The Film Experience

For Pride Month, Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. We've decided to extend the series for a few more episodes. Pretend it's still June for a bit!

by Eric Blume

It’s wonderful fun to revisit 1999’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner, director Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. Although it’s a beautifully textured, multi-layered tapestry of themes and emotions, it has to be one of the unusual films to ever win this big prize. The plot involves, among other thing: a nurse going onstage as an unrehearsed cover for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire; a HIV-positive, pregnant nun; two heterosexual women united by giving birth to sons named Esteban from the same transgender woman; and numerous conversations and jokes about acquired tits.

That none of these unlikely and uncommercial plot strands feel forced or shocking is due to the artistry of Almodóvar. The Spanish auteur weaves stories together nobody else would think of in a million years, wrapped up in the boldest color palettes imaginable, with performances of sheer emotional force that rattle the roof...

While he’d had numerous previous films cross over into international success including the Oscar nominated Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), All About My Mother was Almodóvar’s first Oscar win. It was such a sensation in its year that none of the fellow nominees in the category stood a chance despite the film featuring what was then (and remains) a series of not-exactly-Oscar-friendly characters and situations. Almodóvar would return to Oscar’s stage with his next film, 2002’s Talk to Her, and win outside of this category, once again a richly-deserved prize, for his Best Original Screenplay.

There has always been and there will only ever be one Almodóvar. If gun were to my head and I was forced to name the greatest living filmmaker, I’d say Almodóvar. You can see his influences and who he stole from (masters like Bunuel and Dali, but also “low” forms like burlesque and circus), but what goes onscreen is completely his own. He’s the truly rare thing in cinema: a unicorn. The way this legendary artist sees the world is unlike the way anyone else has seen it.

Since his two Oscars in 1999 and 2002, Almodóvar has been a little all over the place, hitting colossal highs with Bad Education and Volver, and several oddly middling titles between The Skin I Live In, I’m So Excited!, and Julieta. But he’s come roaring back, too, with two later-career masterpieces. Pain and Glory ranks among his greatest achievements, and Parallel Mothers had that steely narrative drive evocative of his early films. And of course in those last two films, he directed Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz to astonishing performances that verge on the transcendental.

But All About My Mother deserves a fresh viewing. It’s bonkers, incredibly joyous, continually surprising. Miraculously its quick and light on its feet but weighty and powerful at the same time. It’s unquestionably one of the queerest films to ever win a prize this big. It’d be a shame if we didn’t see Almodóvar at the podium at least once more in this lifetime.

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