Madrid. The 17-year old Esteban is sad that his single mother Manuela, a nurse, never told him about his father, but still wants to write a novel about her. While waiting outside a theatre during rain to chase after the autograph of actress Huma, Esteban is hit and killed by a car. Manuela thus travels to Barcelona to search for Esteban's father, transvestite Lola. She reunites with transgender prostitute Agrado, becomes friends with nun Rosa who is pregnant with Lola, and becomes an understudy of Huma, even performing in her play "A Streetcar Named Desire". A sick Rosa finds out she is HIV-positive and dies, but gives birth to a baby which she names Esteban, and Manuela adopts him. Manuela encounters Lola again, who is HIV-positive. Two years later, Manuela returns to Barcelona to reunite with Huma and Agrado, and reveals Esteban is HIV-negative.
The director and screenwriter Pedro Almodovar often walks a thin line between soap opera, melodrama and art, but in his earlier films managed to swing towards the latter thanks to his eccentric humor and surreal ideas. "All About My Mother", which he himself considers one of his three best films, is much more quiet, restrained and untypically calm for him, to focus more on honest emotions. As the title implies, it is an ode to women who decided to become mothers. The story is thin and meandering, focusing ostensibly on heroine Manuela (very good Cecilia Roth) in search for her dead son's father, but in reality just spending most of its time on her becoming friends with other women, as Almodovar contemplates what can constitute a family outside the socially acceptable norms: here, even a transgender prostitute and a pregnant nun (wonderful Penelope Cruz) can become part of this group that is more than just friends. Barcelona is, surprisingly, not that featured in the plot: except for one scene where Manuela observes La Sagrada Familia from her car, it deliberately avoids the city's landmarks to focus more on everyday events which could play out anywhere. Little character interactions and interconnected relations build this 'slice-of-life' movie, and Almodovar has an eye for colors (for instance, red is featured prominently in the movie, and Manuela often wears red clothes to symbolize her passion).
Some dialogue is interesting. For instance, when actress Huma says to Manuela: "Success has got no taste or smell. And when you get use to it, it's as if it didn't exist." Talking about the father of her late son Esteban, the transgender Lola, Manuela cynically comments: "Lola's got the worst of a man and the worst of a woman... The bastard! How could someone act so macho with a pair of tits like that?" Rosa's mother confesses that strange feeling among parents who cannot understand their child: "I don't know what I did wrong with Rosa. Ever since she was born, she's been like an alien." A meditation on trying to understand and connect with parents and children is one of the themes of this film. One elegant little transition: a bird's-eye view of two tracks, with one train (carrying Manuela inside leaving Barcelona) going from left to right of the frame, a subtitle saying: "Two years later" appears, and then a second train on the second track, going from right to left (carrying Manuela returning to Barcelona) is seen. The most sympathetic humorous moment arrives when the theatre play is cancelled because the two main actresses are unavailable, so the transgender prostitute Agrado decides to entertain the audience with details from her life, including mentioning all the plastic surgeries she underwent, but then this suddenly becomes sincere and reveals her vulnerable side: "Because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being". "All About My Mother" is very good, but still a bit overrated: film critics often pretend that it's not a soap opera, but it is. And yet, that's not the point. The point is that it somehow manages to enchant the viewers to not care about watching a soap opera, because the emotions and sincerity of its characters somehow makes it better than the sum of its parts.
Grade:+++
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