All About My Mother

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider…To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.

-Pedro’s dedication

I’m really at a loss for (coherent) words following this one, so I will only say that it was a slow-building, intensely emotional experience for me, and left me in unexpected tears. I don’t want to speak of it critically or comparatively right now, but his entire body of work — so sympathetically, deliriously fixated on women, mothers, relationships between women, women as seen by society and men, and above all The Feminine — has given me so much in so brief a time… His characters — broad caricatures, really, filled to the brim with sincere, precise detail — have become part of me. His narratives — always twisting, always shifting, mutating almost to the point of absurdist pastiche, then reigned in again masterfully — find their way into my own. He captures through cinema something of my life, something I have a rare affinity for. There are only four or five other guys I can say this about… and what else can I say? , , .