All About My Mother
1999, directed by Pedro Almodóvar
It’s no secret that All About My Mother derives its title from All About Eve, which Manuela and her son Esteban watch on television three minutes in. The title of the Hollywood classic fills the screen half a minute before the title of Almodóvar’s film. Strangely, though, there aren’t many plot parallels. Esteban becomes one of the autograph hounds that Margo Channing despises; Huma Rojo’s stage name comes from Bette Davis’s trademark cigarette smoke; and most notably, Manuela seizes her chance to triumph on stage while working as a diva’s personal assistant. It’s not enough to justify the homage in the title, unless we notice that it’s the difference between the films that counts most. All About My Mother inverts the premise of All About Eve, and therein lies its point.
All About Eve is a tale of ambition, about an aspiring actress who replaces an older star. In All About My Mother, Manuela replaces Nina for one night and graciously steps away from theater life the next day. She’s more modest than Eve Harrington, but that’s only part of the difference. The real subject here goes beyond ambition.
Manuela’s success on the stage is only a small part of her story, but it echoes the greater arc. Just as she takes Nina’s place in the play, a new baby will take the place of Esteban – his half-brother, also named Esteban. Anyone watching will understand, as Manuela must, that this substitution cannot be total. No one can ever replace her son, just as no actress could have truly replaced Margo in All About Eve. It’s crucial that Manuela isn’t trying to duplicate her son – it’s the baby’s mother Rosa who names him Esteban – yet when Rosa dies, Manuela adopts the baby and evidently loves him as her own.
If these acts of substitution are related, they reveal an unsuspected logic. All About My Mother is built around substitution, from the organ transplants at the beginning to the closing dedication “to all actresses who’ve played actresses”. Rosa plans to replace some murdered nuns in El Salvador. She offers Manuela as a replacement for her parents’ maid who quit. Agrado replaces Manuela as Huma’s assistant then later replaces Nina as Huma’s lover, and her autobiographical stage act fills in for the missing actresses. Manuela cautions Rosa not to make her a substitute mother; Agrado was “like a sister” to Lola for twenty years; and Rosa’s father, beset by dementia, goes around asking women’s ages and heights as if trying to recapture the daughter he’s forgotten. Both the baby and Manuela’s son are named after their father, who was called Esteban before he became Lola, and Rosa is named after her mother. Emotionally, practically, and symbolically, the characters use each other as substitutes.
Likewise, while married to Manuela, Lola had slept around as if perpetually replacing the wife she already had. It’s not only persons lost or missing that we seek to replace, but also persons we’re close to but can’t quite connect with. The impulse to seek someone in someone else is an almost universal response to the fundamental loneliness of the human condition. We seek bonds with others, but those bonds are never enough. The problem goes back to the infant-mother bond that sets the template for all subsequent close relationships, giving the film’s title an unexpectedly broad meaning.
Outside the theaters in both Madrid and Barcelona, a larger-than-life portrait of Huma Rojo advertises the production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Her pixellated face recalls the opening titles of Vertigo, where the impassive face of an anonymous maternal figure emerges from a close-up of lips, the primordial locus of connection between baby and breast. The image comes full circle in a zoom onto Esteban’s lips in a photograph near the end, and it resonates in all the talk of blow jobs, the act of sucking being a substitute for the primal pleasure of the infant. All About My Mother shows both practical and psychoanalytic insight into the act of substitution.
Taking their lead from Freud, Hitchcock’s films consistently call out the damaging consequences of looking for someone in someone else. His oedipal characters, looking for their mothers in other women, are prone to rage. They seek to control and ultimately destroy the objects of their transferred infantile desire, except in the few cases where the man suddenly manages to grow up. From a more common-sensical point of view, putting Freud aside, most of us are aware of the impossibility of replacing someone, even if our desires steer us wrong sometimes. We know that Manuela cannot replace her lost Esteban, and she knows it too.
Almodóvar’s insight resolves this paradox. On one hand we cannot replace those dear to us, and it’s inadvisable to try. On the other hand, the impulse to find substitutes is inescapable. A child’s original bonds, especially with its parents, set the pattern for future relationships, and on some level everyone we meet reminds us of persons we’ve already encountered. No relationship is wholly new, yet if we have the wisdom to bear this in mind, to make allowances for it, we can forge healthy relationships. The key is to accept people as they are, not as we wish them to be.
The intimate exchanges between Manuela and her son in the opening minutes are replete with oedipal markers, especially when she gives him his birthday present in bed, yet when he turns seventeen Esteban tells his mother that “the best present ever” would be “to tell me all about my father.” This wish to know his father as a human being coincides with his entry into adulthood, and also with his mother losing him, symbolically dissolving the oedipal triangle… but the implication here is larger than that. Esteban’s transition to adulthood is purely symbolic, without visible change to his character. He’s been mature for a long time already.
If the characters in All About My Mother are all engaged in substitution, it’s also the case that their innate humanity supersedes their roles as substitutes. Esteban may have taken his father’s place in Manuela’s heart on some level, but he’s never a rival to Lola. Huma may have named herself after Bette Davis, but her talent is distinct from her idol’s. The new baby may fill a hole left by the elder Esteban, but both Manuela and Lola are able to grieve for one while treasuring the other. Characters cross lines of identity, gender, and sexuality, yet their human core is independent of those changes. Manuela’s birthday gift to her son, Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, contains a fitting metaphor for a being who remains essentially unchanged through superficial transformations. Agrado expresses the same idea when she declares herself “as authentic as they come,” not despite but because of all the cosmetic changes she’s undergone.
In Vertigo, the impulse to seek someone in someone else is fundamentally destructive because it’s done blindly, without self-knowledge, while treating the other person as an object. Likewise, in All About Eve, the wish to replace someone is a sign of total selfishness and a betrayal of the acting profession. All About My Mother recognizes that we are all inevitably both audience and actors, putting people in roles we need filled while also filling the roles of people others are missing. Whether this circumstance brings destruction, or lays a foundation for imperfect but worthwhile relationships, depends on how we approach other people.
All About Eve ends at the multi-faceted dressing mirror in Eve’s bedroom, where an ambitious young actress imagines taking Eve’s place in the floodlights. It’s an image of supreme vanity, a perpetuation of Eve’s own sin against Margo, and a warning against the hazards of replacement akin to the dark ending of Vertigo. There’s a dressing mirror in Almodóvar’s film too, but Huma never stops to admire herself in it. Instead she sees Manuela there and turns to offer her a job. All About My Mother is filled with signs of humanity that show how to live in a world where everyone is subject to replacement, even those we love the most – signs like Lola’s love for the son she never knew; Rosa’s selflessness; Huma’s generosity; Agrado’s authenticity and desire to please; Rosa’s mother’s change of heart at the end; Manuela’s unbounded love which she bestows on Rosa’s baby; and most of all Esteban’s unconditional longing to know his father. “I want to meet him. I have to make Mom understand I don’t care who he is or what he’s like or how he behaved toward her.”
The great irony is that Esteban doesn’t know that his father is actually a woman, so that the film’s title can be read as a correction to his expressed wish to know “all about my father” – his father is really a mother. This ambiguity, however, shouldn’t force us to choose between Manuela and Lola, or alternatively Almodóvar’s own mother (for whom he saves the last dedication) in reading the title. If motherhood is the primum mobile of all relationships, then the title may refer to all of these at once, and more.
In its literal sense, motherhood is a biological phenomenon, and the film keeps reminding us of the fluids that sustain and transmit life: the dextrose in the opening shot, the diaper commercial jingle (“not a single drop”), the blood on Agrado’s cheek that she mistakes for Manuela’s, and Huma’s rehearsal near the end (“I soaked my hands in his blood and licked them…. it was my blood…. my son’s blood doesn’t disgust me”). The metaphor culminates in the blood of the baby Esteban, cleared in record time of his “awful inheritance” from Lola, the HIV virus. The transfer of bodily fluids in this film is always a metonymy for the act of substitution, and the neutralization of the virus is a token of faith that our species’ propensity to model new relationships on old ones doesn’t have to be deadly.
CONNECTIONS:
All About Eve – A woman ingratiates herself with a theater diva, works as her assistant, seizes an opportunity to play on stage, then gives a triumphant performance; similar title
Vertigo – Impassive full-screen image of a woman’s face; relationship to the mother as the defining template for subsequent relationships