Melodrama

While watching Pedro Almodovar's 'All About My Mother' (1999) today, I felt the need to find the definition of 'Melodrama'. Those who are familiar with the popular Hindi film tradition may feel they already know what the word means. But since, Hindi films hardly follow genre conventions, they might find it difficult to define. Hence the need to read what experts say. Following are excerpts from various sources:

The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work which exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. [Wikipedia]

In film, the term 'melodrama' denotes a subgenre of the drama film which generally depends on stereotyped character development, interaction, and highly emotional themes. Melodramatic films tend to use plots that appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience, often dealing with "crises of human emotion, failed romance or friendship, strained familial situations, tragedy, illness, neuroses, or emotional and physical hardship". Film critics sometimes use the term "pejoratively to connote an unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tale of romance or domestic situations with stereotypical characters (often including a central female character) that would directly appeal to feminine audiences."[Wikipedia, T. Dirks]

My observation is that the script of a melodrama relies mainly on coincidences, twists in the plot affecting the characters. The following statement by Sidney Lumet sums this up: "In a well-written drama, the story comes out of the characters. The characters in a well-written melodrama come out of the story."

'All About My Mother', in my opinion, is the perfect example of a Melodrama Film. And it is a successful one as well. I recommend this to everyone - at least it will easily illustrate what goes wrong when 'lesser' filmmakers try this difficult genre.

P.S. The film ends with a post-script:
"To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider...
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...
To my mother."

Also, you will enjoy the movie more if you have watched the classics 'All About Eve' and 'A Streetcar Named Desire'.