The Personal 100: #2 ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER

I don't know if I can do this...

Putting my love for this film into words seems like an impossible task. All About My Mother feels like it has been with me all my life.

I don't do memories that well. It is not that I don't have them, just that they tend to bleed in together. When I think back to when I first saw All About My Mother, I can't recall if it was the first time I'd seen one of Pedro Almodóvar's films. I can't imagine I could have missed him for all those years but I can't push myself back to a time before this film engulfed me, so I cannot honestly say. All About My Mother is my cinematic sound barrier.

I do remember when I first heard about the film. I was sitting in the now non-existent Longford Cinema on Toorak Road, about to endure Francis Veber's offensive French farce, Le dîner de cons. It was just me and a couple of old biddies behind me. It was dark when they came in so I never got a good look at them. I picture them by their voices, as they clucked their way through the trailers, cooing to each other as they added the succession of coming attractions to their joint social calendar.

Then they came up against Pedro's boldly coloured preview...

The scene went something like this:

A film by ALMODOVAR, winner of best director, Cannes Film Festival 1999...

Old Duck 1: (coo) "Oooh, Cannes... this one is going to be wonderful then."

Part of every woman is a mother...

Old Duck 2: (cluck) "Isn't that right."

Old Duck 1: (coo) "Awwww..."

Part of every woman is an actress...

Old Duck 2: (Coo) "Ahhh, that is so true."

Old Duck 1: (Cluck) "Yes, I know."

Part of every woman is a saint...

Old Duck 2: (COOOO) "She's so pretty."

Old Duck 1: (CLUUUUCKKK) "We must see this!"

Part of every woman is a sinner...

Old Duck 2: Ummm...

Old Duck 1: Errr...

And part of every man is a WOMAN!!!

Old Duck 2: (Gasps)

Old Duck 1: ...

Old Duck 2: (Splutters)

Old Duck 1: (Swallows tongue) 

Old Duck 2: No, I don't think we'll go and see that.

Old Duck 1: No, no, no...

...and the 25 young queer in front of them smiled quietly to himself and filed the beautifully structured, self-contained radio play under P for prejudice. I still chuckle when I watch the trailer.

I actually hope the two of them got over their initial shock and went and saw the film. Almodóvar's sublime, genre-and-gender-twisting exploration of womanhood would have surprised them with its emotive tenderness.

I do hope they made it but I doubt they did. If the trailer was a step too far for them, a plot synopsis would have been like running a marathon... in heels.

I used to delight in convincing people to watch the film. It's about a mother, I would say. It's about a mother who loses her son. It's about a mother who, grieving, sets out to find her son's father, who is no longer a man. It's about a transsexual sex worker, I would say. It's about actresses, I would say. It's about a reclusive actress and her drug addicted lover. It's about a young nun, I would say, who's pregnant, and HIV+, and in love with a woman, who used to be a man...

And then I would say, "and I know it sounds bizarre, but it all makes perfect sense when you see it."

And nobody would believe me. And then we would watch it. And then there would be tears. And then they would understand.

-oOo-

I was never meant to go to Spain. At least I had no intention to. At least not before seeing this film. After four years living in the Australian desert, I was off on my first substantial European trip, which was to begin with two days in Barcelona and then take me further east. My travel agent put the kibosh on that. I was flying into Madrid, she told me. I was spending at least a month in Spain. I could finish in Barcelona. Then I could see the rest of Europe, but only then.

She turned out to be right. I stepped off the plane in Madrid and instantly fell in love. Scarily quickly. With the air, with the sky, with the general expansiveness. It reminded me of home and felt like home all at once. I fell in love with Madrid. I fell in love with Toledo (dirty old man flashers notwithstanding). I fell in love with Granada. Then I fell in love with a Spaniard. An Andalusian moon, the shadow of the Alhambra palace, a young(ish) foreigner... it was kind of inevitable, I guess.

A week or so later we were travelling around Morocco together. He owned an art gallery. Another week or so later I ended up there. I stayed there for the rest of the year.

In the gallery he played my copy of Alberto Iglesias' score for All About My Mother on repeat. Three hours or so... siesta... then another four hours...

Iglesias' slow tangos now evoke a small space near the corner of a nine storey apartment block opposite a dusty plaza. I don't mind that.

-oOo-

All About My Mother, at its heart, is a film about women. 

It is a film about women filtered through the vision of an anarchic homosexual with a fetish for kitsch. That's not by any means an unusual point of reference; for generations gay men have spent a good part of their artistic output placing femininity on a rarefied pedestal. What is unusual is how Almodóvar, by this stage just two films into his "mature" period, manages to frame his film in such a way that he is able to distill multiple facets of womanhood into just a few characters, to have those characters feel like living breathing women, and to do all this without having to compromise his irreverent sensibility.

"With this film something new has happened. Everyone likes it and the reviews have been wonderful. It has freed me from those adjectives previously attached to me: enfant terrible, provocateur, scandal-maker. Now they think I'm not such a bad boy after all."

                                                                                                         - Pedro Almodóvar

All About My Mother presents an inclusive, accepting and inspiring cross section of women, and one that instantly connected with female audiences. It is not that Pedro had not done that before, but his cheeky take on women till this point relied heavily on humour, farce and a dramatic connection to men. These men may not always be in the picture (just think back to the oppressiveness of Iván in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or of Paco in Flower of My Secret even though those men are only in those films for the briefest of moments) but always, in some way or other, define Almodóvar's women, or did until this film. 

In All About My Mother Almodóvar's women broke free. The only men who have any material impact on the lives of these women are either recently deceased, recently born, or recently women themselves.

Therein lies the joy of Pedro's film, it centres on women, loving, hurting, and ultimately flourishing without men. 

-oOo-

I saw All About My Mother about a month and a half before I flew to Spain. I was back in Perth, having been travelling around Australia. I spent those days in the expectant limbo between leaving work and leaving the country. Every familiar thing I did in the lead up to leaving felt like saying goodbye and this night I was bidding a fond farewell to my favourite cinema, the Luna on Oxford Street. I sat in its comfortingly cavernous main theatre and met for the first time Manuela, Agrado, Huma, Rosa, Lola and Esteban.

I watch with tears rolling down my cheeks as a mother carried her destroyed heart in search of the father of her son. I remember getting chills watching Almodóvar's camera crest Montjuïc to reveal the diagonal streets of Barcelona nestled in the dusk below, partly because the scene is so magnificent, partly because I new I would be there myself very soon.

"She's glad to have come back to Barcelona. By day she rests and at night she goes out in search of Lola. Lola could be anywhere: Naples, Marseille, or Havana. The sea, vice and a broad mind, those are the qualities that Lola looks for in a city. Barcelona has all of them, and besides, it could be any of those three previous cities, as well as itself."

                                                                                                         - Pedro Almodóvar

I feel strange about admitting that because of All About My Mother, I connect Almodóvar most closely to Barcelona. Strange because this film was for him, like the fugitive Manuela, a significant relocation from his territorial heartland, Madrid.

Barcelona's streets, her architecture and her general air, play an extremely important role in Almodóvar's film and, perhaps because of that, I love Barcelona's streets, her architecture and her general air. I've wandered the streets of Born and visited the Palau Música Catalana, with its Gaudí mosaic'ed pillars which preen decoratively across from the window of Manuela's apartment. I've circled the Sagrada Familia, just as Manuela does as she combs the streets for Lola. I've sat waiting to catch up with a friend in the Plaça del Duc de Medinaceli where Rosa calls out to Sapic.

It felt like I could slip inside Almodóvar's Barcelona easily, probably because, like me, like Manuela, he was a tourist.

-oOo-

In many respects, it feels disingenuous to call the women that inhabit the screen in All About My Mother Almodóvar's characters. They are not only his. They are blood and bone and tears scratched together and caressed into being by some of Spanish cinema's most beloved actresses.

There is no denying that Pedro's screenplay here is superb (and it has certainly received its much deserved praise) but his cast, drawn almost exclusively from select clique that has come to be known as "las Chicas Almodóvar" (or who were soon to have their applications accepted, in the case of Penélope Cruz), perform above and beyond anything that is written on the page.

To break down Almodóvar et al.'s depiction of womanhood would require a Venn diagram more complex than is within my capability. The system of overlapping roles would encircle "lover", "saint", "whore", "actress" and "mother". Yet Almodóvar steers well clear of proclaiming that it is only in that space bounded within all of these roles that the fully fledged "woman" can be celebrated. If anything, he is at pains to express how these attributes define women, both in their presence and their absence.

Each of these women embodies but one of these defining characteristics. Rosa, the saint preparing herself to join the missionaries in El Salvador; Agrado, the prostitute not all that interested in finding a new life; Huma, the actress, tied to her work and her drug-addicted lover; and Manuela, the mother who, on losing her son, battles tirelessly against maternal affection, to no avail. But Almodóvar never treats this women as less than whole.

They are but different facets of the same diamond and it is when they come together that All About My Mother is at its most sparkling. It's an electric scene, fuelled as much by champagne as it is by the much needed leavening of grief. It is cinema that heals. That caresses. The connection they share transcends their differences. They recognise in each other an unspoken displacement, then they expand to fill the void. In that beautifully wallpapered living room these four women find family.

It is one of cinema's most ecstatic moments of therapeutic friendship.

-oOo-

I never really marry my life in southern Spain to the the intoxications of Almodóvar's world. It did have melodrama, I saw to that. And it had drag queens (we made nice, one night, with a lovely woman named "Garganta Larga"). But on the post-Franco spectrum of anarcho-irreverence and hyper-conservativism, which seemed to be the accepted paradigm at the time, our life sat at the conservative end. We were closeted, but for my few emotional outbursts that made it clear that I wasn't just a "travel friend". It didn't sit well with me. I coped. He struggled.

It surprised me that my ex and most of his (straight) friends didn't have much time for Pedro. As far as Spain went, they'd have me believe that Pedro represented a minuscule sub-section of the Spanish community. I didn't believe it, mainly because I saw Almodóvar's energy all around me in ways that they, too close to the epicentre, couldn't recognise.

Francisco Franco died in 1975, just as Almodóvar began making films. It was a time of hurtling social change. Spain came out of an ultra-conservative dicatatorship and flung herself head first into the post 60's international landscape. Pedro's films captured that social groundswell, the impact of a dozen years of cultural change distilled, cooked up and mainlined in a single cultural movement: the Movida.

Everything that couldn't be done, now could. Drag queens, fags, drug addled nuns, punk rockers, if Pedro's early films are to be believed, Madrid was a deviant's paradise. The Movida may have all but petered out but the energy still pulses through the streets of Spain.

-oOo-

Almodóvar asserts a world where the sidelines of society are erased. He grants everyone onscreen his blessing and he expects the same of his audience.

For audiences who have lived safely, blinkered, within those sidelines, All About My Mother and Almodóvar's second-natured acceptance of those who they will have always viewed as social outcasts must have been radical. For those of us who happened to live on the sidelines, All About My Mother wasn't radical, at least not as radical. It was, rather, refreshing, truthful, or as Agrado put it in her showstopping speech, authentic.

(and check the two women ducking out at 0:37 - life imitates are, no?)

But authenticity in Almodóvar's world takes on a very different connotation. Authentic is recast as melodrama, brightened in Technicolor, and those who are most authentic are those who have found a way to thrive in this heightened reality or who have at least accepted it as a new truth. Doing so takes effort; it takes face. In short, living authentically in Almodóvar's world is extremely gay, even for the straight characters.

One shouldn't expect anything less in a world filtered through Sirk and Fassbinder, Buñuel and Fellini. To exist in a world of heightened drama requires an actress-like acumen. Lola gets it, she's nothing if not a Hitchcockian blonde of the most elusive variety. Huma, with her conflict-spurring production of 'A Streetcar Named Desire', has made a living out of it. But it is Agrado, who could easily have been plucked straight out of the opening scene of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, who excels. She is larger than life and insistently positive despite her less than ideal circumstances. Antonia San Juan's performance is the soul of Almodóvar's film. She's a blunt mouthpiece to herald the coming of Almodóvar's new world.

Looking back at Agrado fifteen years after she lay out her philosophy, she appears almost prophetic.

-oOo-

It doesn't take a sociologist to recognise that Madrid's transgressions are not now be quite as transgressive as they once were, but that may not be the city's fault.

Almodóvar gets praise (and criticism) for maturing over the years but it is important to remember that Spanish society was also maturing around him. It was only five years after the release of All About My Mother that gay marriage passed into law in Spain. In the city I lived in, which under housed half the population of the city I grew up in, I visited six or seven bars and maybe two or three nightclubs that were gay or "mixed" to the point that they may well have been. Perth had 2. I had conversations with women who were convinced that their boyfriends had slept with mine and they were okay with that because "that's just how it is here". I met numerous men who were married and who had taken up with older guys on the side without their wife's knowledge (or sometimes with it).

Homosexuality in Spain may not have been mainstream, but it was a stream that flowed very close to the surface.

Almodóvar hasn't ever been satisfied with that. He has consistently and forcedly confronted the world's cinema-going public with the insistence that the hetero-normative lens is cracked glass. He has unapologetically expanded horizons.

I see a very special beauty in Almodóvar's evolution from the riotous social anarchist who opened his first feature with a lesbian golden shower to this touching normalisation of HIV and transgenderism. With All About My Mother he demands empathy, and it would be a heart-shrivelled human that didn't concede. To me, this film is every bit as revolutionary as anything he made before or has made since.

-oOo-

Almodóvar feeds off the energy of his past. He continually picking at the minutia of his own films, digging into its backstory to plant new seeds and give new life. All About My Mother is itself the flower of The Flower of My Secret. Manuela is an alternate take on the preceding film's Organ Donor Program trainer, also named Manuela, though not played by Cecilia Roth.

From an almost identical scene, Almodóvar takes the story in an entirely different direction, as if these fabulous melodramas are all around us. Which they are, of course, it is just that we fail to see their beauty when they are dressed in their everyday wear.

If Agrado is the soul of All About My Mother, then Manuela is undeniably its broken heart. She is a walking wound, crusted over, determined not to crack. Determined not to be a mother. Determined not to feel. Determined not to succumb to Agrado, not to care for Rosa, not to confess to Huma. Roth carries herself with remarkable composure, somehow finding a way to exude Manuela's unfathomable pain without having it overflow, which itself is a clue as to just how finely tuned Pedro's ear for melodrama is.

Impressively, Pedro asks Roth to take on three melodramatic layers. Firstly, as Stella in Huma's production of Tenessee Williams' play, the very production in which she met her son's father and that 17 years later precipitated in her son's death; then in the film's meta-narrative recreation of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, tellingly also referenced in both the film's opening scenes with Manuela and Esteban, and its title; and finally in the overarching melodrama of her own grief and her search for her son's father.

That's a lot of schmaltz. There is no doubt Sirk would be proud.

Roth breaks me down every time. That moment on the steps of the Barcelona cemetery when she cuts through the complexity of the reunion with the purest expression of loss and love. It slays me. After almost two hours of amiable but calculated distance, there is such cathartic release in her expulsion of sorrow. It clears the air in the way that only the most uninhibited acting can.

I return there often.

-oOo-

"To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider… To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother."

So much of All About My Mother is driven by the few short scenes before the death of Manuela's son, Esteban. The depth of their relationship is unmistakeable, as is the unspoken paternal gulf that Manuela agrees to finally fill in. It is the present that her boy never receives. His death not only casts a pall over the entire film, it also disembodies its title and gives it a haunting, universal quality.

And so, I guess we inevitably return to me and my mother. When I look back and attempt to unpack why I have connected so strongly with this film, I see a young man who fell in love with a country across the sea (but who was probably always going to). I see a young man who had just come out of his shell and was introduced to a world that was more recognisably truthful. I see a young man who always had a taste for the tawdry emotional ups and downs of melodrama. But, most of all, I see a boy who loved his mother.

That's not an unusual thing, I guess. I'd like to think most boys love their mothers. I was just a little more attached, I think. My mother was a shield from my father's overbearing judgement. She gave us the love where dad always saw his obligations stopped at the roof over our heads and the plates on our table. Unlike Esteban, I didn't have the half photos and impenetrable silences to deal with; I just had good old Aussie stoicism. My childhood was made happier purely because my mother worked tirelessly to fill in the gaps.

One of the most satisfying parts of becoming a "grown up" comes when you reach the age that you can sit down with your parents and talk with them on equal footing. It's a conversation that Esteban never gets to have. In many ways this film is his conversation.

My conversation with my mother came about only a couple of years ago, whilst she was navigating the aftershocks of a suspected infidelity. Over an extended lunch we talked about growing up, growing old, love and loss, not as mother and son but as two people trying to get by in the world.

She told me stories about my childhood that had been until then hidden from me. She told me of sexual rivalries with  the neighbours, how she used to have to convince my father to give her extra money so she could buy us children birthday presents, how the argumentative side of their relationship only kicked off in earnest when she was earning her own income and didn't have to play nice to get by any longer.

It was one of those moments that redefines how you look at someone. My love for her only deepened.

My mother has put up with a lot and without complaint. In her relationship with her mother, she had always been smothered to the point that she couldn't breathe and so she resolved early in her life not to do the same. She said goodbye to me when I left Australia to experience all this and she never uttered a word of complaint. I know it hurts her to have me far away, she told me after I returned, but she'll never stop me from going. She has nursed me through two international breakups; two breakups that injured me immensely, the first emotionally, the second physically.

Even if I don't see her nearly often enough, she is always with me and I'd alway have it that way. So this goes out to my mother, the woman who has made a point of never holding me back even when my choices have been dubious. I owe everything I am to you and because of you I can walk tall in this world. I love you.

There: idolised as only a gay man can.

A mí madre.

x

All About My Mother is #2 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.

You can track my progress here.