TW: sexual assault
With his 22nd feature film, Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar manages to keep his trademarks fresh with a witty and watchable drama about motherhood.
★★★✰✰
The first film since his critically acclaimed quasi-memoir Pain and Glory, Parallel Mothers sees Almodóvar returning to “the female universe, to motherhood, to the family […] the importance of ancestors and descendants.” It’s well-trodden ground for him, particularly when you think of the film that won him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: 1999’s All About My Mother. In this film, we once again meet Penelope Cruz as a struggling single mother, pregnant by accident: Janis, a successful and stylish photographer in her late 30s. While in hospital during labour she meets another single mother, teenaged Ana (Milena Smit), who is being poorly supported by her actress mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón de Angelis). The pregnant pair bond and pledge to stay in touch, and when they do indeed meet again, it transpires that all is not what it seems when it comes to their infant daughters. Rounding out the supporting cast are Israel Elejalde and Almodóvar stalwart Rossy de Palma.
Despite the furore surrounding the weeping areola poster—and the subsequent censoring of it on social media, stirring the ire of the ‘free the nipple’ movement—the film is relatively PG, gestating quickly into soapy melodrama that will have fans of the director nodding in pleased recognition. Possessing a touch of Marine Vacth-esque insouciance, Milena Smit is all shining eyes and cut-glass cheekbones—able to channel her model looks into a performance that is continuously evasive. Her scenes with Penelope Cruz aren’t particularly compelling, and the direction their friendship takes isn’t readily believable, but her budding talents are evident.
More interesting is the broader look at family ties and Janis’ steadfast mission to excavate the remains of her grandfather, who was murdered and tossed into a mass grave decades earlier by the Falangist Movement of Spain. The themes of lineage are more gnarled than they appear, spreading like tree roots across the melodrama. By having his long-time collaborator co-starring with his new muse, there’s a sense of respecting the woman who enlivened so many of his films while also continuing to discover new talent. Smit trained at the same acting school as Cruz, and the film somewhat feels like the passing of a baton; the pair’s tender affection for one another suggests as such. Symbolically, a difficult sacrifice that Janis makes for Ana in the film’s third trimester comes with no bad blood.
It’s difficult to walk away uncharmed from an Almodóvar flick, packed as they always are with life, death, love, grief, laughter, heartbreak and a glorious troupe of queer protagonists. It takes an expert hand to make faintly ridiculously plots this emotionally entrancing. If one aspect fails for you, there’s always a subplot to win you over, a joker hidden up the director’s sleeve. Parallel Mothers is no different, and if the swapped-at-birth caper at the film’s centre doesn’t win you over, perhaps Janis’ tender pursuit of dignifying her ancestor with a proper burial will. Some themes are breezed past fairly quickly—when we learn that one of our main characters has been traumatically sexually assaulted, it’s barely given sixty seconds of airtime. Similarly, a death is brushed under the (crimson red, exquisitely production-designed) rug. But this is Almodóvar, and so he manages to combine breezy wit with melodrama-induced pathos by the film’s end. Impeccable needle-drops and a quintessential smorgasbord of primary colours accompany the action.
The Verdict
Despite a sense of deja-vu, Parallel Mothers is no labour (pardon the pun) of love. Wholly enjoyable and with a well-earned sucker punch of a final scene, this love letter to the powers of family—together in life and death—is a welcome addition to the director’s stellar filmography.
Words by Steph Green
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