All About My Mother
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DVD details
Actor: Marisa Paredes, Penelope CruzBrand: Sony Pictures Classics
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 2.35:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-07-11
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Product features:
- Widescreen
- Exclusive Interview with director Pedro Almodovar
- Subtitles in English and French
- Director's production notes
- Talent files
DVD Reviews of All About My Mother
DVD Review: A very sad and wonderful story
Summary: 5 Stars
I was genuinely touched by this beautiful film by Almodovar. I would highly recommend it, though it is a tale of loss and grief and the way we recover from grief by moving out of ourselves and back into the world.
Manuela is a organ transplant nurse who matches organ donors to recipients in Madrid. Manuela has also performed in medical education films, showing physicians how to ask greif stricken relatives if they are willing to give up the organs of their deceased loved ones so that they might be used by others. Her beautiful fine son, Esteban, will soon have his 18th birthday and we see Esteban writing entries into his journal which he calls "all about my mother". Manuela takes Esteban to see his favorite actress Huma Rojo play Blanche DuBois in Street Car Named Desire. He is struck by an automobile and dies in the emergency room in the hospital where Manuela works. Manuela's physician colleagues must now ask her for her son's organs so that others might live. The acting is so superb and realistic that I found this film to be almost unbearable at this point. Before his death, Esteban asked his mother to tell him about his father, which she never did. Now she leaves Madrid and returns to Barcelona to find her former lover and tell him about the son he does not know he had. Manuela goes to Barcelona and connects with Huma Rojo, the aging lesbian diva, and becomes her assistant. Huma's life is a mess due to her stormy relationship with her junkie lover. Manuela's kindness and calm organizational skills help her bring order to Huma's life. The fact that Manuela comes out of nowhere to come to Huma's aide reminded me of the Blanche DuBois line: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. The parallel to All About Eve is also recognizable as Manuela eventually must take to the stage to play Stella when an actress fails to appear at curtain time.
Manuela becomes the helper and emotional support for Sister Rosa, an HIV positive pregnant nun. Rosa has been impregnated by the same man as Manuela 19 years earlier. Manuela cares for Rosa even as Rosa is rejected by her upper-class mother. Rosa tragically dies in childbirth leaving Manuela with a new baby boy.
Manuela tracks down her former lover and finds that he is now a transexual HIV positive drug addicted prostitute. Lola (his new name) and Manuela grieve the loss of Esteban; he grieves the son he never knew while she begins to move out of her grief into a state of compassion. Manuela, in her support for Lola, is showing that she is moving out of her grief through the love and care of others. She moves out of personal grief and into compassion for the world of sadness all around her.
Almodovar develops outlandish characters; lesbian divas, pregnant nuns, and transgendered playboys. Yet they are played with such warmth and empathy that they become real. Manuela plays the archtypal mother, loving, caring, supporting, suffering, grieving, and sympathetic.
Even though this film broke my heart, it is profoundly sad, it also was so beautifully compassionate to all the humans in the story. Manuela must move from incredible grief (the loss of an only son) toward God's view of the world and human suffering so as to move beyond her own pain and suffering. Only a mature and brilliant film maker could produce such a fine film as this. The subtle and sublime are lovingly combined with the outlandish and absurd.
Description of All About My Mother
After her son is killed in an accident, Manuela (Cecilia Roth) leaves Madrid for her old haunts in Barcelona. She reconnects with an old friend, a pre-op transsexual prostitute named La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), who introduces her to Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a young nun who turns out to be pregnant. Meanwhile, Manuela becomes a personal assistant for Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), an actress currently playing Blanche DuBois in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. All About My Mother traces the delicate web of friendship and loss that binds these women together. The movie is dedicated to the actresses of the world, so it's not surprising that all the performances are superb. Roth in particular anchors All About My Mother with compassion and generosity. But fans of writer-director Pedro Almodóvar needn't fret--as always, Almodóvar's work undermines conventional notions of sexual identity and embraces all human possibilities with bright colors and melodramatic plotting. However, All About My Mother approaches its twists and turns with a broader emotional scope than most of Almodóvar's work; even the more extravagant aspects of the story are presented quietly, to allow the sadness of life to be as present as the irrepressible vitality of the characters. Almodóvar embraces pettiness, jealousy, and grief as much as kindness, courage, and outrageousness, and the movie is the richer for it. --Bret FetzerBestsellers in DVD
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