There was this festival of Pedro Almodovar's films, a few years ago and I accidentally went. The film that I have seen started with a telling of a story about siblings, man and a woman,
woman who is a former man, who had a romantic and sexual relation with their father, who took him to Morocco when he was 8 years old in order to live as lovers and so that the boy could
have a sex operation. As the movie progressed, it slowly turned into a romantic comedy, largely influenced by the style of films Audrey Hepburn was proud to star in, back in the fifties and I was hooked on the combination.
Almodovar's last masterpiece, 'All About my Mother (Todo sobre mi madre)' is a gentle, beautiful story dedicated to the Hollywood classics, 'All about Eve' and the 'Streetcar Named
Desire' as well as to all the mothers out there. It is his regular attempt to combine the gentleness of the long gone Hollywood films, made around the WW2 with the perversity of the
modern world, not really understanding which feels more unreal, perfect romance tearjacker or a story with characters who are transvestite hookers, pregnant nun and battling lesbians, in a
story that expresses the most beautiful family values.
At the beginning, we find Almodovar's trademark, a commercial, that once, in his earlier works was much more ridiculous, and a teenager Esteban (Eloy Azorin), an aspiring writer, that we
see from the perspective of his paper, watching 'All About Eve' with his mother Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and then on his birthday, they go to see 'Streetcar Named Desire', because the boy wants to get an autograph of his favourite actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), an actress that got her name by the smoke of her cigarettes. She gets into taxi, eluding Esteban, inter-cut with All About Eve where Bette Davis is in a same position, Esteban runs after her and is killed by an incoming car, story is set as Manuela, after donating her son's heart to someone, after playing the very same role in an educational video a bit earlier, goes to Barcelona in search of Esteban's father, to inform him about the death of the son he never knew he had.
As she arrives to Barcelona, in a scene that could have either be found in Fellini's films or ZZ-Top's videos, where the beauty of the city slowly falls into a place where cars circle in a
