Criterion Collection: All About My Mother (1999) | Blu-ray Review
Pedro Almodóvar’s most exquisitely dramatic and compassionate film All About My Mother arrived in the final year of the last century, a supercharged queer and feminist homage to maternal instincts and the bonding salve of femininity. On paper, it features a plot which sounds like the soapiest of Sirk mixed with the most lurid of telenovela and yet, as a testament to the writer/director’s mastery, it’s a vividly joyful odyssey of fluctuating emotional tones.
The title was the first of Almodóvar’s films to compete in Cannes, winning him Best Director and taking home the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In essence, a transitional juncture for the director, marrying his lavish, outré energies with maturing, increasingly layered narratives, it’s a film which excels on several fronts with its roundelay of subtexts positing femininity as the hopeful conduit for the fluidity required to achieve contentment. At the same time, it serves as a reminder of how the theater is a reflection of the constant, Sisyphean performance of day to day life and how our reactions to shifting energies delineate their differences.
A trio of superb Almodóvar regulars include Cecilia Roth (in perhaps her generous Almodóvar appearance), Marisa Paredes and Penelope Cruz, all who get some scenes stolen by the director’s real comedic discovery, here played by Antonia San Juan as a matter-of-fact, effortlessly enjoyable sex worker.
Film Rating: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc Rating: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2021: France (Bruno Dumont), Passing (Rebecca Hall) and Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.