the other night i immersed myself in the beautiful drama
that is Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother, a quick synopsis: a single mother grieves the death of her teenage son, Esteban and delves into her complicated past to track down the boy’s father…
before the boy dies he expresses the intense desire to know his father and the movie metaphorically reunites the family in the end. but viewing the movie in this light glosses over other possibilities…
Esteban was enamored with his mother and imagined a fantastic
vision of her as a dramatic heroine despite her mundane existence… Manuela’s reluctance to discuss her mysterious past inspired him to create one for her, passionately filling his notebook with a fictional odes to his mother
but the moment a taxicab violently takes her son’s life,
Manuela is ripped from her reality and forced to inhabit
a tragic role straight out of Esteban’s imagination…
her life is transformed by grief and she is swept into
an unfolding drama filled with theatrical divas and transexual prostitutes where she brings attempted rape to an sudden halt with a rock to the head, plays the midwife to a sick and pregnant nun, and even takes to the stage
it was as if Esteban’s vision of his mother was unlocked by his deathp; his imagined world became his mother’s reality or one could even understand the 2nd half of the movie
as some sort of fevered dying dream, Esteban’s last thoughts…
this is not to diminish the powerful journey Manuela takes
but there are so many layers of possibility in this film
who’s director was interested in the inherent
“capacity to act of certain people who are not actors.”
