About My Mother

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Paintin g the
town g rey
Art
Tim Adams
Prunella Clough Kettle's Yard,
Cambridge
Simon CalleryTate
Manuela (Cecilia Roth) in front of a poster of A Streetcar Named Desire in Pedro AlmocWvar's All About My Mother
Mum's the word
Almodovar brings us transvestites, nuns and garish whores. But there's really only room for one woman in his film
Film of the week
m
Philip
French
'
TW^M
All About My Mother (101 mins,
15) Directed by Pedro Almodovar;
starring Cecilia Roth,Wlarisa Paredes,Candefa Pena,Antonfa San
Juan,Penelope C ruz,Rosa Maria
Sarda
FROM THE START of his
career in the early 1980s.
Pedro Almodovar has been
fascinated by the Spanish
obsession with love and
death , with his countrymen 's taste for histrionics
and emotionaJ extremes, and
the tradi tional rigidity of
sexual identity. But until the
past couple of years, I found
his films, brilliantly crafted
as they are, tiresomely camp.
Until Live Flesh, which I consider a minor masterpiece ,
the only film of his I'd really
admired was the 1985 Matador , a schematic thriller
about a repressed mother's
boy who wants to become a
bu llf igh t er , though he can't
stand the sight of blood, and
confesses to murders he
has n't committed to prove
his machismo. All About My
Mother, which brought
Almodovar the Best Director
award at Cannes and should
have received the Palme
d'Or , is his finest film to date.
This superbly plotted ,
supremely confident black
comedy begins with the
senior nurse and single parent, Manuela (Cecilia Roth),
watching All About Eve on
TV with her handsome son
Esteban , on the eve of his
seventeenth birthday. He
wants to become a writer
and is engaged on a school
project called 'All About My
Mother', for which he wants
in hpar about the father he's
'Until this
superbly
plotted black
comedy,
Ihad found
his films
tiresomely
camp '
never met and about whom
he knows nothing.
As a birthday present, he
ask s if he ca n a tt en d t he
closed circuit TV sessions
that his mother , an organ
transplant co-ordinator ,
conducts with young docto r s , in which she plays the
role of the grieving relative
of a deceased patient whose
organs the hospital is seeking. That night , this scene is
repeated for real after Esteban is killed in a road accident while trying to get the
autograph of the great
actress Huma Rojo (Marisa
Paredes) outside the Madrid
theatre where she's appearing in A Streetcar Named
Desire. The second part of
the boy 's birthday treat was
a visit to the play, whi ch has
special associations for
Manuela , who as a teenager
played Stella in an amateur
production opposite the
Stanley Kowalski of the
man who became Esteban 's
father.
From then on , All About
Eve and Streetcar run
through the plot as leitmotifs. Continuing her son's
work of exploration , the
grieving Manuela return s to
Barcelona, which she left
pregnant 17 years before. The
train rushes through a long
tunnel toward s the light;
Almodovar cuts to a shot of
the glimmering city from the
sky; a taxi takes Manuela
past Gaudi's cathedral , but
continues on to a suburban
waste patch where garish
whores parade for kerb
crawlers. This, it transpires,
is where she once worked ,
and she meets again her best
f rie n d , an ebullient transsexual prostitute (Antonia San
Juan) who styles herself La
Agrado, 'the agreeabl e one ' .
Manuela discoversthat her
ex-husband , born Esteban
but calling himself Lola after
becoming a transvestite
whore, has stolen Agrado 's
savings and left an idealistic
nun , Rosa (Penelope Cruz),
pregnant and HIV-positive.
She cares for both of them
and, meanwhile, she becomes
the assistant to Huma. whose
stage name (a feminised version of the Spanish for
'smoke') derives from having
taken up cigarettes in imitation of her idol , Bette Davis .
When Huma 's drug-addicted
lover is unfi t to play Stella in
Streetcar, Manuela steps in .
identifying passionately with
the role. Asked if she can act ,
she replies: 'I can lie very well
and I'm used to improvising. '
Inevitably, she's accused of
behavinglikc Anne Baxter in
All About Eve.
This funny, sad and emotionally generous movie is
about love , parenthood ,
friendship and loyalty, about
lif e, art and acting roles ,
about re-creating oneself
according to one's dreams,
and about what, if anything,
is truly natural. All the performances are excellent and
the pict ure is immaculately
designed in a manner recalling Douglas Sirk' s work at
U niversal in the Fifties.
While the three writers
specifically cited - Truman
Capote . Tennessee Williams ,
Federico Garcia Lorca - are
homosexual, this isn 't in a
narrow , excluding sense a
gay pict ur e . Nor , despite the
fact that the only two heterosexual males of any conseq uence are a boy who dies in
the first 10 minutes and an
old man with Alzheimer 's
whose dog takes him for
walks, is this a women 's
pict ure - other than in the
way it draws on certain
Hollywood conventions. The
film is, however, dedicated 'to
every actress who has ever
played an actress' and to the
director 's mother.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the electric fence
Other film releases
Philip French
Life (109 mins,15) Directed byTed
Demme;sta rring Eddie Murphy,
Martin Lawrence,Ned Beatty
Never Been Kissed (107 mins,,12)
Directed by Raja Gosnell; starring
Drew Barrymore,David Arquette,
Michael Vartan,Leelee Sobieski
South Park: Bigger,Longer &
Uncut (8 1mins,15) Directed by
Trey Parker;voices of Trey Parker,
Mary Kay Berg man,Isaac Hayes,
Eric Idle
Darkness Falls (91 mins, 15)
Directed by Gerry Lively; starring
Sherilyn Fenn,RayWinstone,Tim
Dutton
EDDIE MURPHY'S appearance in Walter Hill's 48
Hours (you can see it on
BBC1 this Wednesday) is
among the most electrifying
debuts ever. He looked like a
star from the moment he
first appeared, and proved
himself one half way
through the picture with the
scen e in which he cows a bar
of racist rednecks with the
line: 'I'm your worst fucking
nightmare come true, a nigger with a badge.'
He was 20 at the time, and
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in the 17 years that have
passed since then he's rarely
attempted to extend his
range or stretch his talent.
Life, a personal project he has
co-produced , shows that Murphy can act, but it's an uncert ain, compromised work.
Starting like The Odd
Couple and ending up like
Grumpy Old Men, it stars
Murphy and Martin Lawrence as a chalk-and-cheese
pair of blacks in hock to a
gangster in 1932 Harlem. Ray
(Murphy) is a fast-talking
petty criminal, Claude (Lawrence) is a quiet law-abiding
bank clerk , and to settle
their gambling debts they're
sent on a rather unlikely
expedition to the Deep South
to bring a truckload of
moonshine liquor to Manhattan. Framed by a racist
sheriff for murder , the pair
are sentenced to life in the
Mississippi state prison
where they remain for the
next 65 years, the movie
opening with what purports
to be their internment.
The idea may have come
to Murphy while watching
The Shawshank Redemption,
and his picture has much in
common - thematically at
least - with Frank Darabont's film, including the
role that Murphy and Lawrence's literate city sophisticates play in raising the morale and motivating the
illiterate rural blacks they're
imprisoned with.
But Lif e is a half-hearted
affair that doesn't know
whether to go for the brutal
reality of / Was a Fugitive
From a Chain Gang or settle
for the knockabout comedy
of the Richard Pryor prison
film Stir Crazy.Even though
the film jumps a quarter of a
century at one point , it
seems a long stretch. What is
good about it is the convincing manner in which Murphy and Lawrence age and
not just with the help of Rick
Baker's make-up.
This week's high-school
comedy, Never Been Kissed,
lacks the verve of last week's
Rushmore, though it's a deal
more straightforward. Like
Lif e, the film is produced by
its star, Drew Barrymore.
She plays Josie, a pedantic
desk-bound copy editor on
the Chicago Sun-Times,
who's ordered by a wilful editor (Garry Marshall, director
of Pretty Woman) to go
undercover at a local high
school to report on teenage
mores. As a 25-year-old virgin, living with two turtles,
Drew Barrymore in Never Been
Kissed.
Josie has the opportunity to
advance her career as an
investigative reporter and to
make up for her sad school
days when she was a frumpish outsider nicknamed
'Josie Grossie'. Almost
everything about it is predictable, and most of the best
scenes were done better in
Coppola 's Pe ggy Sue Got
Married.
Apart from the excruciatingly sentimental ending, the
picture is amiable enough ,
Barrymore is sweet, and
there are a couple of rather
splendid moments. In the
first, and best, the heroine
and her 23-year-old brother
(David Arquette), who has
returned to school to give her
moral support , are at a teen
party, each with an amorous
under-age person of the opposite sex. 'I'll see you around
the cell block, Mrs Robinson ,'
he quips.
In the second , the school
Senior Prom has taken as its
theme 'Meant for Each
Other '. Josie and her swain
come as Rosalind and
Orlando , but one couple turn
up as Joseph and a heavily
pregnant Virgin Mary only to
be told by the school's trendsetting cheerleaders (all
dressed as Barbie dolls) that
'there's no room at this table'.
Funnier than Never Been
Kissed and more scatological
than Eddie Murphy has
dared be in a mainstream
movie, South Park: Bigger,
Longer & Uncut is a spin-off
from the animated TV cartoon comedy series. The purpose is to satirise cinematic
celebrations of small-town
life, to mock upholders of
public virtue, and to send up
adults bent on protecting
children from the horrors of
this wdrld. For much of the
way (though it goes on too
long), I laughed like a dirty
drain.
The graphic style is artfully artless. The flat primary colours resemble Dick
Bruna 's books for infants ,
and the overall effect is like a
team of naughty kids with a
couple of pairs of scissors
and some gummed coloured
paper standing in for Charles
Schulz. The story starts with
children bribing a drunken
bum to take them into the
R-rated Canadian film Asses
on Fire starring the outrageous comedians Terrance
and Phillip. Only the kids
stick the movie out to the
end and emerge spouting
obscenities that shock their
parents and teachers. America declares war on Canada,
Terrance and Phillip are sente n ced t o dea t h , and the
Royal Canadian Air Force
makes a pre-emptive strike
on the homes of two acting
families, the Baldwins and
the Arquettes.
One of the kids is incinerated after igniting his fart for
a be t, and on being sent to
hell he discovers that Saddam Hussein (now dead) is
sodomising Satan and
encouraging him to take
over the world if Terrance
and Phillip are killed. This is
not, I admit , particularly elevating stuff, but it put me in
PRUNELLA CLOUGH is 80
this year and this retrospective celebrates her sixth singular decade in the van guard of British painting.
Clough has been an edgy
and formidable presence.
She has never needed a
trademark style, borrowing
assiduously from whatever
has been passing, but she
has always possessed a
texture , a
trademark
thoughtful , scraped vision of
industrial landscapes: from
the docks of Lowestoft in
her formative work to the
London wastegrounds that
inspire her later canvases.
As men have slowly been
bleached from Britain 's
manual workplaces so they
have quietly been absented
from her paintings. The
earlier works here, from the
Forties and Fifties, are
almost romantic abstracts of
men and their machines;
over the years, they have
given way determinedly to
more detached compositions
that dwell on the objec ts left
behind by labour, dough 's
Clough's Wire Landscape (1985).
to uch with my inner child ,
who is the creature that put
the id into kid. The songs are
alternately offensive ditties
and spot-on parodies of serious inspirational numbers in
Disney films and Lloyd Webber-style musicals.
Darkness Falls is a dim
contribution to that branch
of the psychological thriller
in which people are held
hostage in their own homes
and their lives put on the
line
by
mysterious
strangers. The genre is seen
at its peak in Priestley's An
Inspector Calls, and the
recent Austrian picture
Funny Games. In this example a disturbed , but determined auditor (Ray Winstone) moves into the
mansion of a slimy business
tycoon (Tim Dutton) and his
alcoholic American wife
(Sherilyn Fenn) equipped
with a pistol and silencer ,
glue to fix the alarm system
and enough lousy dialogue
to last the night. A succession of flashbacks explains
why he wants his day in
court. This is the fourth
movie from the Isle of Man
this year, and it confirms
that , like Manx cats, Manx
films have no tales worth
talking about.
eye enjoys the visual
serendipities of coiled wire,
or the sudden shock of a
pink-and-white-striped plastic shopping bag or a pair of
crimson tail lights against
the city 's pavement greys.
The incongruous and the
awkward in these 'urban
still lifes' are held together
by her nervy sense of architectural construction. But it
is the vague trace of human
presence adrift in her paintings, stripped away and
worked over like the tatters
of old posters on a billboard ,
that gives them their quiet
and strin gent authority.
Simon Callery s show at
the Tate might be said to
take Prunella Clough 's
painting to its logical conclusion. Callery's osten sible
subj ect is also the industrial
fabric of London - his early
paintings evoked the qualities of light of the cityscape
as viewed from his fifthfloor flat in Limehouse - but
his painstaking rendering of
the city 's surface seeks to
remove every vestige of
human presence.
From a distance, the halfdozen monumental paintings here, in differing
shades of grey and variously
scored with vertical lines,
have the gravity of cut
stone. But he invests in the
inflected surface of the canvas, in its layers of whites
and blacks , a highly crafted
and attentive energy.
Callery is the most austere
and painterly of the Young
British Artists vaunted by
the Saatchi Gallery. There is
a distinctive care and difficulty in his approach. As
such, this room offers a nice
cold-shower antidote to
Abracadabra , the Tate's
hyped bestiary of most of
what is worst in contemporary art in the thronged
gallery next door.
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