454 - All About My Mother, Spain, 1999. Dir. Pedro Almodovar.
Esteban is writing in his notebook.
The television plays in front of him.
The movie is about to start!
I'm coming!
His mother Manuela comes and joins him. She brings the snacks. They start the movie.
Eva al desnudo.
Eve Unveiled.
Esteban complains. They always change the title! It should be Todo Sobre Eva.
All About Eve.
Esteban has found his title. He writes at the top of the page. Todo . . .
We flip under the pencil. We, the camera, become the notebook. Esteban writes on us.
When we saw Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 film The Lodger we saw The Lodger walking on top of us, on an invisible ceiling. We on the first floor looked at the bottom of his shoes on the second floor.
The Lodger
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Now we see a pencil writing on us, on invisible paper.
What are you writing?
Nothing. Future Pulitzer winners.
She laughs. Eat. You need to put on a few pounds. Some day you may have to work the street to keep me.
Work the street. We do not yet know the significance of her statement. Esteban does not know. And he never will.
The credits have been rolling as we have been watching, and we have not yet seen the title. Now we do.
All About My Mother. Todo Sobre Mi Madre--not Mi Madre al desnudo--appears in bold, all caps, sans serif font, with the words in red, except "madre," which is in white, emphasized.
The words stand between them. Come between them. Split them. As words so often do come between people who love each other.
He follows up on her joke. "And you? Would you prostitute yourself for me?"
She looks at him with the fatigue of a single mother. "I've already done just about everything for you."
The titles play on several levels.
All About Eve--which stars Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holme, and Thelma Ritter, with a young Marilyn Monroe--is actually not about Eve but about Margo Channing, the Bette Davis character. It is about ego and identity and dealing with aging, the changing of public tastes, the fragility of stardom, the perpetual threat of younger players, marital infidelity, and alcoholism.
But Eve makes it all about herself by insinuating herself into Margo's life and taking over.
When Esteban complains that they always change the title, they actually change the title on us as well.
The Spanish title spoken on television is Eva al desnudo, which they portray in the subtitles as "Eve Unveiled." This translation seeks to capture a broader, more metaphorical sense of the meaning by suggesting that the film will show the true Eve, who she really is beneath the surface.
The literal translation of Eva al desnudo is "Eve Naked," or "Naked Eve."
We can see that the figurative translation, "unveiled," makes sense with respect to what the movie is about. In English we do use the term naked to suggest emotionally unguarded, open, or transparent (e.g., Natalie Imbruglio's "Torn": "I'm cold and I'm ashamed / Lying naked on the floor"; or Randy Stonehill's "When I Look to the Mountains": "I stand naked before you in amazed belief."), but by making it unveiled the subtitle translators have made that meaning more clear.
So when Esteban wants to take it back from Eve Unveiled to All About Eve, he removes the layer of meaning that suggests, "This movie is about what the real Eve is really about."
But he also opens it up to another meaning. All About My Mother adds to it the layer from popular psychoanalysis. Why are you the way you are? It is all about my mother.
And we will discover another layer. An ironic one.
And by isolating this clip of film, Almodovar shows us the furtive glance Eve makes as she stands outside the door listening in on Margo Channing's conversation. Her ambitions rendered naked from the beginning.
Esteban asks his mother a question. "Would you want to be an actress?"
She responds, "It was hard enough becoming a nurse." We appreciate that she recognizes the hard work it takes to become an actress.
Manuela is a nurse who promotes becoming an organ donor. An extension of one of Almodovar's previous films, The Flower of My Secret (1995).
Esteban promises, "If you were an actress I'd write parts for you." He adores his mother.
And if you know Almodovar, you know that he adores his mother. And that he writes parts for her.
Manuela says she was in an amateur troupe when she was younger. She will look for a picture later. She does. After the movie she finds it and shows it to him.
The picture of Manuela when she was younger. To us she looks a lot like Diane Keaton in the 1970s. With the hat. The sleeves. The man's tie loosely tied. The hand on the hat. La-de-da. La-de-da. La-la.
Boris Vian, she says. Cabaret for intellectuals.
Which immediately takes me back to a show I saw once on Hollywood Boulevard at a place called King King. It was advertised in the LA Weekly as the story of a man from Huntsville, Alabama, who went on a journey of discovery and became an evangelist. How is it that a cabaret on Hollywood Boulevard came to be about a man from Huntsville, Alabama, who became an evangelist? I went to see it. It was fascinating and strange. As cabaret for intellectuals can be. The high octave, high octane singing. The tightly choreographed, flamboyantly bold dancing. The unbelievably all-too-familiar plotline. And the thoughtfulness. Camp with much more going on beneath the surface.
At midnight Manuela brings Esteban his birthday present.
Music for Chameleons, by Truman Capote. (Another Alabamian.)
He asks her to read to him, as she did when he was little.
"I started writing when I was eight. I didn't know that I had chained myself to a noble but merciless passion. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip, and the whip is intended only for self-flagellation."
Yikes. Manuela feels that those thoughts would turn one away from writing. Esteban feels it is a great preface.
He asks to see his mother act in an organ-donor seminar. She performs live skits on camera for medical professionals to watch in order to learn how to guide dying patients and family members into donating their organs. He goes. He watches.
Then they go see the local performance of A Streetcar Named Desire. It looks like a play. It does not look like life actually happening before their very eyes.
"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
And afterwards they wait outside. Just as Eve Harrington stands outside Margo Channing's dressing room after Aged in Wood, so also Esteban stands outside Huma Rojo's dressing room after Streetcar. His motives are bit simpler. He wants an autograph. And yet they are deeply more complex. He wants to learn about his origins. Which makes our title ironic.
His mother tells him that they played Streetcar twenty years ago. She feels they did it better. She played Stella. Stella! His father played Kowalski. Kowalski!
"Someday you'll have to tell me all about my father."
Huma Rojo comes out of the theatre. Complaining. She gets in her car. He races to her. Puts his face to the glass. The car drives away. She looks out the back window. Watches his face. He runs after the car. Chases it. Races it.
And here we have John Cassavetes' Opening Night (1977). Another play about life in the theatre. In which we also referenced All About Eve.
Opening Night
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About a fan waiting to see her beloved star. And chasing her. And racing her. And getting hit by a car. And dying.
Manuela runs after Esteban.
"My son! My son!"
Oh, Absalom! Absalom! Oh, Esteban! Esteban!
And the movie takes it turn.
Now Manuela must make the decision. Will she donate the organs of her son?
His corazon. Her corazon.
She sneaks into the files. Finds the location and identity of the recipient. Flies there. Goes to the hospital. Stands outside and watches. Watches as he walks outside. Alive. Smiling. Happy. Wearing her son's heart. Her heart. His chest walking into the camera. As if we have just entered into his chest cavity and touched his heart ourselves.
Manuela will do what her son asked of her. She will go in search of his father.
The Search for the Father Figure.
This time not by the child but by the mother of the child.
Seventeen years ago she made the trip from Barcelona to Madrid. But she was not alone. She had Esteban inside her. Today she makes the trip from Madrid to Barcelona. Travels through the tunnel like a birth canal. This time alone.
Going back to be reborn.
Pedro Almodovar inhabits a space shared by our friends the German Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), the Italian Luchino Visconti (1906-1976), the Danish/German/British/American Douglas Sirk (1897-1987), and the Americans John Waters (1946- ) and Quentin Tarantino (1963- ).
He once said in a speech while receiving the Lumiere Award in France, "I think I used the colors of my childhood, Technicolor, brilliant explosive colors, that my passion for color is my mother's reply to so many years of mourning, blackness."
His movies are big and bold both in production design and in theme. He seems to have a very big heart and requires a very big canvas on which to express it.
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