Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch All About My Mother
1999 · Pedro Almodóvar · All About My Mother on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the colors each woman wears and lives inside. (light)
Manuela moves through reds and warm earth tones, Sister Rosa through whites and pale blues, Huma Rojo's dressing room glitters with gilding. Hospitals run on cool fluorescents against all that warmth.
Payoff: Almodovar sorts feeling by color, so you can read a room's temperature before anybody speaks.
Watch how long Beato holds a close-up on Roth. (camera)
Affonso Beato keeps faces on screen well past the point of information. Grief, practicality and an old actor's poise contradict each other on the same face while the take runs.
Payoff: You feel the grief as duration instead of watching it get processed into plot.
Notice the films and plays the characters are watching. (structure)
Esteban watches All About Eve dubbed into Spanish and names his notebook after it. A Streetcar Named Desire turns up as a play, then again as something that already happened to Manuela.
Payoff: The film keeps pairing a life with the story it was borrowed from, until you cannot separate them. In the reading: the crystal-image (hyalosign). The reading calls this a crystal-image: a real thing and its performed double circling until neither one is the original.
Watch San Juan's La Agrado hold vulgarity and dignity together. (performance)
Antonia San Juan plays her frankly, with no apology and no wink at the audience. Her loyalty to Manuela arrives as practical help rather than as a punchline.
Payoff: You are asked to take her completely seriously while she is being funny, and she makes that easy.
Notice the weeks of grief that the film skips. (cutting)
Jose Salcedo jumps from Madrid to Barcelona with almost nothing in between, arriving with Manuela already in motion. Elsewhere he lets scenes run long past where commercial cutting would leave them.
Payoff: You do the bridging yourself, and what the film spends its minutes on tells you what it values.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the play inside the life. Almodovar keeps putting a performance and a real thing in the same frame.