Parallel Mothers debuts in theaters on Dec. 24.
As is the case with most Pedro Almodóvar movies, Parallel Mothers is an unexpected, sometimes crazy ride that keeps you off-kilter to the very end. A contemporary melodrama, Almodóvar peppers his story with a medley of disparate topics including but not limited to the ongoing fallout from the Spanish Civil War, middle-aged motherhood, sexual experimentation, and generational trauma and privilege. None of that should work together but in the hands of writer/director Almodóvar, he mostly succeeds in connecting them together into a coherent and deeply absorbing drama that packs plenty of emotional punch.
Almodóvar retains his gift for telling women-centric stories, and casting them with actresses who make even the most heightened of stories feel grounded and at least emotionally relatable. Parallel Mothers features his frequent muse Penélope Cruz as Janis Martinez, a single, 40-something, high-end magazine photographer. On behalf of her family and the town she grew up in, she takes on a personal side project trying to get the government involved in confirming, and exuming, a mass grave of murdered Francisco Franco dissenters, including her kin. She connects with Arturo (Israel Elejalde), who is part of a state-run anthropological project that is cataloging and documenting similar sites around the country, to get the site on a waiting list. The pair connects in a more carnal way too, despite his married status. And surprise, Janis ends up pregnant. Desperate to be a mother, she breaks off the affair after telling him he does not need to be involved and she goes all in on her shot at motherhood.
Nine months later in the hospital in labor, Janis meets her roommate Ana (Milena Smit), a 20-something single mother who is a lot less excited about her own impending motherhood. She’s got an extremely self-centered, actress mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), a father who kicked her out, and no real prospects. The polar opposite women bond over their shared labor and become friends after the birth of their daughters.
It’s that aftermath that Almodóvar is most interested in exploring, as Janis and Ana are both resilient and dedicated mothers. Both want to give their daughters the kinds of childhoods they didn’t have, with Ana’s mother, Teresa, serving as an ongoing object lesson in the truth that not all women are cut out to be parents. What’s refreshing about Almodóvar’s approach is that he keeps peeling back the layers on all the women, who are all remarkably candid about their sins and failures leading them to this point. As their lives dip in and out of one another’s, Almodóvar is making a subtle but strong case about the traumas that shape people, and how those experiences infect the next generation even when it isn’t intentional.
Cruz and Smit are exceptional in the naturalism of their performances. A lot of very melodramatic things happen for the two women stemming from their shared time in the maternity ward, but to Almodóvar’s credit, the film never spirals into histrionics and telenovela territory. The grounded performances, framed by the absolutely exquisite in-camera lighting techniques by cinematographer José Luis Alcaine and the moving but tempered score by Alberto Iglesias, achieve an incredible balancing act in making it all work. In lesser hands, the inciting incident and subsequent domino effect that ensues for Janis and Ana should be some eye-rolling stuff. But Almodóvar is more interested in seeing what choices these women will make in light of their own experiences, and the even more painful ones wrought on their ancestors of the near past. These women exist within the harsh realities and disappointments of their lives, and that’s shown with a pragmatism and resoluteness that informs everything in Parallel Mothers.
Plus, Almodóvar and his cast are fantastic about capturing all shades of life, from the funny, to the absurd, the sad and the sexy. The story goes to all these places and more and that means the story zips by in terms of pacing and the overall destination of the story. Because of that, the only major quibble is with how the narrative comes back to the mass grave story. It is the emotional top and tails of the whole piece, so when it returns so abruptly after fading from the movie, it’s a bit emotionally jarring to get reinvested. Perhaps, if it was given more space to come back to the forefront, it would have felt less rushed. But it does effectively help tie together the overall themes of sacrifice, motherhood, and the intentional steps needed to connect Spain’s past with its present.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3ySUGV6
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