Film - Jonathan Romney on the Spanish director
Pedro Almodovar's return to form
The first thing we see in Pedro Almodovar's new film is a fluid drip in a hospital, and some might think that's an appropriate image: it's often said that Almodovar's cinema has been needing a transfusion of fresh spirit. From the start, with his recurring themes and family of repertory players, Almodovar's cinema has been self-enclosed, each new feature prefaced with the words "An Almodovar film", like a brand name telling us more or less what to expect. Indeed there have been times (High Heels and Kika in particular) when he simply wasn't able to surprise any more, no matter how freakish or transgressive the films seemed to be.
Occasionally Almodovar has announced projects that promised to take him in a new direction - but then, even if he had made his western or his Marlene Dietrich biopic, it's a dead cert that they would have been Almodovar to the hilt. His last film, however, saw him taking on new and unlikely sustenance - an adaptation of Ruth Rendell's novel Live Flesh that was, as it happened, pure Pedro, with Rendell present only as a teasing trace element.
All About My Mother, though, is probably his freshest and most complete film, which is all the stranger in that it barely departs from what we might think of as the Almodovar model. In fact it's pretty much an archetype of the director's work - at times, you even feel you're watching all his previous films rolled into one. The cast, for example, includes not only Marisa Paredes, a regular in his recent films, but the Argentinian actress Cecilia Roth, who appeared in some of his early ones. And the story and imagery are riddled with echoes. The several transsexuals recall Carmen Maura's career-making turn in The Law of Desire. When one of them gets up on stage to announce, "I'm authentic!", it's practically a verbatim echo of a speech in Kika. There's even a hospital scene repeated from The Flower of My Secret.
What's going on here - self- vampirism as admission of exhaustion? Rather, it's the other way round - Almodovar gives himself, and his repetitions, a new surge of life by making such grafting a theme in itself. This is, after all, a film about borrowed identities and acquired body parts, about surgically transformed identities and about people's life force and body fluids suffused into each other for better or for worse.
The plot, in which nearly all the characters are women (including those who may once have been men), involves Manuela (Roth), a nurse whose teenage son is killed while trying to get the autograph of Huma (Paredes), a theatrical grande dame starring in A Streetcar Named Desire (or, in Spanish, named Deseo - which is also the name of Almodovar's production company). The stricken Manuela travels to Barcelona - an old haunt for her, a radically new one for the Madrid-based director - to search for the boy's father.
What follows is an extended demonstration of the efficacy of female bonding. Manuela befriends Huma and rescues the transsexual prostitute Agrado (Antonia San Juan), who introduces her to the young nun-in-distress Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), and before long all of them are having a jolly, boozy evening on the sofa - "Just like How to Marry a Millionaire," they exclaim. Digging through his own back repertoire, Almodovar has made his most Freudian film to date, a search for origins that concludes that identity is never as fixed as we imagine and that, although the past can't be undone, it can always be re-rehearsed, redramatised. The theatrical metaphor, as usual, is foremost - the film begins with Tennessee Williams performed in a style you'd more readily associate with Lorca and ends with Lorca himself.
Everyone is performing, wearing a costume of sorts, whether they're a nun, a nurse or a transsexual hustler. Agrado, performed with swaggering, rough-edged panache by the newcomer San Juan, goes from demi-monde PVC to natty Chanel to the more casual look she wears on stage when she tells a rapt audience about the cost of her authenticity, all accounted for in surgeon's bills. Even Barcelona itself is defined by its look, its dressiness - whether in GaudI's architecture or the chaotically mosaicked interiors.
The film's title revolves around an observation made by Manuel's son when they're watching Bette Davis in a dubbed All About Eve on television: its Spanish title ought not to be Eva Desnuda (literally, "Eve stripped bare") but Todo Sobre Eva - hence Almodovar's title Todo Sobre Mi Madre. The point is that, sexually and socially, people are rarely stripped bare but take on disguises of various sorts, which become their real selves. The only nakedness here turns out to be facial, as the film movingly contrasts theatrical make-up with the unadorned, often haggard faces of its stars - Roth, lined and drained by grief, or San Juan after taking a beating, black-eyed and with the faintest hint of stubble.
Somehow the effect of highlighting all the masks and self-reference is quite the opposite to what you'd expect - this proves to be Almodovar's most emotionally direct film. But it may also be his most thematically complex and intellectually rich one. And there's undoubtedly one subtext missing - Williams, Lorca and All About Eve certainly, but as cinema's great celebrator of performance and masquerade, Almodovar has surely become the Oscar Wilde of the age.
"All About My Mother" (15) continues nationwide
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