All About My Mother (Spanish: Todo sobre mi madre) is a 1999 Spanish drama film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. The film deals with complex issues such as AIDS, transvestitism, faith, and existentialism.
The plot originates in Almodóvar's earlier film The Flower of My Secret which shows student doctors being trained in how to persuade grieving relatives to allow organs to be used for transplant, focusing on the mother of a teenager killed in a road accident.
The film centers on Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse who oversees donor organ transplants in Ramón y Cajal Hospital in Madrid and single mother to Esteban (Eloy Azorin), a teenager who wants to be a writer.
On his seventeenth birthday, Esteban is hit by a car and killed while chasing after actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) for her autograph following a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she portrays Blanche DuBois.
Manuela has to agree with her colleagues at work that her son's heart be transplanted to a man in A Coruña. After traveling after her son's heart, Manuela quits her job and journeys to Barcelona, where she hopes to find her son's father, Lola (Toni Cantó), a transvestite she kept secret from her son, just as she never told Lola they had a son.
In Barcelona, Manuela reunites with her old friend Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a warm and witty transsexual prostitute. She also meets and becomes deeply involved with several characters: Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a young nun who works in a shelter for battered prostitutes and is pregnant by Lola; Rosa's mother (Rosa Maria Sardà); Huma Rojo, the actress her son had admired; and the drug-addicted Nina Cruz (Candela Peña), Huma's co-star and lover.
Her life becomes entwined with theirs as she cares for Rosa during her pregnancy and works for Huma as her personal assistant and even acts in the play as an understudy for Nina during one of her drug abuse crises.
On her way to the hospital, Rosa asks the taxi to stop at a park where she spots her father's dog, Sapic, and then her own father (Fernando Fermán Gómez), who suffers from Alzheimer's; he does not recognize Rosa and asks for her age and height, but Sapic is cleverer and knows Rosa. Rosa dies giving birth to her son, and Lola and Manuela finally reunite at Rosa's funeral.
Lola (whose real name is Esteban), who is dying from AIDS, talks about how she always wanted a son, and Manuela tells her about her own Esteban and how he died in a car accident. Manuela then adopts Esteban, Rosa's child, and stays with him at Rosa's parents' house. The father does not understand who Manuela is, and Rosa's mother says it's the new cook, who is living here with her son. Rosa's father then asks Manuela her age and height.
Manuela introduces Esteban (Rosa's son) to Lola and gives her a picture of their own Esteban. Rosa's mother spots them from the street and then confronts Manuela about letting strangers see the baby. Manuela tells her that Lola is Esteban's father; Rosa's mother is appalled and says: "That is the monster that killed my daughter?!".
Manuela flees back to Madrid with Esteban; she cannot take living at Rosa's house any longer, since the grandmother is afraid that she will contract AIDS from the baby. She writes a letter to Huma and Agrado saying that she is leaving and once again is sorry for not saying goodbye, like she did years before.
Two years later, Manuela returns with Esteban to an AIDS convention, telling Huma and Agrado, who now run a stage show together, that Esteban had been a miracle by not inheriting the virus. She then says she is returning to stay with Esteban's grandparents. When asking Huma about Nina, she becomes melancholy and leaves. Agrado tells Manuela that Nina went back to her town, got married, and had a baby.
Almodóvar dedicates his 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." Almodovar recreates the accident scene from John Cassavetes's Opening Night as the epicenter of the dramatic conflict.
No comments:
Post a Comment