There’s something about switched-at-birth narratives that just clicks in the human subconscious. It’s as primal a mystery as one can experience, shifting every aspect of a person’s life into uncertainty, making the indicative into the subjunctive, and taking the foundation out from under whatever sort of identity you’ve cobbled together.
Pedro Almodóvar knows melodrama well, and as a writer and a director he believes strongly in getting out of the way of amazing actresses and good stories and letting them unfurl. So to say that Almodóvar’s latest, Parallel Mothers, is an exceptional melodrama that showcases stellar work from Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit — well, that’s par for the course. But there’s more here than what we habitually rely on Almodóvar for, and the power this film wields is sneaky and deeply resonant, and will make the viewer want to do some difficult reading about early-20th-century Spain.
Janis (Cruz) is the kind of high-end photographer whose work defines the hottest of the haute. She leads a low-key glamorous life, but she’s putting her heart and soul into her photography and into an archaeological dig she wants to help find financing for. A fling with a scruffy forensic anthropologist (Israel Elejalde, bringing polyglot shades of fuckboy to global art cinema) lands Janis in a position that films since the ’50s have been working new angles on — unexpectedly pregnant. During the course of her pregnancy, she meets and befriends Ana (Smit), another expectant mother nearly 20 years younger than her. When they both give birth to baby girls, they make a point of staying in touch. Both are single mothers, and they’ve relied on each other more than any of the intermittent men who drift in and out of their lives. Janis grew up being raised by her grandmother (in the village she’s currently trying to raise funds for), so she’s conscious of the value of strong bonds and the uncertainties that can come from flaky men.
Things become complex in ways that are completely familiar to anyone who’s been kicked around by life. If the bonds of family can be broken easily, the strands of DNA are constant and immutable, and Janis and Ana are placed in a particularly fraught position that brings laughter, tears, crisis and several reckonings on scales both intimate and culturally vast.
After his semi-autobiographical 2019 magnum opus Pain and Glory, Almodóvar could have gone in pretty much any direction. His English-language debut — a 30-minute adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice — was both a stylistic flourish and a new breaking of ground in uncertain spaces. But Parallel Mothers is a marvel of a film, one that builds on the director’s strengths and refinements even as it reaches back to the confrontational rigor of his very first films. (See especially Law of Desire and Pepi, Luci, Bom.) But back then the focus was on the newfound freedoms of sex, drugs and art following the death of dictator Francisco Franco, and now the focus is on the lingering horrors inflicted by the Spanish Civil War and the decades of Francoist rule following it.
From the beginning, Almodóvar has been very smart about broadening the discussion and awareness of queer lives, using genre and a deft eye to make “respectable” discourse expand itself simply through acknowledging and addressing his work. Given the varied assortment of topics and issues he’s addressed in his 40-plus years of filmmaking, it makes sense that he would find a way to use that accessibility to examine some deep wounds. But there’s not an exact equivalency between the journey that Janis and her childhood village are on and, say, what happens to Enrique and Ignacio during their youth at the hands of the church in 2004’s Bad Education — though both deal with an ongoing state of willful silence determined not to upend the status quo.
To say that Parallel Mothers is about speaking difficult truths in the face of habitual silence is completely accurate, but it doesn’t really get at why this particular story works so well and stays with you long after the film is over. Cruz is superb, finding nuances and textures in Janis that leave you wanting even more. May we also take a moment to appreciate the return of Rossy de Palma to the silver screen? She’s always iconic, always a singular presence — and as Janis’ friend and occasional editor Elena, she is absolutely the bedrock that any adventurous artist would like to have.
Almodóvar knows how to make a movie, and he does so with so much life that it makes other films seem anemic by comparison. I have never hated an Almodóvar film, and I have loved many of them. Most of them make me want to call my mom or get back in touch with my ’90s art-scene associates and college compatriots (or all of the above), and a few have reignited my instincts for finding the best parties or assisting with elaborate romantic schemes. But this is the first one to haunt me to my very soul. The final scene of this film is simply unforgettable, both tranquil and shocking and representative of an honesty and responsibility that humanity usually just runs away from.
