Mother (Pride pt. XI)

All About My Mother

Die, Mommie, Die!

Happy Pride (still), dear readers! We’re halfway through the year, so I hope you’re celebrating Pride and Summer accordingly, and dodging any Geminis you might need to… Pride is a perfect time to party, soak up some sun, and show appreciation and love to your friends and family—be they chosen, or the one you were born into (should they deserve it). I realized that I’ve never done a Mother’s Day double feature, nor a Father’s day double feature, but given the fact that mommy/daddy issues are such a wide-reaching epidemic, I didn’t really see the need. But this week, I want to celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and mostly, Pride, with a set of films that showcase a few different kinds of parental figures and family units. Unless you’ve never been on the internet or around gay people, I’m sure you’re familiar with the power of the term “Mother”—and how it can be attributed to feminine icons who’ve been deemed as such. These are icons who have not only fed the children (or population at large) with entertainment, but have educated all who study underneath their tutelage. Lady Gaga is Mother, of course. Jessica Chastain, she’s also Mother. Amy Adams? Likely Mothered Jessica Chastain. Ru Paul = Mother, Beyonce = Mother, what lies in the basement in the movie Barbarian = Mother, and at this particular moment and Summer, Kylie “Padam” Minogue is certainly Mother. With this long-lasting pop culture colloquialism, you do not have to have children to earn mother status, you do not even need maternal instincts, you must simply be an untouchably, effervescently talented and impactful person who garners respect and positive attention. Mother is the moment, Mother is eternal, motherhood is what Citizen Kane comes down to (I think), and we all came from mothers—biological ones and influential parasocially-related ones or both. So for this belated Mother and Father’s day, let’s take a look at two very different but very queer explorations of motherhood. Both films are about literal mothers, but they’re also about the mothers on the screen who raised us and taught us what a bad bitch is. Both of these films featured dazzling set pieces, costumes, casts, and some very powerful redheads. Let’s begin with a movie that I’ve wanted to see for a very long time, an Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Pedro Almodóvar's 1999 film All About My Mother. What is so striking about all of Almodóvar's films is their ability to handle serious, even morbid or disturbing topics, without excluding charm, whimsy, and an off-beat sense of humor. Almodóvar's films tend to feature a lot of bright, contrasting colors, queer characters and storylines, and a brand of melodrama that can be read as humorous, but is never without impact. All About My Mother was the perfect confluence of humor and tragedy, an impeccable blend of irony and sincerity. It is a diverse, layered, and, at times, very complicated exploration of parenthood and chosen family, and it was so refreshing to see. Like with all of Almodóvar's films, All About My Mother featured a mostly-female-driven narrative, with a cast of beautiful women, both young and old. All About My Mother is a dramadey that weaves many stories together, but it mostly follows a nurse named Manuela (Cecilia Roth), whom we meet alongside her son, Esteban, just as they’re about to watch All About Eve. Instantly, you’re hit with the expectedly, overwhelmingly beautiful color scheme that is unique to Almodóvar’s style, and instantly you’re made aware of how close Manuela and Esteban are. Very rarely have I seen such a thoughtful and specific representation of the love between a woman and her son, but just as soon as we’re introduced to these two and their blissful lives, it’s taken away. Shortly after this moment the two go see a stage play of A Streetcar Named Desire, where Esteban chases after the lead actresses with whom he is obsessed, and is swiftly struck by a car. I knew tragedy would be unavoidable here, but this particular punch to the gut came just as quickly as the one in A Single Man. Just before his untimely death, Esteban asked his mother to finally tell him about the father he never knew, which she’d planned to do when they returned home from the theatre. Grief-stricken and heartbroken, Manuela leaves Barcelona and returns to Madrid, where, 18 years ago, she fled the lover who impregnated her. All we really know about Esteban’s father is that Manuela and he became close while doing a production of A Streetcar Named Desire—she played Stella and he played Stanley—but the tapestry of this person’s life is woven together throughout the rest of the film. Manuela is searching for Lola—the transgender woman with whom she had Esteban, though Lola had no knowledge of his existence. First, her search takes her to the risky but vibrant backstreets of Madrid, where an underground ring of transgender sex workers are posing to attract the circling drivers and motorcyclists who are out shopping for a good time. Here, we meet Agrado—an old friend of Manuela’s who’s just been robbed and back-stabbed by the elusive Lola. In a film packed to the brim with eccentric characters, Agrado, who says “All I have that’s real are my feelings and pints of silicone”—might be the most hilarious and memorable. Managing all of the sex workers is, surprisingly, a very young Penélope Cruz, who has a complex relationship with her mother—as evidenced by her instant mom-crush on Manuela. Manuela also finds herself embroiled in some drama with the cast and crew of A Streetcar Named Desire, currently stationed in Madrid and threatened by the tumultuous love affair between the actresses playing Blanche Dubois and Stella Kowalski. All the while, Lola is revealed to be at the center of just about everyone’s issues, and yet she is still nowhere to be found. There are explanations and clarity for each loose end that Almodóvar presents, with lots of jaw-dropping revelations to be discovered along the way. All About My Mother has a little bit of everything: old Hollywood references, chain-smoking lesbians, dynamic trans characters, gorgeous Spanish architecture, gorgeous Spanish men, chic costuming and makeup, and all of the mommy issues and appreciation that one movie could offer. I wish I had the time and the ability to properly articulate how wonderfully bizarre and brutal All About My Mother was, I wish I had the language skills to explain just how nuanced and progressive the conversations within this film are. The older we get, the more we realize that all adults—including our parents—have no idea what they’re doing, either. Mothers make mistakes just like their children do, just as we all do, as life goes on and becomes more complicated—and this film really captured this notion. All About My Mother wasn’t delicate in its portrayal of grief, nor was it overly-careful with its depiction of trans people—it just felt incredibly, believably messy and real. I wish I could divulge more information about this tangled film, but it really must be seen with one’s own eyes. This telenovela of a story is the kind of chaos that I live for, but All About My Mother was more than just scandalous entertainment, it was rich with earnestness, and brimming with sentimentality. Cecilia Roth gives a performance that is so visceral and powerful—dare I say she gives a bit of Gena Rowlands in the way she showed her grief—but every player here was just spectacular. When the film ends, Almodóvar leaves us with this dedication: “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider… To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, and to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.” Like all of Almodóvar’s films, queerness is inherent to his storytelling. And while they may not always be the simplest or most well-rounded of depictions, this director certainly gets kudos for even bothering to try. Another auteur who tries—and never fails—to showcase the bewildering beauty and undeniable fun to be had with queer storytelling, is Charles Busch. Charles Busch is the creator of Psycho Beach Party, a film I reviewed last year during Pride Month, and one that very swiftly became an all-time favorite. As soon as that film ended, and I realized that this queen-writer-extraordinaire had another film, I knew that I had to see it. Two years after the beach blanket brilliance of Psycho Beach Party, Charles Busch and director Mark Rucker gave us Die, Mommie, Die!: a satirical, Mommie Dearest-esque, Hollywood noir comedy. Die, Mommie, Die! follows aging starlet and singer Angela Arden (Charles Busch)—who was once part of a singing duo with her twin sister Barbara back in the days of Vaudeville. Decades later, Barbara is dead, and Angela is unhappily married to a film director named Sol Sussman (Philip Baker Hall), with whom she has two children, Edith (Natasha Lyonne) and Lance (Stark Sands). Meddling around this family unit is their nosy maid, Bootsie (Frances Conroy), and Angela’s part-time lover Tony Parker (Jason Priestly). Like Psycho Beach Party, Die, Mommie, Die! is set in the pseudo-fifties and sixties, with little evidence that it was made in the early 2000s—beyond the usage of a more bold, crass lexicon. The hardboiled set up of Die, Mommie, Die! presents us with more than just a miserable marriage and two wild children, but murder, mayhem, and some of the funniest dialogue I’ve ever heard. Perhaps just as special as its script were the line deliveries of each character—namely Angela and Edith—who really nailed that old-timey, 1950s Twilight-Zoney dialect that felt authentically ridiculous. Once again, the nail was hit firmly on the head, with its accurately-stunning fashion, sleekly colorful cars, faux-profound lines of dialogue, and some excellently gay camerawork. Die, Mommie, Die! was the surrealist queer Hollywood noir of my dreams—the kind of movie that is able to balance a healthy appreciation for and criticism of these older narratives of death and glory. Charles Busch evoked a bit of Kathleen Turner here, with her effortlessly-hilarious face-acting and the astonishingly-funny way she delivered each line. Natasha Lyonne was reliably lovable, Philip Baker Hall cracked me up (especially when he said, “Nobody said it would be easy being an old Jew”), and Jason Priestly deserves flowers for his ability to seduce every character in this film—in a time when manly Hollywood A-listers like himself were not taking roles like this. I don’t want to give too much credit to a cis, straight man during Pride Month, but Mr. Priestly’s perfectly-nuanced bad-acting chops had me on the floor laughing, and made me wonder where this comedic timing was during 90210… If only I’d had time to jot down every iconic line, but all I had time for was “He said I’d instigated a homosexual orgy in the faculty lounge!” and “I’m not in the mood for your patented brand of bitchery.”—sentences that very easily could’ve been uttered by Bette Davis or Cary Grant herself. Just like All About My Mother, Die, Mommie, Die! felt like a love letter to not just Old Hollywood, but to the cinephiles and fashion nerds and cultural historians who appreciate this not-soon-forgotten era of media magic. As a critic who tries to see everything, I don’t like to limit myself by describing what my taste consists of. However, if you cracked open my brain, I’m pretty sure you’d find Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! just playing on a loop. As a woman, as an ally, as someone who is obsessed with their mother and movies about mothers (and all of the evolving definitions of this word), I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this week’s films. Motherhood is no easy feat, and all of our mothers—be they biological or chosen—deserve recognition for giving us life and giving us 👏life👏. Thank you for reading along this week, dear reader, now go call your mother.