No one who saw Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother doubted that this vibrant film, his glorious homage to women, was the best thing entered in the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.
No one except David Cronenberg and his jury. They gave the Spaniard the best director prize, and handed the Palme d'Or as best film to an obscure Belgian drama called Rosetta.
Coincidentally, All About My Mother (Todo Sombre Mi Madre) opens in Toronto today at the same time as Rosetta. See both and decide for yourself if Cronenberg & Co. went loco in the jury room.
Finest moment
Playing here in Spanish with English subtitles, All About My Mother is Almodovar's finest moment in a career marked by exuberant, showy cinema that includes films such as Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown from 1987. The new film, bathed in rich blues and reds, has all the flash of the earlier work but also a growing maturity and intelligence.
Steeped in pop culture, especially films from Hollywood's Golden Era and plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire (parts of which are performed here in Spanish as an important part of the story), Almodovar is a curious creature. He is a child of Hollywood lore who sees through a unique prism.
In All About My Mother, Almodovar anchors his pop references deep in the bedrock of real-life emotion. The film is deliberately theatrical, even surreal, but it bristles with great ideas and perspectives on the human condition.
The title of the new film comes from the classic film All About Eve, which the heroine (Cecilia Roth) watches at home on TV with her teenaged son (Eloy Azorin). Inspired, he jots down the phrase "All About My Mother" in his journal.
Shockingly, the next day, on his 17th birthday, the young man is killed in a traffic accident on the street outside the theatre where he and his mother watch Streetcar. His heart is transplanted into another man's chest, saving a life.
The tragedy propels Roth, an expert in transplant operations at the same Madrid hospital where her son's heart is removed, to seek out the boy's estranged father in Barcelona.
We learn that the father has changed his name to Lola. Maybe other parts have been changed, too. The grieving mother has not seen him since she got pregnant with her son almost 18 years earlier. This will be no simple search into the past.
The journey will involve a host of other unusual women and one transvestite prostitute (Antonia San Juan).
Key are the actress who plays Blanche Dubois in Streetcar (Marisa Paredes), the one who plays Stella (Candela Pena) and a nun with a dark secret (the fragile Penelope Cruz).
Almodovar's strength is blending all his near-absurdist elements of the story with the theatrical and cinematic references and giving us a core story that is profoundly moving.
(This film is rated AA)
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