Pedro Almodovar’s Academy Award winning 1999 Spanish drama film All About My Mother is dedicated to his own mother in the closing credits, suggesting that the film is based upon his personal relationships. However, one may have already suspected this if they were really focusing on the meticulous direction and attention to detail of Almodovar that exists within the film’s first few scenes. In this brief review, I will explore Almodovar’s masterful attention to detail in All About My Mother, filling each scene with a multitude of underlying subtexts and themes. One of my favorite portions of the film and one of the best examples of such deep detail is in the first scene with both Esteban and his mother Manuela. Before the audience is shown the title of the film, Esteban and his mother Manuela are sitting on the couch watching the 1950 film version of All About Eve starring Bette Davis. Esteban then makes a comment about the film’s title translation in Spanish before beginning to write down his own idea for a title, as he begins to write the full title for All About My Mother appears on the screen directly in between Esteban and Manuela. In the reading “Forms of Being” written by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, the authors explore important queer themes and characteristics of  Almodovar’s All About My Mother. While analyzing the title sequence scene mentioned above, they argue that “the effect of this juxtaposition is to encourage us to identify Almodovar with Esteban – or rather to identify the boy with a younger Almodovar.” (Bersani & Dutoit, 77) The authors recognize that this identification is almost immediately confused because Esteban is killed so early on in the film. In spite of this, Esteban’s spirit certainly permeates the rest of the story, and the identification between the auteur and Esteban never seems to diminish. Pedro Almodovar identifies himself with Esteban in ways other than a strong connection to his mother, including a strong artistic drive and coded homosexuality. Although Esteban is never explicitly described as homosexual, he is coded as one. Esteban’s deep longing for a paternal figure in his life as well as a close relationship with his mother are both aspects of Esteban that can be read as queer and/or homosexual. By bonding Manuela with Bette Davis in the lead role of All About Eve, in this scene, Almodovar sets up his exploration of female actors, acting, artifice, authenticity, and mothering in the film. You can view the scene between Esteban and Manuela right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twx1-VrTusg A little while into the film, the audience is introduced to another important female actor in the story, in the splendid shot seen at the top this article featuring Huma’s face blown up on the wall behind Manuela. In so many ways, the film seems to be asking spectatorship the pressing cultural questions of: what is real and what is artificial, what is genuine and what is contrived, and how can the lines between them blur so easily?

Almodovar’s great attention to detail is also demonstrated before the scenes analyzed above (in the very first shots of the film) where the camera closely follows hospital equipment. Although at first viewing I found this choice surprising and somewhat confusing, as the film progressed, an awareness grew in me of the many underlying messages, motifs, and themes that Almodovar had already begun exploring. An emphasis on the beauty and power of a controlled liquidity and its life saving virtues already hints at ideas of transplant, an abandonment of the real, challenging perspectives of authenticity, and the dynamics between reality and fantasy. The exceptional opening sequence of All About My Mother “announces the dissipation of the real and of the identities which the real at once shelters and constrains.” (Bersani & Dutoit, 101) All About My Mother has a cast of sheltered and constrained identities from Manuela, Esteban, Lola, Rosa, Agrado and Huma – all of whom share experiences of artifice and queerness and the construction and/or re-construction of an identity. In “Forms of Being” the authors analyze All About My Mother’s exploration of identity and artifice and its blurring of the lines between reality and fiction. In particular, they write about the impact and honesty of emotion even in artificial forms such as cinema. They state that “one of the most trustworthy signs of emotion is, in film and in the theatre, yet another artifice.” (Bersani & Dutoit, 109) The two main female actors in the film are fine examples of these trustworthy signs and expressions of emotion – as they act scenes within scenes – for example when Manuela replaces Nina in the stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire. The heart-wrenching cry Manuela gives out on stage hardly feels like acting to the audience members viewing All About My Mother, proving that artificial modes like cinema and theatre both can be vessels for honest emotional manifestation. Almodovar seems to be stretching the expectations of reality and authenticity, suggesting that everything is real and false at the same time? The authors argue that this may mean that the audience member is being asked throughout the entire film to “construct and to accommodate a ‘place’ where the choice between the two (the real and false), and the very formulation of such an alternative, would no longer be necessary.” (Bersani & Dutoit, 110)