All About My Mother is spiced with this particular foreign flavor. The movie is all in the interaction of the characters, and sometimes they do baffling things, like trust each other, help each other, listen to each other, and accept each other, all despite their huge differences. Imagine! All sorts of things requiring emotions you rarely see in your average big-budget eye candy. (Even something like Magnolia doesn't take this approach.) Admittedly, I had to get over this while I was watching the movie. I wondered honestly if people would behave this way in any country. I still can't say.

However, the movie had more than enough to move me beyond this petty curiosity. The characters are complex, just as their relationships are, and director Pedro Almodóvar doesn't tippy-toe around. He throws everyone together, protecting no one, and we get to see what happens. By the end of the movie, while I wasn't emotionally attached to the heroine, Manuela (Cecilia Roth), I was moved by her plight and her strength and selflessness. Manuela's selflessness, actually, is more complex because it comes from her selfishness. Hmm, yes. Selfless selfishness. I sound loopy. Did you know hot dogs are made of whipped pig or cow? Yup. Loopy as an amusement park ride announcement. But not loopy enough to forget to warn you to skip the next paragraph if you want to know nothing detailular.

Back to the point: Most everything Manuela does is colored by her pain over her son's death, by her need to find his father, and by her want to heal herself. It's how she goes about these wants and needs that make her selfless. She goes beyond the call of duty to help Agrado (Antonio San Juan--or Antonia, depending on your source), an abused transsexual (or is it transvestite? I can never remember which is which...), and Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a pregnant nun with AIDS. Even her intrusion into the life of Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), an aging stage actress, turns from selfishness to selflessness.

What I didn't realize until after the movie was that All About My Mother borrows some huge chunks from All About Eve (the 1950 movie with Bette Davis and Anne Baxter) and A Streetcar Named Desire. Yes, the name of the movie should have told me that there was a connection, but I was too ignorant (and, don't forget, loopy). I've never seen All About Eve. After seeing All About My Mother, David enlightened me to the connections. Now, most of you know my apartment has turned into the largest DVD warehouse in Brentwood, so it just so happens Sven has All About Eve in his collection. I therefore took the liberty of watching it so I could see for myself what Pedro pilfered.

Wow. Very clever. In All About My Mother, Manuela becomes, for a time, Huma's Eve Harrington. It's all there, the backstage dressing room introduction, the personal assisting, the story-time revelation of a dramatic past... Manuela even uses Eve's line about meeting her husband on the stage. As the movie progresses, the similarities end, but that's okay because Pedro is not out to re-make All About Eve. He's just borrowing. I haven't seen A Streetcar Named Desire, either, so I can not tell you what all the connections are there, but from the snippets of the play in the movie, you can figure some of them out. It's the subtle ones I didn't get. Pedro's borrowing might sound gimmicky or lazy, but it works perfectly in the movie, so nuts to that.

While in the end I was still a bit unsure if I bought the characters' behaviors and relationships in a logical sense, I did buy them in a dramatic sense. All About My Mother has rich themes, some of them explored in novel ways. And since every single major character is female or wants to be female in some way (except Esteban, Manuela's son), you get the whole story through a unique perspective. The movie is not just about mothers, but about all women. The dedication at the end of the movie has more to say about this.

All About My Mother definitely deserves its Oscar nomination for best foreign language film--though I guess I've seen so few foreign films this year I can't claim to be an authority. If the movie's still showing where you live, you should check it out. It's very widescreen and will be butchered in pan-and-scan, so the theater's the place to see it, of course.

Oh, and what did I think of All About Eve? It's a great movie! Ah, those classics have such snap, such sass, such snarky intelligence. I mean, yeah, you could tell right away there was something wrong with Eve, that she was too sweet and nice. But that made her exposure ever so excellent to observe. Bette Davis was amazing in her grumbly, smoky way. I doubt I would have ever thought to watch this movie had it not been for All About My Mother. And David Melito. Thanks, Pedro and David!

--Steve

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