Madres paralelas
Pedro Almodóvar (2021)
In his twenty-first feature film, Pain and Glory (2019), Pedro Almodóvar dramatised his personal history as never before and the result was one of his finest works. In film number twenty-two, he extends his view to national history – the legacy of Franco, as represented by the mass graves of Spanish Civil War casualties whose families have long been denied the means to trace and rebury their loved ones. This new film, though engaging enough, is far from Almodóvar’s best. Parallel Mothers inadvertently exposes his limited appetite for the larger historical perspective that promised to be its chief distinction.
The film gets off to a strong start. The title sequence – brisk and, of course, visually alluring – makes you smile. In the first scene, photographer Janis (Penélope Cruz) is doing a photo shoot for a glossy magazine: her subject is Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a high-profile and photogenic forensic anthropologist. They haven’t met before but she asks if they can talk after the shoot and he agrees. Arturo does work for the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (a real organisation in Spain), which gathers testimony about the Civil War missing and, where possible, arranges their exhumation. Over a bottle of wine, Janis asks if he’d be prepared to excavate the mass grave in her home village – a grave that contains, according to the grandmother who raised her, the remains of Janis’s great-grandfather and other local Republican men killed by the Falangists. Arturo agrees to take the case on. This dialogue conveys, credibly and efficiently, plenty of information about both Janis’s family history and the work of Arturo’s organisation. At the same time, the scene makes clear the instant spark between two attractive people. It’s not long before Arturo contacts Janis again and they arrange a time to meet at her Madrid apartment. When Almodóvar’s camera arrives there, it moves up the apartment building to show a white curtain billowing from an open window. The image signals romance in the air; the camera moves inside the apartment and, sure enough, finds Janis and Arturo making love. There’s no post-coital conversation about the progress of his research, however. The film races ahead, the action switching to a hospital, where Janis is about to give birth.
This sudden shift in tone and narrative focus is, not unusually in Almodóvar, disorienting yet beguiling. Once it occurs, you’re primed for more shifts, and you get them. On the maternity ward, fortyish Janis is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first child; Ana (Milena Smit), in the bed next to her and half Janis’s age, isn’t. Both will be single parents, Janis by choice, Ana by force of circumstance. Each gives birth to a daughter; the two new mothers exchange contact details before leaving hospital. Ana is currently living with her mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), an actress. When she pays a visit to the maternity ward, Teresa has just come from an audition, which is all she wants to talk about. For a short while, her amusing theatrical egocentrism takes centre stage in Parallel Mothers. Teresa breezily admits to being a rotten mother, who has always preferred to concentrate on her acting and now sees a chance for a late-in-the-day career breakthrough: sure enough, she gets the title role in a touring production of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster. Ana confides in Janis her amazement that Teresa gets work at all: ‘She really overacts’. From the bits of rehearsals for the Lorca that we see, you can’t say Ana’s wrong.
Meanwhile Arturo, whose line of business looked to be so crucial in the early stages, retreats to the margins of the film and is reduced to a familiar, even generic male figure. He calls Janis to say he’s in Madrid and would like to see their new daughter, whom Janis has named Cecilia. As the doorbell rings, Janis experiences a flashback to Arturo’s reaction when she told him she was pregnant. He wasn’t ready for them to have a child together. He had to keep their affair secret from his wife, who is suffering from cancer. Once Janis snaps back into the present and opens the door to him, Arturo isn’t in the apartment for long. He shows little enthusiasm or affection for baby Cecilia, and goes on his way. He nevertheless triggers the pivotal twist in the story. Janis subsequently demands that Arturo explain his perfunctory attitude towards the baby and he replies that he doesn’t believe the child is his. This understandably infuriates Janis but she decides to take a maternity test and discovers she isn’t Cecilia’s biological mother. She keeps the shocking discovery to herself.
Sometime later, she bumps into Ana in a cafe where the latter now works: she has been looking after herself since her mother went on tour with the play. Ana also reveals that her baby, Anita, died – a cot death. After seeing photos of the baby, Janis begins to suspect that Anita and Cecilia were mixed up while both were in the hospital’s neonatal observation unit. At Janis’s invitation, Ana moves into her apartment as live-in maid and nurse to Cecilia, while Janis resumes her photography. She contrives to get a saliva sample from Ana, and sends it to the lab where she sent her own maternity test. The result confirms that Ana is Cecilia’s biological mother. Janis doesn’t tell Ana.
Newborns swapped, a man who intuits that the child supposedly his was fathered by another, a jealously guarded guilty secret, an asking-for-trouble decision to let a birth mother care for the baby she doesn’t know is hers – these are melodramatic staples. Thanks to his individuality, imagination and humour, Almodóvar has often proved a master of revitalising melodrama, and transforming its meanings. The presence in the cast of Penélope Cruz and Rossy de Palma (as Janis’s agent) evokes examples of his alchemy – The Flower of My Secret (1995), All About My Mother (1999), Broken Embraces (2009) – but this serves only to underline the difference between those films and Parallel Mothers. Here the clichés are played straight; the solemn Spanish Civil War dimension of the story demands that they be played straight. Yet although Janis’s urgent conversation at the start of the film lodges in the viewer’s mind, Almodóvar puts her quest for ‘closure’ on the back burner while he works through her relationship with Ana – they become lovers at one point – and the consequences of Janis’s keeping mum (and another mum’s child). The unquiet grave in her village becomes the film’s elephant in the room.
Parallel Mothers depends critically on how it connects the characters’ lives in the present with the longer family history that prompts Janis to approach Arturo. Resonances aren’t hard to spot. As Janis decides to conceal the truth of her and Ana’s maternity, so the mass graves are an expression of a nation in denial, their contents almost literally skeletons in the cupboard, on an appalling scale. Ana thinks she has lost her baby but, when Janis eventually confesses the truth, reclaims the child she gave birth to; Janis, on behalf of her forebears, seeks to recover an actually buried past. Absent parents form a motif: Janis was raised by her grandmother after her father skedaddled and her hard-partying mother (who named her daughter for Janis Joplin) died; Arturo twice decides against playing a paternal role; when Ana’s father, with whom she was living at the time, learned she was pregnant, he packed her off to his unmotherly ex-wife. Contrasting with these voluntary abdications of parenthood are the corpses in the village grave, forcibly separated from their children in the short and the longer term. Federico García Lorca, in whose play Teresa is starring, was another casualty of the Spanish Civil War whose remains have never been found.
You can note these connections without finding much substance to them as you watch the film. The high-end soap-opera twists and turns are so dominant that it’s hard to feel any kind of correspondence between Janis’s evasion of the truth and Spain’s evasion of its past. Almodóvar is unusually anxious in Parallel Mothers to adopt a politically responsible view, and not just in relation to what’s known in Spain as Historical Memory Law[1]: Ana reveals that her pregnancy was the result of a gang rape by fellow students and that her father insisted she keep quiet about it so as to avoid media attention. It’s clear enough that, as a Spanish citizen, Almodóvar feels strongly about the Civil War inheritance. He even has Arturo, at the start, deplore the withdrawal of government funding for exhumation projects – fair enough, since the film’s story begins in late 2016, although Pedro Sánchez’s administration, on election in 2018, restored such funding. But Almodóvar’s film-making heart isn’t in the subject; if it were, he wouldn’t be so ungenerous with the screen time allotted to it.
We’ve come to expect a lot of Almodóvar and it must be stressed that Parallel Mothers satisfies expectations in several important ways. It goes almost without saying that the colour combinations are exhilarating throughout (José Luis Alcaine is once again the cinematographer), that Alberto Iglesias has supplied another beautifully intriguing score, and that the acting is of a high order. Penélope Cruz carries the film with assurance and a commitment to the job in hand that makes her glamour somehow all the more remarkable. Two Almodóvar debutants in particular make an excellent impression. Despite the awkward conception of his role, Israel Elejalde, best known in Spain for his stage work, leaves you in doubt you’re watching a first-rate, nuanced actor. Aitana Sánchez-Gijón is highly entertaining as Teresa. The Pedro regulars Rossy de Palma and eighty-eight-year-old Julieta Serrano – in a brief, eleventh-hour and luminous appearance as Janis’s grandmother – are very differently splendid.
The conclusion of Parallel Mothers, when Janis eventually returns to her village, includes some impressive things: a conversation between the protagonist and her grandmother, now close to death but whose testimony has kept the family history alive; the excavations by Arturo and his team; the procession – including not only Janis and other villagers but also Ana and two-year-old Cecilia (Luna Auria Contreras) – which heads down a road towards the open grave; and Cecilia’s face as she stands at the graveside and gazes down (Almodóvar has described this as ‘the gaze of the future’). Yet Janis’s reconciliations with Arturo and Ana to enable this harmonious finale seem too easily achieved, and the status of their relationships at the end is left vague. Janis, according to what she tells Ana, is now pregnant again – presumably by Arturo. They share a bed during their stay in the village and we already knew that Arturo had decided to separate from his now recovered wife but it’s unclear what he or, more to the point Janis, thinks about their living or having children together. The main difficulty with these last scenes, however, is that they’re a persisting reminder that what can only be called the story’s grave aspect has, for most of the film, been conspicuous by its absence (and if this is meant as a metaphor for Spain’s turning a blind eye to the same, it simply doesn’t work). The climax’s involving power, far from deflecting attention from Almodóvar’s oversight, sharpens our awareness of it.
31 January 2022
[1] Enacted in 2007, the law ‘recognises and broadens the rights and establishes measures in favour of those who suffered persecution or violence during the Civil War and the Dictatorship’ (Wikipedia).
