Cecilia Roth makes listening as revealing as speech. We warmly recommend All About My Mother for her restraint: she lets a woman in grief remain interested in other people without disguising what it costs her.
Fi1m perspective
Cecilia Roth listens in All About My Mother (1999) as though the person speaking still matters, however much Manuela is suffering. The performance gives us someone we can follow through the film’s changes of mood. Roth lets grief affect an ordinary conversation without making every line sound like a declaration of pain. We were moved by the effort Manuela makes to attend to others when doing so plainly costs her. There is considerable work in making a part this demanding look straightforward.
That lead role came after years of working in both Spanish and Argentine cinema. An early part as Ana Turner in Iván Zulueta’s Arrebato (1980) was followed by collaborations with Almodóvar, including Labyrinth of Passion (1982). Adolfo Aristarain also matters: Roth played Ana in A Place in the World (1992) and Alicia in Martín (Hache) (1997). It was the latter performance that led Almodóvar to cast her as Manuela. That makes the Argentine work worth following rather than treating it as a footnote to the Spanish films.
Affonso Beato’s cinematography gives All About My Mother intense colours that suit its frankness about feeling. Costume designers Bina Daigeler and José María de Cossío help establish how each woman wants to be seen, giving the actors something useful to work with. We value that care, but Roth’s unshowy performance also makes the occasional excess of polish harder to ignore. When the image looks too carefully arranged, the suffering becomes easier to look at than it should be.
In Pain and Glory (2019), Roth returns to Almodóvar as Zulema, though Antonio Banderas’s restrained performance is the chief reason to see the film. Its opening drifts and its self-examination could be tougher; we still recommend its patient attention to people. For Roth herself, start with All About My Mother, then follow the connection back to Aristarain. Pay attention to what she does when somebody else has the line.
