All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Pedro Almodóvar's films are so stuffed with irony that even the sympathetic streak underneath his wild transgression can sometimes seem a front for even darker impulses underneath. In All About My Mother, the director so thoroughly blurs camp, tastelessness and wrenching drama that it should be the most insoluble of all his movies. On the contrary, however, this is by some measure his most openly loving film, a tribute to the roles women play in art and life that deepens and softens the black comic exaggeration of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The women here are no less melodramatic or filled with presence, but Almodóvar's affection is plain even without the lovely dedication he makes at the end.

The opening shots, of tilts and tracks over medical equipment giving a few final, artificial breaths to the doomed, do not so much set a tone for the film as get Almodóvar's usual darkness out of his system. Whatever one might want to read into the machinery falsely keeping flesh alive or a broader cold machination underneath the red-blooded melodrama to come soon dissolves as nothing more than a setup for a swift emotional payoff: these shots merely establish the initial setting of Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse in Madrid in charge of overseeing organ transplants. Almodóvar establishes her here so that when her teenage writer son, Esteban, dies on his birthday chasing an actress' autograph, he can immediately place her in the position she had to place so many others, of being sorry for he rloss but needing to act fast. I did say this wasn't the usual Almodóvar black comedy, right?