mothers
by Douglas Messerli
So
begins the tragic series of events that might be defined as the trail of “blood
on the ground” of his mother Manuela’s life. She has told Esteban nothing of
his father, but had promised him she would reveal information the next day. It
is now too late, and, in mourning, Manuela follows her son’s donated body parts
to the new recipient and follows the tracks of her life back to Barcelona from
where she has originally come. As in many an Almodóvar film, it is the journey
that leads to self-perception and, in this case, reconciliation with an outré
past that Manuela has tried to put behind in order to build a more normative life
for her and her young boy—a past that includes prostitution, drugs, lesbianism,
transvestitism, and AIDS.
We
realize in the very first scenes in Barcelona just how different has been
Manuela’s past was from the productive life she lives in Madrid as a
nurse-teacher, helping her fellow employees to learn how to obtain permission
from victims’ families to donate their loved ones’ body parts. Taking a taxi to
an isolated circle round filled with drag queens, transvestites, and whores,
Manuela discovers an old friend, the transvestite, Agrado (Antonia San Juan),
being robbed and beaten. With Manuel’s help, Agrado is freed, and the two turn
to a local nun to seek employment, but mostly in order to get Agrado off the
streets. The nun, Hermana Rosa (Penélope Cruz), tries to find employment for
them in her mother’s house, but her mother, a harsh critic of Hermana’s
activities and her friends, refuses. A few days, later, however the tables are
turned, as Hermana, realizing she is pregnant, begs for a room in Manuela’s
newly rented apartment.

In
short, Almodóvar creates in All About My
Mother a strangely interrelated group who, together stand against the
normality in the world outside of theirs, but serve each other almost as a
tightly-knit, maternal family—substitutes, perhaps, for their own failed family
ties. When Hermana dies in childbirth, Manuela adopts the child, caring for it
in the very house from which Hermana’s mother had originally rejected her. But
when the mother observes Manuela showing the child to a transvestite, the
returned Lola, she is outraged. With the patience and forbearance that Manuel
has shown throughout, she explains that the man-woman is the child’s father.
Hermana’s mother is horrified, afraid even to touch the child for fear of
contracting AIDS. Even the forgiving Manuela perceives the situation; as she
puts it to Lola: “You are not a human being…Lola. You are an epidemic.”
Once more, accordingly, Manuela leaves Barcelona without saying goodbye, this time to return two years later for an AIDS conference where she reveals that the baby is now completely AIDS free.
In the end, of course, we have discovered
nearly everything we need to know about Esteban’s mother, but where is Esteban
in all this? Dead of course, having learned nothing of the truth the viewer has
received. Even Lola, finally told of Esteban's existence, dies soon after, so
that we can wonder to where the center of perception has shifted. Obviously, it
is Manuela, through her memories of her first son, and the process of raising
the second, for whom the encounters in the film have any true meaning. What she
has been seeking throughout the film in her returns to Barcelona and her
bizarre past is not Lola and her old friends, but herself, that part of herself
she has destroyed in order to move forward. By film’s end, moreover, the “my
mother” of the title is not so much about Esteban’s mother as it is any mother and the truths and lies
mothers share with her daughters and sons. The director brings these various
loose threads together, when he combines, in a dedication, the various great
actresses of the films and plays with all women, all mothers, his own mother:
To all actresses who have
played actresses. To all women who act.
To men who act and become
women. To all the people who want to
be mothers. To my mother.
That link, in turn, strangely interconnected
this film with my own previous discussion of All About Eve in my essay "Life upon the Wicked Stage," a
world in which women rarely come to any good.
Los
Angeles, July 16, 2012.
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