Susan Granger’s review of “ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER” (Sony Pictures Classics)
This is the foreign language picture you’ll be hearing about in the coming awards season. It’s the 13th film and best work so far from Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodovar, who gave us unconventional fare like The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. This baroque, non-judgemental film about femaleness – what it means to be female – tells the story of Manuela (Cecilia Roth), whose teenage son is killed by a car. Honoring her son’s wish to learn more about the father he never knew, she goes she goes back to her native Barcelona to locate the man she fled from nearly 20 years earlier – a man now known as Lola. Finding herself amidst drug addicts and transvestite hookers, she befriends another former companion, Agrado (Antonio San Juan), who introduces her to Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a nun whose own secret connection to Manuela is cleverly interwoven into the criss-crossing fabric of coincidences and interconnections as she comes to reconcile with ghosts from her past. For inspiration in creating these characters, Almodovar draws on many sources: A Streetcar Named Desire, echoing Blanche Dubois’ famous line: “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers…”, All About Eve, from which the title and character comes, and, primarily, John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, in which a Broadway actress (Gena Rowlands) is haunted by the accidental death of an idolatrous young woman. But Almodovar creates a fascinating, often hilariously funny work that stands on its own, evolving into a magnificent, if melodramatic, meditation on female solidarity. Almodovar calls it a “screwball drama.” On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, All About My Mother is a poignant 10. It’s 1999’s best foreign language film.
