)

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Manuela (Cecilia Roth) lives alone with Esteban (Eloy Azorin), her teenage son, and they are very close. Only eighteen years apart in age, they could be brother and sister. The mother works in the Ramón y Cajal Hospital as a Transplant Coordinator for the National Transplant Organization (O.N.T.)

The boy is interested in literature, and currently writing a story about his mother, “All About My Mother,” the title suggested by Mankiewicz’ classic film “All About Eve.” They are having dinner in front of the television, watching that film, when Esteban thinks of the title and writes it down in his notebook, which he always keeps by his side.

The next day is his seventeenth birthday and Manuela waits until midnight to congratulate him. She gives him Truman Capote´s “Music for Chameleons” as a present. Esteban, already in bed, asks her to read out loud to him, like when he was a child. Manuela opens the book and reads the first page, the preface: “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.”

It is impossible to describe more perfectly the nature of creation. The next day, to celebrate his birthday, they go to the theatre to see a performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Mother and son share their admiration for Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), the actress who plays Blanche Dubois.

Outside the theatre it is pouring rain but Esteban wants to ask Huma Rojo for an autograph. In spite of the rain they wait outside the artist’s entrance, protected under an awning. The mother looks out at the rain, silent, thoughtful.

“You were very moved by the performance,” Esteban tells her.

“Twenty years ago, with an amateur group in my village, we staged this same play. I played the part of Stella and your father played Stanley Kowalski,” Manuela confesses as the memory hardens her.

Esteban is surprised by this unexpected confidence, as his mother has never liked talking about
his father.

“Some day you will have to tell me all about my father,” Esteban says without bitterness, “It’s not enough to tell me that he died before I was born.”

“It is not an easy thing to tell,” his mother responds.

“I was about to ask you for it as a birthday present,” the young man mumbles.

“I don’t think it would be a good present,” the mother insists.

“You’re wrong, for me there is no better present,” Esteban responds, his eyes shining with illusion.

Manuela understands that her son is right, at seventeen he is no longer a child and she no longer has an excuse for her silence.

“All right. I’ll tell you everything when we get home.”

Huma Rojo and Nina Cruz (Candela Peña), the actress who plays the part of Stella, come out quickly from the artist’s entrance and argue heatedly while they hail a cab. When the car speeds away, Esteban goes running after them. The rain continues to pour. Manuela orders him to forget about it, the situation is absurd and sinister. But Esteban keeps running after the cab, with his notebook in his hand. The taxi turns the corner when another car appears suddenly from the left. It is going so fast that, when the driver sees Esteban, it is too late and he runs him over. Involved in their argument and isolated by the rain, the women riding in the taxicab do not notice what has happened. Manuela, however, sees it all, even before the car sends her son flying through the air. She anticipates it as casual witnesses anticipate events, those people who always seem to be on the scene before such events occur.

While the car rushes away, Esteban lay on the ground, deaf to the storm and his mother’s cries
of anguish.

Esteban arrives dead to the hospital where his mother works. As usual, they conduct an electroencephalogram to confirm the brain death. Manuela knows the routine, but in this case she has been displaced to the waiting room holding on to her son’s wet and stained notebook, as if she were holding on to his hand.

When she sees two of her colleagues come out of surgery, Manuela knows by heart the conversation that will follow. She knows that she will have no control over herself, that regardless of their explanations she will try to deny the evidence. Before the doctors can inform her of the results of the brain scan (and suggest to her the donation of Esteban’s organs, which could save the life of another patient), before the doctors can even open their mouths, Manuela lets out an agonizing scream.

Esteban’s young heart saves the life of a patient who lives in A Coruña, the transplant was successful. Three weeks later, as the patient leaves the Provincial Hospital accompanied by his family, Manuela spies on them, hidden behind dark glasses, furtive. She knows it is forbidden, but in Madrid she searched through the O.N.T. archives to find the name and address of the transplant recipient.

Near the Hospital, Manuela stares at the recipient. She looks at his chest, the place where her son’s heart is beating.

Manuela leaves her job as Transplant Coordinator at the O.N.T. She is going crazy and runs away from Madrid to Barcelona. It is not the first time she has made this trip. Eighteen years ago she went from Barcelona to Madrid, also escaping, but then she was not alone, she had Esteban inside of her. In that trip she was fleeing from his father, (the person who’s identity she had decided to confess to her son a few minutes before he was run over.) Paradoxically, she is now going in search of him. She knows that Esteban wanted to meet him (she read it in his notebook) and Manuela wants his biological father to know it.

She wants to show him the stained notebook, soaked by the rain, in whose pages the boy confesses that one day, looking through his mother’s papers, he found a set of photographs. As he described: “All of them were cut in half: my father, I suppose. I have the impression that my life is missing that same half. I want to meet him, no matter who he is, nor how he is, nor how he treated my mother. She can’t take that right away from me.”

Manuela wants to fulfill Esteban’s last wish, even if she can only do so in part. She leaves Madrid in order to find the father and inform him that they had a son, and that he has died. She is not doing it for revenge. She merely wants Esteban’s father to be able to read the last words he wrote, dedicated to him even though he didn’t know his son existed. Manuela thinks that Esteban would have liked that.

Once in Barcelona, Manuela looks for Esteban’s father at night. She looks through the areas of transvestite prostitution, places that the father used to frequent. Before they arrive at one of the main “meat markets,“ known as “the Field,“ a clearing full of dust and drug refuse, illuminated only by the car lights of circling clients, Manuela discovers a couple fighting. When she approaches them, she discovers a client brutally beating a professional. She gets out of the cab, picks up a rock and hides it in her handbag, possessing the daring of those who are suicidal. She hits the aggressor in the head with her petrified bag and liberates the wounded transvestite. She doesn’t recognize him until she gets closer. It’s La Agrado (Antonia San Juan)! (La Agrado lived with her and Esteban’s father twenty years ago).

Dizzy, the aggressor leaves while the two friends celebrate their encounter with cries of joy. Agrado can’t hold back her tears, not because of the beating but because she hasn’t seen Manuela for eighteen years.

“You left without a word, not even a simple letter or telephone call. I thought you were dead!” she reproached her.

Together they go to the transvestite’s house. While Manuela heals her wounds she looks at a framed photograph where all three, in 80´s fashions, appear: Agrado, Manuela and another transvestite (or at least about to become one) with a wide smile and even wider shoulders: Lola the Pioneer.

“Do you know anything about her?” asks Manuela.

“About Lola . . .?” Just hearing her name Agrado become furious.

“Yes. I took her in because she was sick. How could she not be sick, with all she crams into her body!… One morning when I was returning from the Field, exhausted from work, I discover she has cleaned out my house, stolen all my mother’s jewels, what little money I had saved, even the cd’s … To do that to me, who since we put on our tits twenty years ago, has treated her like a sister! But, what can I tell you?”

Manuela listens in silence while she stares at the photo of Lola, with contradicting emotions.

“What’s the matter, are you looking for her?” Agrado asks, bothered. Manuela nods.“Yes. We have something pending.” But she doesn’t tell her what.

And while waiting to resolve that important matter, Manuela learns to survive without realizing it. She crosses paths again with Huma Rojo and Nina Cruz, who are now performing “A Streetcar…” in Barcelona. Manuela becomes Huma’s personal assistant, in the manner of Thelma Ritter. She even substitutes Nina Cruz in one performance, playing Stella, the same role she played twenty years ago, in her village, when Lola was called Esteban and still had no breasts. But Manuela doesn’t have any theatrical ambitions, she is the anti-Eve Harrington. In fact, the following day she abandons her job with Huma to take care of Sister Rosa, a nun in crisis who was the last person to see Lola, who left her a poisoned legacy. Although she resists at first (Manuela doesn’t want to love anyone again for fear of losing them) Manuela ends up adopting her, like a daughter.

When her life begins to have sense again, when Huma, Agrado and Sister Rosa have become her real family, Lola appears. All in black, leaning on a cane, thin as a shadow: death in person…

From www.sonyclassics.com/allaboutmymother

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