All About
My Mother:
I find
this movie one of the best works of Pedro Almodovar. Spanish Cinema has always attracted me, but
this Spanish-French tragic-comedy has redefined the meaning of melodramatic
cinema. Melodrama as a genre has always
been criticised by scholars for excessive use of emotionality but this movie
challenges that perception depicting how we can be sentimental to things
without being overtly emotional. I love this movie not because of its capability
with issues like organ donation, AIDS, homosexuality (lesbian), transsexualism,
and existentialism but its power to accommodate them around a single narrative
and at the same time maintain the specificity and sentimentality of each. Thus
when it argue in favour of transsexuality and demand us to accept it, at the
very same moment it questions its violent aspect. In character of Lola, it
criticises the dominant and masculine dimension of transsexuality In the
process, it unravels different aspects of women’s cosmology and celebrates
motherhood as the most courageous, special and transformative part of it. So
whether it is a question of organ donation of your loved one immediately after
their death, or serving AIDS patient while being a victim of it, accepting the
violent aspect of transsexuality, courage that motherhood gives you to
overpower these binaries and adverse situations.
In the
film, Almodovar uses cinema as a source of cinema. He brilliantly uses films like
‘A Street Car Named Desire’ and ‘All About Eve’, and unapologetically
contextualises his inspiration in this film while simultaneously
decontextualizes the source by weaving it to the issue of tragic instances of
stardom. The way this film comments upon trauma related with success, trauma
related with being innocent and the ethical in this non ethical world, is
brilliant. There is a line in the movie where Huma Rosa ( who represents Bette
Davis) says that “ Success has no test no smell, and when you get used of it is
like it didn’t exist”. In single line we just got a critique of feminism who
celebrates successful women only and converts success also as a painful
achievement.
This film also establishes the fact that death
of someone’s near and dear one can bring extreme pain, sorrow, loneliness but
despite this tragedy, this utter loss, if you believe in life’s existentiality,
you can counter these feelings by associating yourself with others, not on the
basis of charity but on the ground of being simultaneous subjects of pain. In
that process, the films explores the world of women based on strong female
bonding, based on love - a pure love that transcends the trajectory of desire. And last but not the least, The way this film
took us to the subaltern spaces of Barcelona specifically when we see red-light
area of Barcelona, a grave as a site of reunion it seems that film is intended
to bring these outskirts into the imagination of people in a subtly political
manner. I think nothing could be made more brilliant and strong queerly
feminist cinema than this and at the sometime film. In terms of performance I
must say it is one of the best Ciecela Roth film.