Posted for Lusi Fan

Contradictories in All About My Mother

Drama and Life

The essential visual element in Pedro Almodovar’s film is the use of color. The bright and saturated colors in his films brought the sense of intimacy and at the same time, tension to the audience, in order to make the story convincing and realistic, as if everything happened next door to us. The fast-paced narration left no time for the audience to draw distance from the story itself, instead, all the complications and tragedies are flooding out, that successfully drew attention and empathy from the audience. However, Almodovar has never been interested in making his movie a documentary of social issues and community chit-chat. He would rather embrace the absurd and psychedelic aspect of drama--- the combination of fast-flipping story sequences and some camera tricks kept warning us that: this is just fictional.

The movie is also talking about the relationship between drama and life. Before the son Esteban died, the mother Manuela watched three movies with him together: All About Eve, the video clip about organ donation and transplantation, and The Streetcar Named Desire. The first two movies are giving a hint to the plot that happened later, and the third movie was the clue that went through the whole storyline. Almodovar implanted the movie clips, long enough to slow down the pace of the whole film, that creates the absurdity that blurred the boundary between life and drama.

A Streetcar Named Desire played an important role in this film. On one hand, it ran through few turning points of the whole story: the encounter of Manuela and her old lover Lola, the death of her son Esteban, and the meeting of her soon-to-be close diva friend Huma. On the other hand, it implied the storyline and set the tone of the movie through the actresses that featured in this drama. Manuela, Huma and Huma’s lover Nina--- none of them escaped the similar tragic fate with the characters’ in The Streetcar Named Desire. Outside of the theatre and on the newspapers, the glamorous diva Huma’s posters are everywhere, while in fact her life is problematic, lonely and sad, just like her role Blanche in The Streetcar Named Desire; Manuela met her old lover and the biological dad of her son Lola via playing Stella in this drama, and left the man with a child just like Stella, and many years later her child indirectly died for seeing this drama. It also explained Manuela’s mental breakdown after Huma asked her intention of participating the drama while auditioning, since The Streetcar Named Desire could be regarded as the focal point of her suffering.

  

Masculinity and Femininity

The idea of masculinity did not present that much in this movie, that only three male characters are involved: Manuela’s son Esteban, Rosa’s aged father that has Alzheimer and actor in Mario. Thus in some ways, masculinity in this movie is presented in a vulnerable way, that associated with death, helplessness and disappointment, while the femininity shown in this movie has to do with the ability of overcoming pain and chaos. Indeed, the female characters showed their unlimited power in front of varieties of sufferings. The dedication of Huma, the unsophisticatedness of Rosa, the optimism of Agrado and the forgivingness of Manuela. All of these qualities helped them overcame one distress after another. Thus, Almodovar was in fact giving a praise to the two basic instinct of females: optimism and endurance--- the four women could immediately get together and chit-chat and become each others’ backing. Men and women both have love, but it seems like women can easily turn their love into forgivingness and care. From their profound laughter, they deluded each other’s pain--- maybe just to avoid loneliness rather than more divine reasons. Even Agrado, a she-male, that a lot of qualities of her makes her a real woman as she wept for Huma and Nina’s accident, and as she sighed and rejected Mario’s request of sex service.

Queer and Normality

The most unforgettable part of the movie starts from when Manuela hop on the bus till she found Agrado. From Madrid to Barcelona, what Manuela travelled through was not only the distant space, but also seventeen years of time. After the music and her monologue, the scenery switched from the wild into the city. However, the first thing Manuela encountered as she finally got into the suburban area of Madrid, was the explicit and astonishing scenes of sex trade and violence. Civilization and barbarism sharply combined and collided in this city, the director further complicated the story through this scene and brought out the discussion of the ‘queer’, of the ‘abnormal’, of the ‘unnatural’.

While Agrado was giving a compensation speech for the absence of two leading cast in the show, ‘he’ thoroughly introduced the cost of all the products of artificial technology on ‘his’ body: nose, jaw, skin, breasts and so on--- and ironically, the starting point of all these ‘anti-nature’ body modifications are none other than serving the primitive desire of human-being.

The film brought up many sensitive social issues that marginalized minority of people due to their bio-medical or genetic conditions such as homosexuality, AIDS, transgender and drug addiction. The good thing is, the film focused on telling stories, revealing characters’ emotions and affectionateness rather than being didactical and judgmental. Instead of labelling the characters as the ‘minority’, Almodovar highlighted their ‘normalities’--- just like every other story that every other one has: life, love, and death.

Contemporary civilization did not bring wealth and stability to this country, instead, brought crisis and pain. It seems like human beings have never been emancipated from their primitive desires, the so-called civilization is pushing the desires to extremes by distorting it, and present itself in irreversible ways. The only things that could ease the tension seemed to something primitive as well, such as liberty, fraternity and equality.