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essential to what they achieved-a medley of barbed wit and tender
feeling that neither could have managed on his own.
Apart from their muted radical politics, Leigh's films emerge from a
post-sixties aesthetic that challenges the actor not only to find authentic
emotions but to write the lines that will express them. Without the dom–
inant hand of a playwright, these stories depend on individual scenes,
sometimes involving characters who never reappear, such as Gilbert's
mad father and embittered mother, or matters hardly mentioned again–
the death of General Gordon in Khartoum, the alcohol abuse of one
actor, the drug addiction of another. The rare closeups have the same
highlighting effect. A tiny smile lights up Gilbert's features as the idea for
The Mikado
leaps to mind, just as a pensive grimace flickers across his
face as he takes in his father's dementia or his wife's sexual unhappiness.
In a world in which formal manners dictate enormous restraint, in which
the camera itself usually keeps a respectful distance, such discrete scenes
and intimate moments humanize the characters by pointing up all that
remains unspoken, the feelings only obliquely expressed.
Leigh is a particularly subtle and patient director with a quiet passion
for emotional authenticity. He shows how fragile and exposed actors
can be, and how much support they give each other. This is exactly what
interests Almod6var about his community of women, which is also his
company of actors, in
All About My Mother.
Like many gay men,
indeed, like many artists and others who grew up feeling out of step,
Almod6var is fascinated by role-playing. His story is a twin tribute to
actresses who play actresses and to men who impersonate women. Like
Leigh's movie it is about performance-how actors perform their own
lives and how they bring life to the stage. But where Leigh strives for
freshness in a period piece, Almod6var echoes and imitates the old sto–
ries that inspired him, including
A Streetcar Named Desire, All About
Eve,
a Romy Schneider film, and John Cassavetes's little-known movie
about performers,
Opening Night.
All these have great women's roles,
and in the intuitive relationships of his four main actresses, Almod6var
offers homage to Blanche and Stella, to Schneider and to Gena Row–
lands. Rarely has a film so derivative seemed so deeply felt. The unlikely
way these plucky women come through for each other-the bereaved
mother, the aging diva, the pregnant nun, the hard-edged transvestite–
lends humor and vitality to soap opera material.
If
two veteran directors from Britain and Spain delivered some of
their best work last year, what has this to do with the new American
film scene? Well, nothing and everything. Leigh and Almod6var seek
emotional honesty in movies for grown-up audiences but, unlike the
