ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) | Dir: Pedro Almodovar | There could be an entire month dedicated solely to the provocative, passionate, colorful, moving work of Almodovar. Is there another director working today who evokes queerness in practically every frame? My introduction to Almodovar was probably “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” or “High Heels” or maybe “The Matador” (with young Antonio Banderas in all of his glory), but it was this film from 1999 that made me sit up and take notice of the depth underneath his heightened characters. Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is about a nurse named Manuel, played by Cecilia Roth, who loses the teenage son. Grief-stricken, she sets out to search for the boy’s long-lost father in Barcelona and meets a pregnant, HIV-positive nun (Penélope Cruz), an actress (Marisa Paredes), and a transgender sex worker (Antonia San Juan). It’s about motherhood, homosexuality, gender, and the families we create when our blood-families betray us or dissolve. What I love about Almodovar is his ability to take a universal event — birth, death, betrayal, first love, reunion — and somehow make me see it differently, as if he himself had discovered it for an audience to experience and examine for the first time. Everything feels new in Almodovar’s hand, through his lens. He’s one of the few filmmakers that has regularly incorporated trans characters into his stories. ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is a movie that celebrates actresses, leading ladies, the women who are the protagonists in their own lives. I can’t think of anything that speaks to gay men more than that. Or at least this gay man.
