All About My Mother

In All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar weaves together a magnificent tapestry of femininity with affectionate winks to classics of theatre and cinema in a poignant and often hilarious story of love, loss and compassion that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  After her son is killed in an accident outside a theatre, emotionally-devastated Manuela (Cecilia Roth) leaves Madrid for her old haunts in Barcelona, hoping to find her ex-husband (and Estaban’s father), who is now working as a female impersonator. During her search, she reconnects with an old friend, a transgender prostitute named La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), who introduces her to Rosa (Penélope Cruz), an innocent young nun who turns out to be pregnant. Meanwhile, Manuela becomes a personal assistant for glamorous Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), an actress currently playing Blanche DuBois in a stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Naturally, Huma has troubles of her own, mostly involving her drug-addicted significant other, Nina (Candela Pena). The delicate web of friendship and loss that binds these women together forms the emotional core of All About My Mother, which writer/director Almodóvar dedicates to all the actresses of the world. Displaying the filmmaker’s trademark penchant for extravagant melodrama, outrageous humor and highly-stylized aesthetics, All About My Mother also displays a strikingly vivid sense of melancholy and character-driven drama that makes this one of Almodóvar’s most emotionally-satisfying films. (Dir. by Pedro Almodóvar, 1999, Spain, in Spanish with subtitles, 101 mins., Rated R)