Word: manuela
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...trip was a tonic for him; this film, for all its verbal and emotional buoyancy, touches a depth his earlier work danced around, like revelers on a volcano's edge. Mother begins by painting an idyll: of Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse who works in her hospital's organ-transplant unit, and her darling son Esteban (Eloy Azorin). Manuela is the mom every gay, or simply sensitive, son would adore. She watches All About Eve with him, gives him a Truman Capote book for his birthday, takes him to a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He is a sweet...
...father, whom the boy never knew. There, by chance or fate, she meets her flock: Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a nun who deserves many fretful prayers, and her bitter mom (Rosa Maria Sarda); Huma Rojo (Paredes), an actress who is playing Blanche in the touring production of Streetcar that Manuela and her son had seen in Madrid; Huma's druggie lover Nina (Candela Pena); and Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transsexual prostitute who has raised artifice to a philosophy. "You are more authentic," this dear creature says, "the more you resemble what you dreamed you are." Manuela helps all these...
...film, when Manuela discovers her son's fate, she lets out a hoarse wail of sorrow, chilling in its nakedness. Much later she is onstage, filling in for Nina as Stella in Streetcar, and she emits precisely the same cry; she has remembered and transformed her mourning into art, and the audience applauds fervently. It is a lovely clue to one of the movie's themes, as Almodovar describes it: "the capacity of women to act without being professional actresses: to lie, to fake, to perform. Men and women both have loneliness, pain, the same kind of suffering...
...normally stone-faced critic at the Cannes Film Festival after seeing this vivacious screwball melodrama, which won Almodovar the Best Director prize. Hot tears are an apt response: the two most innocent characters die; the others grieve and carry on womanfully. At the center of the film is Manuela (Cecilia Roth, in a heroically clenched performance), who goes to Barcelona looking for her ex-husband and ends up mothering half a dozen lost souls. She is Mother Courage, Mother Teresa and your mom on her very best day. But All About My Mother also gives the viewer reasons to laugh...
...Manuela T. Arciniegas '01 asked how Harvard compared to other educational institutions in terms of support for Latino studies...