Word: melodrama
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...Spain's up and coming actresses, meets Manuela as Sister Rosa, a beautiful young nun impregnated and infected with HIV by none other than the famous and increasingly mythical figure, Lola. Coupled with this twist, Manuela becomes a stage assistant for Huma's run in Barcelona. Thus, melodrama ensues--a transvestite, a nun carrying Esteban's half-brother and a woman on the run from her past...
...film's artistry borders on the over-done as the melodrama envelops the audience. The wallpaper patterns are reminiscent of '60s acid tripping posters, and the rooms seem too perfectly contrived. While red is normally a color used on camera to draw attention to an actress in a scene or emphasize a particular state of emotion in a drama, the women in All About My Mother are continuously cloaked in red. Thus, dress provides no clues as to where scenes of tension replace scenes of relaxation. Visually, each scene has an obnoxious similarity to the one before. Despite the melodrama...
...About My Mother is dedicated to "all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers." Almodvar's intention is successful, for while the melodrama and subject context is difficult for anyone other than a film buff to appreciate, he does capture a heart-warming study of women who move from self-delusion to reconciliation...
...somehow that doesn't matter. Neither does the fact that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind...
...oldest myth of cinema: that the magic is real, that movie people in person are as delightful, as bigger-than-life, as they are on the giant screen. Thus the truest compliment to pay his movies--those tangy, nourishing stews of bent men and brave women, of comedy and melodrama, passion and grief--is to say they are every bit as beguiling as he is. And the only thing to say about his new film, All About My Mother, is that it is even better: the most mature and satisfying work in a glittering, consistently surprising career. "Pedro...