Critics and fans agreed. At the end of the film’s gala screening last week, the black-tie audience in the Palais des Festivals leapt to its feet and gave a rare 20-minute standing ovation. The reason the picture works so well, says its leading lady, Cecilia Roth, is because of Almodovar’s clear–if extreme –view of the world. “Pedro can watch everything without prejudice,” Roth explains. “And he can transmit that to you when you watch his movies on the screen.”
It has taken 20 years of filmmaking and a lifetime of observing for Almodovar to create what many critics consider his masterpiece. Born in La Mancha to a gas station bookkeeper and a housewife, Almodovar had a strict Roman Catholic upbringing. At 17 he fled to Madrid, began drawing comic strips for underground newspapers and took a job as an administrative assistant with the National Telephone Co. Long a fan of the cinema, Almodovar bought a Super 8 movie camera and began to make short films in his spare time. He also joined a theater group, where he met the young Spanish actors Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas, and even staged his own cabaret act–in drag. Eventually, Almodovar scraped together enough money to shoot his first feature, “Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Other Girls Like Mom” (1980). Unlike other young Spanish directors at the time, who were turning out somber movies about the then recently deposed dictator Franco, Almodovar depicted the wildly hedonistic night life of mid-’70s Madrid. After the success of “Pepi,” Almodovar quit his job and devoted himself full time to filmmaking.
His cinematic breakthrough came in 1988 with “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” a kitschy comedy about a group of wacky women, starring Maura and Banderas. It earned $7 million in U.S. ticket sales and an Academy Award nomination, and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best foreign film. Almodovar’s deft direction of women in screwball comedies soon earned him a reputation as a modern-day George Cukor.
“All About My Mother” again explores the world of women. Manuela, played by Roth, takes her son to see a stage production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” for his 17th birthday. After the play he chases the lead actress for an autograph and is run over by a car and killed. To heal herself, Manuela leaves Madrid for Barcelona to find her son’s father–a transvestite she left when she discovered she was pregnant. During her search, Manuela connects with an old transvestite pal, befriends a young wayward nun and works as an assistant for the actress in “Streetcar” whom her son was chasing when he was killed.
The movie is filled with eccentric characters, most based on people Almodovar has encountered. During his research in Madrid, he found an order of nuns that has a home for transvestite drug addicts. “The nuns help them through detox, teach them how to sew or some new profession,” he says. “All of that is real.” Same for the transvestite fathers. “When I first went to Paris in the early ’70s,” he says, “I saw real transvestites, working as whores. They were all Spanish, and they all had children back in their village.”
Though Almodovar is heralded throughout the international film world, he says the Spanish media are “respectful but lukewarm” toward him. This time, however, Spanish critics have applauded his new film. Almodovar thinks it could be the movie’s underlying message: “The solution for all of our problems is in those people who are closest to us, sometimes people we may not even know. It’s as simple as that.”
