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Hoberman reviews "All About My Mother" directed by Pedro Almodovar and "Secret Defense" directed by Jacques Rivette.

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER

Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar

A Sony Pictures Classics release

Opens November 19

SECRET DEFENSE

Directed by Jacques Rivette

Written by Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, and Emmanuelle Cuau

At Anthology Film Archives

November 19 through December 2

Long-established, if not altogether consistent, pillars of the European art film, the Spaniard Pedro Almodovar and the Frenchman Jacques Rivette are predictable only in their perversity. In Rivette's case, flouting the norms is generally a matter of form; for Almodovar, however, it's more like mother's milk.

Almodovar's All About My Mother is as straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be. While Almodovar has never lacked for international attention-in America, he's surely been the most widely distributed foreign-language filmmaker of the past 15 years-with his 13th feature, the 48-year-old writer-director has received the best notices of his career, and not without reason.

Erupting out of the Super-8 underground, Almodovar started wild and then, after the superb one-two punch of Matador and Law of Desire, turned wildly uneven. Hot fluff like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and High Heels gave way to the sour s/m of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Kika, and the less-than-successful attempts to break into something more sober with The Flower of My Secret and Live Flesh. All About My Mother is the achieved synthesis of the whole Almodovariety show, a new genre-part farce, part weepie, low camp and high melodrama, caustic yet heartwarming, humanist and programmatically gender-blurring.

Opening with a close-up pan down an IV drip, All About My Mother is concerned with scripting its own mortality. Almodovar evokes sacred texts only to rewrite them. The nurse Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her teenage son Esteban watch All About Eve on TV, then, to celebrate his birthday, take in a performance ofA Streetcar Named Desire. The play already has talismanic significance for Manuela-she met her long-vanished husband in an amateur production wherein she played Stella to his Stanley. It acquires even greater weight when, after the performance, Esteban dies in an attempt to secure an autograph from the diva Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), who plays Blanche DuBois.

More screwball tragedy: After arranging for Esteban's heart to be transplanted, devastated Manuela goes to Barcelona in search of the boy's father, once Esteban but now Lola. Cruising the local meat market in an absurdly lyrical sequence, she finds instead Lola's transsexual friend La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), who gets most of the movie's best lines: "All I have that's real are my feelings and those pints of silicone that weigh a ton." Manuela also encounters a beautiful young nun (Penelope Cruz) who happens to be pregnant. As God is everywhere, so A Streetcar Named Desire is playing here too. Manuela goes backstage, like (but unlike) Eve Harrington, and winds up as Huma's personal assistant.

All About My Mother is a movie in which wallpaper patterns border on the lysergic, women typically wear red, and characters are prone to compare any given situation to something out of How to Marry a Millionaire. It is also a movie in which forms of motherhood proliferate-as does the kindness of strangers-and fathers are generally worse than useless. Although Manuela never gets over her son's death (throughout, she is compelled to repeat the story of his fatal accident), Almodovar does contrive to crown her maternal sorrow with a climactic miracle.

The filmmaker dedicates All About My Mother to "all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers," and to his own mother. Pagan as Almodovar's exuberance may be, his cult of the Madonna, his meditation on the notion of a virgin birth, and his insistence on martyrdom all seem profoundly Catholic. In any case, I'd very much like to have our mayor (no mean cross-dresser himself) see the movie and explain how it's not.

At once the most classical and the most experimental of nouvelle vague directors, Jacques Rivette makes no more compromises at 70 than when he was a kid navigating the murky currents of Left Bank paranoia in Paris Belongs to Us. It's in the nature of Rivette films to fly beneath the radar: Secret Defense, like its two immediate precursors, is having its local premiere at the appropriately forbidding Anthology Film Archives.

Just shy of three hours (and thus one of the director's medium-length features), Secret Defense is an elegant, ascetic, and rigorous meta-thriller that updates the Greek tragedy of Electra and infuses its tale of filial revenge with the detached fatalism the young Rivette so admired in the later movies of Fritz Lang. Research scientist Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire) has her routine rudely disrupted when her unstable younger brother, Paul (Gregoire Colin), confronts her with evidence that their father's accidental death, five years before, may have been a murder committed by his partner, Walser.

Bonnaire's Sylvie is serious, almost severe, while Colin plays Paul with a permanent glower. The performers are wearing masks; just as they would have for Euripides, and just as is the dourly mysterious Walser (Polish actor Jerzy Radziwilowicz). The action is slow to develop until, more convinced of Paul's craziness than Walser's guilt, rational Sylvie decides to protect her brother by shooting Walser first. The heart of the movie is then a 20-minute set piece in which, having resolved to commit murder, the driven Sylvie travels by train to Walser's chateau. There, she pulls a gun on him but the wrong person winds up deadwith Walser himself a seemingly willing accomplice after the fact. Secret Defense has so far moved relentlessly in one direction. Now, although no less deliberate in its pacing, the narrative takes a surprising turn. (It's a Hitchcockian maneuver and there's an additional echo of Psycho when the innocent victim's sister comes looking for her.)

Secret Defense-which can be translated as "Top Secret"-is a mystery made of long takes and empty spaces in which duration and distance exert their own irrational fascination. Hermetic and somewhat opaque, this perfectly symmetrical tragedy is not for every taste. For those willing to enter the Rivette zone, however, it's a chess puzzle devised by a grand master.

Larger and more inclusive each year, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival continues through Saturday, giving a local showcase to a number of documentaries that have been circulating on the international film circuit.

Crazy English! (Wednesday night), by Chinese independent filmmaker Zhang Yuan, is an unforgettable portrait of the motivational speaker Ii Yang, whose enormously popular stadium events are patriotic pep rallies devoted to English-language instruction, or rather the mass chanting of key American phrases ("I made it!" "No problem!" "Sure!"). To an outsider, the spectacle has intimations of the post-World War II Melanesian cargo cults. But Li is not only a parody American go-getter, he seems to have telescoped the last century of Chinese history, harnessing his own sense of cultural inferiority to invent a mock Maoist revolution predicated on the power of positive thinking. A great performer, Li is rivaled only by the hyperkinetic subject of Louis Prima: The Wildest (Wednesday and Friday nights), Don McGlynn's totally uncritical paean to the resilient and once-again-popular Dixieland-big band-r&b-Vegas-Jungle Book-Gap-commercial star-totem or fetish?-whom someone calls "the Mount Rushmore of Italians."

The festival closes Saturday night with the world premiere of Arlene Donnelly's Naked States, a documentary on Spencer Tunick and his notorious mass nude photo-ops. Ostensibly the climax to the Mead's body-art sidebar, Naked States shows Tunick traveling cross-country organizing his events. The movie thus has the effect of passing ethnographic judgment on America itself-aa" refracted through the lens of Tunick's expectations ("the biggest surprise about Fargo was how easy it was to get models there"), his difficulties with California nudists, and the happy ending of a CNN interview.

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