HuntinPeck80

I liked this movie a good deal more than my last Almodovar screening, Carne tremula (1997). I'm not sure he really gets heterosexuality, he needs some sort of unconventional filter. In this case, everyone's getting knocked-up by a tranny junkie.

Manuela and her son Esteban are watching All About Eve. For his birthday (17) she takes him to the theatre to see A Streetcar Named Desire. After the show he chases after the star actress, trying to get her autograph, and gets himself flattened by a car. We then get a bit of Esteban's disembodied narration, and for a mo' it seems like his voiceover will become a guiding feature of the movie. But no.

Manuela, grieving for her son, returns to Barcelona to inform his father, Esteban senior (aka Lola) of the loss. Instead of Lola she finds another tranny hooker, Agrado, and through Agrado she meets the winsome Sister Rosa. The Tennessee Williams production comes to Barcelona and soon Manuela is involved with that too.

"Secrets and lies! Why can't we share our pain?" That line is from the movie Secrets and Lies, and one could well ask, how much pain is caused, ultimately, by lying. All About My Mother is full of fibs and fibbers. It's also full of altruistic behaviour, generosity, kindnesses. A melodrama without sentimentality, or not too much anyway. It's very gynocentric, which I suppose is the zone Almodovar feels most comfortable. It's so heartfelt that it is very hard to resist, something I found quite the opposite in Carne tremula.

Then again, Esteban's accident does feel a trifle contrived (his mother had only just warned him about dashing into the road without checking). Having one of the male actors suddenly willing to perform fellatio on Agrado, simply because 'she' has boobs, feels a tad unbelievable. The movie's ending is maybe a bit flat. This movie would have been daring in the 1990s, and in a sense could be daring today. Thing is, trannies were more exotic then, whereas today we are all sick to death of hearing about 'trans rights', most of the time from aggressive lobbyists who are not transsexuals themselves but simply addicted to opinionated troublemaking; the twitterati, SJWs, the woke-mob, and other button-pushing riffraff. Maybe, with that in mind, we need Almodovar's compassionate world more than ever? That said, one can applaud but also smile wryly when Agrado makes 'her' speech, the one about being at your most authentic when you have become the person you dreamed of being. No-one asks, so you dreamt of becoming a tranny hooker, en verdad?

Ultimately, compassion and empathy, whatever the weird psychosexual trappings, are the gifts most frequently renewed in Almodovar's cinema, and like I say, we need those two more than ever.