So I try not to learn anything about movies before I watch them. When this one started, it’s focused on the relationship between a teenage boy and his single mother — the boy is (slightly uncomfortably) obsessed with her, even writing the movie’s title down in his journal.

(Which is, incidentally, an explicit reference to All About Eve, a connection I hadn’t put together, but which comes up again later in the movie. There’s also a whole subplot in the movie that involves A Streetcar Named Desire. Watching the AFI movies for cultural literacy turns out to have been a good idea.)

And so I figured that the movie was going to be all about this relationship, probably with the boy learning more about his mom’s past and about his absent dad and all that, but turns out: nope!

Because what happens is, the boy gets hit by a car and dies very early in the movie, and then the actual plot of the movie is his mom tracking down his dad. Or I guess I should say, his other mom, because turns out she’s actually transgender[1]. And the process of finding her involves finding an old friend who’s another trans woman (and a sex worker), a pregnant nun, a heroin addict and an actress in a gay relationship, and if this movie were released today, you’d have the predictable people calling it “woke.”

Mostly, though, it’s a look at all these people — the young, innocent nun (Penélope Cruz); the actress and her lover; and all these older people who have these tangled up relationships with each other — and how they come together and interact with each other, for better and worse.

Given the description above, you’d think it a melodrama, and it’s not not melodramatic — I didn’t even spoil some of the more melodramatic plot points — but it’s fundamentally grounded in a quiet realism, and it treats these people’s lives seriously. This must have seemed impossibly daring and edgy in 1999 when it was released, and it holds up today.

  1. (Though the movie says “transvestite” throughout. It’s pretty consistently using the vocabulary and ways-of-talking of its time (or possibly of its setting’s time, since it’s set in the late ’80s) rather than those of the present, but I think you’d have to be incredibly prickly and unaware of history to hold that against it.) ↩︎