All About My Mother.

Pedro Almodovar's latest outlandish lark All About My Mother is also his most touching

All About My Mother * Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar * Starring Cecilia Roth, Penelope Cruz, Antonia San Juan, Marisa Parades, Eloy Azorin * Sony Pictures Classics

"What a story!" gasped Thelma Ritter in All About Eve, just after Anne Baxter finished relating her hard-luck saga to Bette Davis. "Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end!"

All About My Mother, the sensational new riff on Eve from Pedro Almodovar, has everything but the bloodhounds. It has death, it has birth. It has heart and raunch. It has transsexuals with attitude, transvestites with muscles, and nuns with HIV. Being the pig for grand effects that Almodovar is, the film--which won him the Best Director award at this year's Cannes Film Festival--throws in A Streetcar Named Desire for good measure.

That was the play that Almodovar's heroine, Manuela (the divine Cecilia Roth, an ironic beauty in the Carmen Maura tradition), was appearing in when she conceived her son, Esteban. She was playing Stella; Esteban's father, now a transvestite named Lola, was playing Stanley. Eighteen years later, after Manuela attends a performance of Streetcar with the literarily inclined Esteban (a younger surrogate for Almodovar, we surmise), the boy is mowed down by a car as he waits in the streets to get an autograph from the production's Blanche DuBois.

Thus begins the extraordinarily elliptical journey that Manuela takes into her past and toward a future life as she embarks upon a search for the long-estranged father that Esteban never knew. In quintessential Almodovar fashion, it's a zigzag trip, filled with seeming detours that turn into main routes and foregone conclusions that veer off before they reach their mistakenly anticipated end.

Leaving her hospital job and heading to the Barcelona streets where she once turned tricks, Manuela aids and is abetted in return by three women of decidedly different backgrounds: Huma Rojo (Marisa Parades), the diva actress who unwittingly led Esteban to his death; Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a nun who is pregnant by the elusive Lola; and a transgendered whore named Agrado (the irresistible Antonia San Juan [profiled below]), a sweet tart of a cabaret performer who sends our spirits soaring with a bravura monologue about the high cost of cosmetic surgery.

Almodovar layers in the plot conventions of All About Eve with cunning dexterity. Moved by the grieving mother's suffering, Huma Rojo anoints Manuela as her personal assistant, and it is not long before she has taken over the role of Stella. In Almodovar's lively queer revision of Eve, the actress Manuela succeeds just happens to be Huma Rojo's drug-addicted lover.

More significant, there is not a drop of Eve Harrington calculation or malice in Manuela, who is heaven-bent on a mission to draw something beautiful out of her son's death. Despite its bluntly allusive title, All About My Mother owes one of its main themes instead to Streetcar. Almodovar's masterpiece is really about the kindness of strangers, how random acts of compassion can transform, civilize, and redeem. All of the women Manuela encounters are, like herself, in great pain; all of them are rescued by sisterly love.

Almodovar has never been shy about displays of feeling, but rarely has he employed his operatic shifts of emotion with such confidence and control. He has a talent for seasoning tears with spice worthy of Bette Midler (who once upon a time could have played Agrado). When things get dire, he is not above throwing in a ribald scene between Agrado and Streetcar's horny leading man (Carlos Lozano), who is gunning for a blow job.

He doesn't get one. Nor does the film need it. All About My Mother is better than sex.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.

For more about the films of Pedro Almodovar, go to www.advocate.com