All About My Mother is an electric, crafty tragedy-melodrama about loss and love-filled compassion. Manuela (Cecilia Roth), an Argentine nurse and organ donor supervisor in Madrid, Spain, has a lovingly simple life with her aspiring writer teenage son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín). On the night his 17th birthday, he gets fatally run over in attempt to get famous actress Huma Rojo’s (Marisa Peredes) signature. Devastated, Manuela ventures to Barcelona, where Esteban’s transgender mother Lola (Toni Cantó)—whose deadname Esteban was named after—resides to reveal their son’s existence and death. While there she reunites with her witty transgender prostitute friend Agrado (Antonia San Juan) along with new friends such as nun Rosa (Penélope Cruz), Huma, the actress whom Esteban died chasing after and her drug addicted lover, Nina Cruz (Candela Peña). Through waves of on-stage performances, off-stage debacles and all forms of conflict in between, this group of women grieve, love, and help each other heal in a chain reaction of sudden tragedies.

Mother is, at its base, a dedicated exploration of female/feminine existence—and that means all women. It boldly presents a smorgasbord of characters angularly defined in their own ways, chaotically colliding with others. Some struggle with their identities, as demonstrated through Lola and Agrado’s being transgender; some struggle with the prospect of motherhood, like Rosa or—though more retroactively than in anticipation—her own mother’s reflection of her failures; and some deal with loss, like Cecilia. But in leaning on each other, they draw from each other’s strengths to learn how to love their own: “It costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am. And one can’t be stingy about these things,” Agrado implores to an open-minded crowd on-stage towards Mother’s end; “… because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.” The film demonstrates the range of costs to become what “you’ve dreamed of being” through cluttered, sad togetherness and acceptance.

While Mother is heart wrenching, director-writer Pedro Almodóvar still limits the film’s scope through base stereotyping and very occasional flimsy one-liners. Not all women are mothers, or nurturing, or innately more thoughtful. While the displayed thoughts and actions here are organic, the separation between motherhood and non-motherhood is thin; everyone seems poised to be a mother or motherly figure. Diversity in characterization could’ve enhanced the mother figure at the center of it all. The few corny melodramatic lines add some fun to the morose mix, except at the end—the first HIV case to disappear? Unlikely. Nevertheless, All About My Mother is a kinetic, multifaceted dive into at least many examples of womanhood worth several watches.

All About My Mother
1999
dir. Pedro Almodóvar
101min.

Screens in 35mm Sunday, 8/11, 2:00 pm @ Coolidge
Part of the repertory series: Out of Time 1999