Loving Pedro

CTERESA ISASI--SONY
'All About My Mother': Almodovar's best movie yet

The word for life in spanish ought to be Almodovar. As in Pedro, the writer-director and all-round vital force in two decades of mostly terrific movies. He loves to tell stories, whether in his 13 features or across a restaurant table.

This enchanting chatterbox, with the round face and electrified hair of a Madrid muppet, makes you believe the 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 is a great dancer," says Marisa Paredes, one of six superb actresses in Mother, "and this is his tango."

Hollywood likes his moves too. In a U.S. market where foreign-language films are hard to find even in art houses, Almodovar, 48, is a reliable moneymaker. He also makes the kind of bright, saucy films Hollywood wishes it could. So the studios have courted him ever since his 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. They bought remake rights for Jane Fonda, then for Whoopi Goldberg (though the film wasn't made), then they asked him to direct Sister Act, First Wives Club, Runaway Bride and, he says, "anything with drag queens." But though he hopes to make a film soon in Florida, based on Pete Dexter's novel The Paperboy, Almodovar's roots are deep in the Iberian psyche. He has never filmed outside Spain. Indeed, he hadn't shot outside Madrid until he made All About My Mother, set mostly in Barcelona.

The 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, giving lad with a lot of promise. Almodovar is careful and caring in setting up this lovely couple--one could build a fine movie around them--and then he is ruthless in tearing them apart. With Esteban gone, Manuela has a mission: to grieve heroically and heal the wounds of other desperate souls. She is the ultimate organ donor. Now that her heart has been broken, she gives pieces of it to everyone.

She goes to Barcelona, hoping to find Esteban's 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 women resemble their dreams on their way to transcendence, accommodation or early death. By the end, Manuela--whose son is gone and whose dreadful ex-husband poisons all he touches--has knitted her de facto sorority into a family.

There is another family in this briskly cathartic film: the brilliant acting ensemble. Almodovar cherishes the notion of a family of actors--the gypsies who, for a few months, become as close as siblings under the maternal eye of their director. So with each new project he plans reunions, forming the tightest stock company in movies. Nearly a dozen actors have appeared in three or more of his films. One, Antonio Banderas, segued into American stardom. The others are all actresses, including Paredes, Carmen Maura and Victoria Abril. Almodovar is the man who loves women, who understands them, who writes women's roles that any actress would die or kill for.

Sometimes my main characters are men," he says, "and the script is written from their masculinity--a very testicular movie. But I do prefer to work with women. Maybe that's because when I was young, I was surrounded by strong women, real fighters. This was in La Mancha, a very machista and conservative region. There, the man is a king sitting on his throne. And the women are like the prime minister; they are the ones who govern the house, resolve the problems."

In his new 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. But the way women react to these things is much more spectacular, much more cinematic. It does seem that men are made up of fewer pieces than women."