1 ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER. AND ABOUT MY FATHER AS WELL

Pedro Almodovar’s “All About my Mother ” may be regarded as an homage to the director’s mother, his two sisters, and the many women he came in contact growing up in a small, highly religious and sexually repressed village called Calzada de Calavata, in La Mancha, Spain. Almodovar has reported being fascinated by the chat, laughter, and daily exchanges of women who, during long oppressive childhood years under Franco’s dictatorship, the only fun allowed was to dress up in costume during Carnival (Salgado, 2001). Yet, the portrayal of the multiple object relationships confirms the recurrent longing for the absent father. A psychoanalytic reading of a film must be approached with a modicum of suspiciousness regarding the alluring, often distracting narrative that occupies the foreground of the visual representations. The viewer may want to reflect on the dynamic tension between foreground and background, in other terms, between what is revealed and what remains concealed. I shall demonstrate how the foreground of “All About my Mother”, like most of the director’s film, while centering around various portraits of women, it highlights a ‘repressed’ background that conceals a “father-hunger ” (Herzog, 2001). Father-hunger is the key to the whereabouts of the absent father, and the film’s overt representations of stereotyped femininity will be addressed in connections to powerful nostalgia for a measure of masculinity