In case you missed it in the last Upstate Film Society series at the Carmike, Pedro Almodovar's Oscar-winner for best foreign language offering is out on video. The sort of thing that may not be for everybody, but is unquestionably a fine example of careful, quality moviemaking, it's difficult to explain without conveying how gently normal the Spanish writer/director makes such nontraditional circumstances appear:
Manuela (Cecilia Roth) is a Madrid hospital worker whose gifted son has grown up thinking his father is dead. When the boy is killed in a car accident, she moves to Barcelona to find and break the news to Lola, a transvestite with whom she had a fling 17 years earlier when both were prostitutes. There she reconnects with mutual friend Agrado, played by sexually ambiguous cabaret artist Antonia San Juan, and enlists her help in finding Lola. In the process they meet Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz, who, currently shooting Captain Corelli's Mandolin with Nicolas Cage and Shakespeare in Love director John Madden, is the only castmember with much American recognizability), a young nun who has life-altering issues to confront thanks to her own run-in with Lola. All of them wind up insinuated with a touring company of A Streetcar Named Desire, which stars the actress whose autograph Manuela's son was seeking when he was killed.
Far from being the lurid excursion into aberrant sexual practices it sounds like in summary, All About My Mother is a thoughtful, supremely well-acted, and visually gorgeous movie. Almodovar, who was apparently fortunate in avoiding film school, quietly stamps his self-taught imprimatur all over his work. Employing brilliant colors, lingering close-ups, and what must be a preternatural gift for eliciting hallmark performances from a seriously divergent cast, he manages to relate this oddly uplifting tale without resorting to pretense or artsy devices. He succeeds simply on the strength of a talent for texture and detail that leave me wanting to search out his other work and give it a look too. B+
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