The Frame

One of Pedro Almodóvar’s most acclaimed films, and it definitely deserves it. Manuela and Esteban have a wonderful mother-son relationship until he is hit by a car and killed, leading her to return to her home town of Barcelona as she deals with her grief. I had a few sentences here describing the rest of the plot, but it’s pointless. The plot isn’t what matters. Like his most recent film Volver, it’s about returning home, reconnecting with the past, and moving on into the future. It’s about looking past appearances and finding what’s real. Being an Almodóvar film, several of the characters are transsexual (for some reason he has that in nearly all of his films)–that’s not really horribly important to the film except as indicators of complexity and defying convention and expectation; I mention it really only to warn against choosing this for family movie night. With the amount of multitasking I tend to do, a movie that grabs me and forces me to pay attention and forget everything else is pretty special. This one did that in spades.
Superior