All About My Mother (film)

"It’s an absolutely brilliant, subversive and very loving film. I was thinking about the quote from Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Almódovar explores this in All About My Mother . It means that gender is an aspect of identity that we acquire: we work with or against mainstream cultural interpretations of being female and male. Almódovar asks us, ‘what is an authentic woman, what is an authentic man?’ What interests me is that Almódovar dedicated his film to all women who act. By this, he doesn’t just mean actresses, he means it in the sense that we are performing roles: the role of mother, daughter, wife, lover. In the film, he is looking at definitions of self that are not fixed in mainstream narratives. The film was also in my mind as I was writing Hot Milk . It was in the mix with Colette’s flowering garden in Burgundy – nature and nurture, insects and animals; it was in the mix with The Lover and the sad, harsh mother, who just seems to have no joy at all in her. Then there is Sontag who has really gazed at her mother, tried to figure out what’s going on, and talks about making herself smaller. And with To The Lighthouse we return to self-sacrificing, patient, creative – actually, enormously creative – Mrs Ramsay, who is also very controlling. I was also extending some of the themes that I gave an airing to in Things I Don’t Want to Know , namely that ‘The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.’ In Things I Don’t Want to Know , I wrote that the modern mother is required to be ‘passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled’. This is the call made on strong, modern women. It is best not to take that call."