A template for Almodovar movies

No doubt Pedro Almodovar is a great cinematic story-teller and, more than any other male director, he's the writer-director with the most enduring and intense interest in the lives and inter-relationships of women, and his early (1999) breakthrough, All About My Mother, is a template for Almodovar movies. Central figure is a nurse on a transplant team, a single mom whose son, an aspiring writer, has just turned 17. To celebrate his bd they go to a show of Streetcar, and after the show, as he's trying to get an autograph from the star who played Blanche, he's struck by a car and killed. One would think this would be a story examining how a transplant nurse faces the world differently once her son is killed. Does she donate organs as she's encouraged to many to do? (She does.) Does she follow the man who's received her son's heart? (She starts to.) But there's nothing conventional about this film or about Almodovar's narrative style. This is anything but a Lifetime movie; the nurse heads off (from Madrid) to Barcelona where she begins hanging around at a remote traffic circle where people go for hook-ups or worse and she finds a trans woman prostitute w/ whom she'd been close about 20 years ago, and thus she embarks on a completely new life, involving several prostitutes, some of them trans, a young nun (Penelope Cruz) who strays from her vows, the Streetcar theater troupe, wracked by drugs and jealousy, and ultimately the man who was the father of her late son. Lots of complicated and relationships here, many of which bend of break stereotype; lots of struggle and heartache, but all told in a jaunty style carried along by the confident personalities of these strong women - and lifted by humor and by Almodovar's rapid narrative pace and by some beautiful cinematography, especially in Barcelona by night.