A Complete Work, In Progress

On Almodóvar’s All About My Mother

When David O’ Mahony asked me to choose a film to include in The Bigger Picture, I found it easier to choose a Director than a film,  and, having taken counsel from my film club of Livia, James Albert and Philip, I chose Almodóvar.

Firstly, he was conspicuous by his absence on the list, but also, what I most enjoy about Almodóvar’s work, is that, it is impossible to separate one film from the other.

I always get them confused. I do not mean that all of his films are exactly the same, squeezed out of some production line, as if it were Carry On Up the Prado, or something,  but rather that all of his films appear to exist in parallel, as if he had just one good idea, he decided one day to make one film and all films he has ever made have since been a multiple, a variant of that.

Let me explain.

As someone who works in and for culture, and as a gay man of an age where looking over your shoulder is hard to avoid, I am increasingly interested, perhaps increasingly, impatiently obsessed, with the idea, that we each are many selves, many of these selves existing in parallel, or with reference to the other. We are each our own company I guess, literally but also conceptually.

It seems important somehow that we acknowledge that we are our own footnotes, that as I speak to you now in this cinema, the event has its foundations with me being 7 years old queuing in the rain in Cork, holding my Dad’s hand, waiting to see my first film, my first feeling of awe, a double bill of Star Wars and the Empire Strikes back, afterwards asking my Dad why I was not born a Jedi, and him simply replying, ‘maybe you are a Jedi, just not yet’.

Films have shown me, taught me and convinced me that I am not one singular thing, but rather, I am various.

Pedro Almodóvar is a master of this, a master of the various, and in being so, I think he is one of the most radical, real and revolutionary film makers of our time.

I use the word real on purpose.

It is not that his films are not fantastic, or full of fantasy and very often, on the face of it at least, based on some very tall tales indeed.

But the films are real in as much as I think Almodóvar knows the world in an honest and true, way.

He sees people and draws his characters in all of their complex pain and glory.

And in a late-capitalist, still rather neo-liberal world which requires you to declare everything about yourself with such limiting certainty, I find it reassuring that Almodóvar, at his best, never seeks to know or share everything about his characters on screen.

He is rather more at home in a world where getting along with other people is not about knowing all parts of them in order to assimilate them or trust them, but rather it is about accepting all people are opaque, and entirely unknowable, and, that we just have to love them and care for them simply because they are alive and smiling at us, up there on the screen, or munching popcorn beside us, right here in the dark.

Tonight, we will watch Almodóvar’s 1999 Oscar winning,  Cannes conquering, finally mainstream movie, All About My Mother, his most successful in terms of awards and accolades, hailed by many as his best work.

As a film it is a good example of Almodóvar’s interest in the various, the multiple reading of actor, place and narrative, and I offer just three examples of this.

First, Almodóvar casts the same actors, over and over again, like Penelope Cruz or Marisa Parades in this film. Almodóvar seems loyal and collaborative as an artist himself and this is part of it, he works with those he trusts, he has his muses. But such is the screen presence, the distinctive appearance or the complete beauty these actors possess, once on screen they are always themselves, they do not escape this - Penelope Cruz is always Penelope Cruz.

And yet, from film to film, we also tend forget this, and whatever Almodóvar does with these actors, while being themselves they are at the same time inhabiting another version of themselves, at another time and place, or in another setting, such is their capacity to act and to convince us that while we know them, find them familiar, they are also new, strangers, out of context somehow. It is important we know them and not know them at the same time.

Cruz, a young possibly lesbian nun on screen tonight, is also the mother gently attending to her son in Pain and Glory, or Janice in Parallel Mothers, moving across time, place, and, differing social and political contexts. It is the greatest trick Almodóvar pulls, to disarm you from the comfort of the familiar, to disrupt what you know, in order to be prepared for the stories about to unfold.

Second in his various tricks, is Almodóvar’s legendary production design. For decades Almodovar collaborated with Antxón Gómez and together they advanced production design in cinema to new levels.

For them, the set is not a mere backdrop it is a character too, it has a role to play.  Together they did not just build sets, they seemed to audition and cast them from film to film, using the setting of the scene to activate the actors and to allude to the emotional, social and political contexts relevant to the unfolding stories.

But their signature use of colour and pattern is not a nod to the World of Interiors in terms of decoration, but a much more profound nod to the world of our interiors, our minds and our psychological and emotional need to build ourselves into and out of the places in which we live.  Colour is used in this evenings film – red – to rhetorically connect a disparate band of women, binding them together as a kind of chromatic family.

Almodóvar and Gómez know that as we build places they build us back – their use of colour, pattern and material objects was intended I think to describe the affinities between people and place, that one of our various selves is, in fact, the places or rooms we inhabit - you cannot ever separate the room from the roommate.

Finally, as  the title All About My Mother suggests, this is a film about mothers, motherhood and mothering, conceptually and literally, but, so are very many of Almodóvar’s films.

Indeed his work is what academics call, “inter-textual”, he refers to himself, his own work, and the work of other directors, writers, plays, and more. He does this repeatedly, new work builds on old, so as you watch one film by Almodóvar, you see or hear echoes of others.

You will see this tonight, where A Street Car Named Desire, is not just a play that is being performed in a movie, but a thing with agency, chosen specifically to drive narratives of what it means to be a woman.

There is a really rather famous dedication at the end of this film, as the credits close, which testifies to Almodóvar’s commitment to women in his work and his life, again, there is an affinity here, and all of my creative direction has been driven by collaborations with women, and this evening I offer this film up to all mothers, the bravest people among us, and I think especially in this moment of my architecture-mother, Shelley, so beautiful, so brilliant, who today said goodbye to her own muse, Michael.

There is a famous scene in tonight’s film when Agrado takes to a stage in a theatre when a performance is cancelled and instead, she gives an impromptu version of her life story. 

‘Aside from being pleasant, I am also authentic’, Agrado says.

Then, at the end of her speech she admits that, ‘it cost me a lot to be authentic. But we must not be cheap in regards to the way we look. Because a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself’.

Twenty six years ago, Almodovar presented, Agrado, a trans woman as she wished to be seen, simply as a woman.

He did so, not by defining or declaring her, but by setting the scene so she could tell her own story, revealing that she, like all of us, is a construction project, committed to building and rebuilding toward our dream-selves, extending and expanding every multi-story, each of us already diverse, none of us finished, not fully, not yet.

And as much as I loved the science-fiction future of Star Wars when I was 7, it has been Almodóvar that has been one of the artists that has confirmed again and again that to thirst for the future is the worst kind of trap.

In his work Almodóvar states that truly imagining a future is about being present in the now, and when he empowered Agrado to take to the stage, at the heart of this film, at the turn of the century, he knew the future was already here, right in front of him, looking steadfast into the darkness, while staring straight into the lens, a woman various in her beauty, a complete work, but in progress.

Enjoy the film, this, evening and thank you for coming.