All About my Mother by Pedro Almodóvar

Category: Non-English

Definitely the most outstanding film of Pedro Almodóvar that I've seen in the last 3 days, this one is a bit more grounded in reality without having characters tear each others' clothes off with no real reason.

The film essentially deals with Manuela who coping from the loss of her 18 year old son decides to finally look into what happened to the father of the child. Love in the film stems from a play called "A Street Car Named... Desire". Manuela eventually makes it o Barcelona and meets Sister Rosa who has been diagnosed as HIV Poistive whilst being pregnant. The culprit is the transvestite (or same man rather) who impregnated Manuela back in the day! There's also the angle about the actress Huma and her younger lesbian lover Nina. Then there's also a transvestite by the name of Agrado who is probably one of the most interesting characters in the film.

I know it sounds tedious and annoying but the film's characters are actually greatly enhanced by the visuals we see, the development of relationships is beautifully interlaced with certain political comments at times or certain questions of our own being, albeit not in the most direct and poetic savagery as a Bergman for example.

The film is much lighter in comparison to other film makers but there are certain moments that stand out in my mind - for example with the changing of letters and time at the end of the film or when he's capturing the moments of a picture the camera knows exactly what to focus on. My personal observation here is the characters in the film or maybe even in real life, can only digest the loss of a person ONCE they know the real reason behind it.

Recommendation level: 3.5/5 - Yeah it totally deserves this and I am going to make the first films review - Tie me Up! Tie me Down into a 2.5 in comparison to this! Watch it if you can, it's won a ton of awards too!

Additionally I don't normally do this but recently a blog named: Only Good Movies featured one of my reviews (on Tie me Up! Tie me Down!) in their 101 best movie posters article. Have a look at their website sometime, it's pretty neat!