barcelona to madrid (and back and back and back again)

yesterday evening i sacrificed the vice-presidential debate between charming cheney and exasperating edwards to watch all about my mother (1999) by pedro almodovar. i have watched it before but my memory is terrible (what with being a heroine and all, you know) and i had forgotten every detail. to prevent another round of memory failure, let me first summarize the film. the next paragraph will bore you but the one following it is thrilling.

1. we start in madrid. manuela (cecilia roth) works as a nurse and is organizing a liver transplant from a patient who has just died. later that evening, she watches a movie (all about eve) with her son esteban, a mature 17-year old aspiring writer, at home. at midnight she gives her son a book for his birthday. the following day he is allowed to watch her role-playing for an organ donation video. that evening, mother and son go to the theatre to watch "a streetcar named desire" starring huma (marisa paredes) as blanche dubois and nina (candela pena) as stella. huma and nina, as we are to discover later, are tumultuous lovers in real life. after the play, manuela and esteban wait on the deserted street in the rain for huma to emerge so that esteban can get her autograph. while they wait, esteban presses manuela for information about his father who he has been told is long dead. manuela promises to reveal all later that night. huma and nina exit the theatre, rush into a taxi, and leave. esteban chases the taxi, resulting in the fatal accident. esteban's death is confirmed to manuela in the hospital. in the resulting hysteria, she is asked to make a quick decision about donating his heart. she signs the papers. a montage of scenes illustrates the transplant of the heart to a thrilled recipient in another town. three weeks later, manuela has tracked down the recipient, and hides as he and his exultant family exit the hospital. she returns to madrid and, resisting her friend's attempts to calm her, makes the sudden decision to move to barcelona to track down esteban's father. 2. in barcelona she takes a cab straight to the surreal red light district, where she finds her old friend (from argentina?), the transsexual prostitute agrado (antonia san juan). agrado is thrilled to see her after manuela fled barcelona mysteriously 18 years ago. manuela spends the first night in agrado's apartment. the next day agrado takes her to see the young nun rosa (penelope cruz). the next day rosa tries to get manuela a job as a cook for her parents. her mother rejects her because she believes manuela is a prostitute. out in the park, rosa vomits. now i'm starting to forget the sequence of events--manuela goes to streetcar (which has now moved to barcelona), barges into huma's dressing room, ends up taking huma to find nina who has rushed off to get a drug fix. rosa asks to move into manuela's apartment because she is pregnant with lola's (toni canto) child, manuela refuses because (as we know by now) lola is also esteban's father (and now a transsexual), but agrees to take rosa for a hiv test the next day. that night manuela goes to see huma in her dressing room again and accepts a job as her personal assistant. the next day, rosa goes to the hospital and learns that she needs bed rest before her pregnancy, and manuela agrees to let her stay with her. one night nina is in hospital from an overdose, so manuela is convinced to play stella (she is already familiar with the role, having played it many years ago). she is a hit. the next evening, nina and huma accuse manuela of trying to steal the role from nina. huma demands an explanation, and manuela tells her how her life is inextricably linked to a streetcar named desire. she quits the job. the next day, as manuela and rosa return from somewhere, huma is waiting outside manuela's apartment. she has come to pay manuela and ask her to come back. manuela refuses, citing rosa's (who she claims is her sister) ill health (at some point we have learnt that rosa is hiv-positive). the three of them chat, soon agrado joins, and they are laughing and joking and manuela convinces huma to hire agrado. huma thinks they are all liars but is utterly charmed. 3. a few months later, manuela calls rosa's mother to come see rosa. she comes, but is still uneasy with everything outside her plush upper-class existence (which is no bed of roses either, with a husband who has lost is memory and a career of copying paintings). rosa is taken to the hospital for her caesarian (on the way there they stop by a park where she meets her father and their dog, but the father addresses her as he would a stranger. she dies in childbirth. at rosa's funeral, manuela meets lola (anger is so pointless that all is forgiven) and tells her about esteban and the baby esteban. lola is dying of aids. miraculously, the baby is not hiv-positive. manuela brings the child back to live with rosa's parents. rosa's father is angry because he believes the child is his wife's. rosa takes esteban to lola. rosa's mother happens to see lola caressing esteban and later tells manuela that she doesn't want strange women touching her grandson. manuela informs her that the strange woman is her grandson's father. in the meantime, agrado's job is going well. one night, nina and huma are in the hospital after a particularly violent fight, so agrado entertains the audience with a bit of standup comedy (after having a flirtatious encounter in the make up room with the man who plays stanley kowalski, where each offers the other a blowjob). on a later occasion, a man brings flowers for agrado and huma, with a note from manuela apologizing for again leaving without a farewell. she and baby esteban have moved back to madrid. 4. manuela visits barcelona (with esteban) a year later. relations with rosa's mother are better. she goes to see huma and agrado. they look well and inform her that nina left huma to get married. lola is now dead.

such drama! i liked the movie very much. my thoughts are muddled and will remain so because i don't have much time. lush, intricate plot with so many intersecting lives, yet entirely dialogue-driven. all four actresses were excellent. true, the story was contrived, but it was a contrivance so rooted in a particular geographic, cultural, and psychological context that it nevertheless seemed truthful.

rarely do we get to watch a movie with woman as protagonist. movies along the lines of woman-is-better-than-man, woman-doesn't-need-man-to-be-happy, woman-is-goddess, etc. don't count as having female protagonists. even if, on the surface, the main character is a woman, the underlying driver of the plot is male because when a movie is made in opposition to men it can't help but succumb to a male-centric view of the world. all about my mother transcends this problem altogether.

loved the garish colours, the extreme close-ups, the godard-school cuts that shoot across space and time and leave you briefly suspended in confusion every so often (it takes us a few seconds to realize that the nurse in the hospital is the same single mother making sandwiches in her kitchen, that we have gone from rosa's bedside to her funeral, etc). even the streets often look like sets, which is fitting for a movie that is so theatrical in itself and is littered with so many references to theatre. early in the movie, when esteban secretly observes his mother standing in front of a giant poster of huma roja, he has an idea for a short story about her. could this movie be the story?

abbe oye!