Why Mothers Are Immortal (All About My Mother)

On his 17th birthday, Esteban is supposed to finally find out from his mother Manuela, a nurse working in a transplant clinic, who his father is. At Esteban’s request, on the eve of his birthday they attend a performance of Tennessee Wiliams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire with Huma Roja playing the beguiling character Blanche. When afterwards he tries to get an autograph from her, he gets hit by a car and dies a few hours later in hospital. Calling out „My son, my son“, Manuela collapses over his body in despair. With her permission, Esteban‘s heart gets transplanted, thus saving another man’s life. She herself then follows her son’s wish and searches for his lost father, who for Esteban has only existed as a void space. However, the imaginary world we are entering with her does not work according to the laws of logic. Children are not born, but get transplanted from one body to another; women can have both breasts and penises suitable for suckling, and the nun Maria Rosa, who has taken a vow of absolute chastity, works in a shelter for prostitutes and is known as “angel of the whores.” Eventually, we encounter Esteban’s father who has transitioned to become a woman named Lola. When he was still a man and an HIV-positive drug addict, he slept with Maria Rosa and got her pregnant with a son, who will be named Esteban after his birth, just like Manuela’s deceased son. Apparently, death is not final here; instead, death and resurrection can seamlessly follow each other. Nevertheless, Rosa dies giving birth to her son, while Esteban’s father, now in female form, is majestically descending the stairs. Shortly before he himself dies, Manuela manages to tell him that he has a son, and he expresses his joy about it. Manuela, with the newborn Esteban entrusted to her by Rosa before her death, initially moves in with Rosa‘s parents as cook. As this becomes increasingly difficult, she returns to the world she had left behind in search for Esteban’s father. Eventually, it is revealed that against all odds the newborn Esteban did not contract HIV from his deceased father, and his mother is very relieved about that. And all of this is staged so magnificently, that the viewer remains captivated from beginning to end, unaware that at the same time he had witnessed a Christian redemption fantasy from which most of them have long since stopped believing in. And that the concept of a virgin mother who is solely focused on her child and also stand by him as an adult has survived the age of enlightenment, and that it is this image of an always present, idealized mother, to keep this idea alive.