MUBI

Soon after witnessing the death of her teenage son, Manuela (Cecilia Roth) leaves Madrid on a bus bound for Barcelona. The emotionally charged journey between these two Spanish cities, it turns out, has already happened in reverse—eighteen years prior—soon before her son Esteban’s birth, rather than on the heels of his death, as the journey now occurs in “All About My Mother.” The film’s director, Pedro Almodóvar, signifies Manuela’s arrival in Barcelona with sweeping shots of the cityscape, its modernist architecture embodied by the illuminated Sagrada Familia cathedral built by Antoni Gaudí, a massive, ethereal beacon glowing in the darkness.

The breathtaking images of Barcelona (which persist, a little more subdued, throughout the film) have no equal among the images Almodóvar gives us of Madrid, where Manuela lives. For a director who came of age in Madrid, Almodóvar presents us with hardly any affective, or even identifiable, images of the Spanish capital. In truth, “All About My Mother” needs Madrid only insofar as to establish a contrast to the film’s main locale, Barcelona. With its beautiful mosaics and streetwalker circus, Barcelona shares with the film’s transvestites a desire to mask depravity beneath a glamorous facade.

And yet, for all their airs, the transvestites in “All About My Mother” are hardly the only “performers” in the film’s storyline. Two of the film’s characters, Huma Rojo and Nina (Marisa Paredes and Candela Peña), play actresses performing in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” (El Deseo, the name of Almodóvar’s production company, is Spanish for “desire.”) For Manuela, Williams’s play is really a two-fold tragedy where love and loss extend beyond the stage. Years ago, she starred in “A Streetcar Named Desire” with Esteban’s father, whom Esteban always dreamed of meeting but never knew. Through a strange coincidence, Esteban’s tragic death occurs after a performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire” in Madrid.

There are a number of coincidences that occur throughout “All About My Mother,” enough that they gradually cease to seem unusual. In a scene after Esteban’s death, Manuela becomes the bereaved family member she has always role-played as a nurse. When she arrives in Barcelona, Manuela stops by a field frequented by prostitutes and their clients, hoping to find Lola, Esteban’s father-turned-transvestite. She finds, instead, one of her and Lola’s old acquaintances, La Agrado (Antonia San Juan). La Agrado, in turn, introduces Manuela to Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a nun who not only knows Lola but is carrying the transvestite’s child, just as Manuela once was. Manuela also stands-in as Stella in a performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire” in Barcelona when Nina self-destructs. The chain of coincidences in “All About My Mother” never fully undoes verisimilitude, partly because coincidence is often quite compatible with comedy and melodrama. As interesting a film as it may be, Almodóvar’s previous effort, “Live Flesh,” is arguably too chance-driven for a thriller—or at least too chance-driven to be taken completely seriously. “All About My Mother,” however, tests the limits of believability without undermining its serious and poignant moments.