Melodramas were often dismissed as “women’s weepies”, films that made you cry, because they told the life of their protagonists as tragedy and did not shy away from artificial exaggeration. Douglas Sirk and later Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the socio-critical potential in the staging of these stories and the tears they evoke, whether in Imitation of Life or Fear eats soul. The Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has been perfecting this principle for more than four decades and with his new, meanwhile 22nd film parallel mothers filmed his most overtly political melodrama to date. He was often concerned with women, especially mothers, young and old, real and fake, caring and absent. But the often shrill tone of the early films has given way to a deep seriousness, and the Spanish society he describes still struggles with its own past.
There are three mothers in the new film. Penélope Cruz plays the photographer Janis, almost forty, who is commissioned by a magazine to portray the forensic anthropologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde), with whom she not only soon begins an affair, but also asks him for help, the remains of her from the Falangists murdered and buried in a mass grave great-grandfather. When she becomes pregnant unintentionally, she decides to have the child without Arturo, who is already married.
In the hospital she shares a room with 17-year-old Ana (Milena Smit), who is also expecting a child, alone and completely overwhelmed. Their mother Teresa (Aitana Sánchez Gijón) is too busy with her own theatrical career, which is picking up late, to take care of her daughter and grandchild. After the birth of their children, Janis and Ana lose touch for a while, but a chance encounter in a café brings them back together. Janis soon takes the younger woman under her wing as a babysitter and the initially non-committal meeting turns into a friendship between two very different single mothers who support each other and who, quite almodóvaresque, connect even more.
The film artfully and touchingly unfolds this tracking down of suppressed truths and the exploration of family models. Almodóvar’s previous film, the autobiographical one suffering and glory,with its serious tone and melancholy look back was an old work. with parallel mothers the 72-year-old now leaves all campness aside, even if his sense of color and image composition, supported once again by Alberto Iglesias’ film music, leaves nothing to chance and charges every detail with meaning without overloading it melodramatically.
transition with silence
The stories about the two mothers and their secrets as well as the confrontation with the political past of the country run parallel. After Franco’s death in 1975 and the subsequent “Transición”, the transition from dictatorship to a democratic system, Spanish society functioned according to the principle of silence. The civil war and the murder of political dissidents, said to be more than a hundred thousand, were not discussed for a long time. Only since the turn of the millennium have people begun to open up mass graves from this time nationwide and to confront the wounds of the collective trauma. Almodóvar himself, with his troupe of queer punks and drag queens, was part of the “movida madrileña”, Madrid’s subculture, which lustily tried to drive out the old mustiness with creativity and excess, while simply negating Franco.
Beneath the exalted surface, his films have always been political, whether in the norm-breaking aesthetics, the gender fluidity of his characters, or quite specifically in allusions to social unrest, as in My blooming secret. But Almodóvar, who has changed from a former enfant terrible to a white-haired gentleman, has not addressed the shadows of his country’s past as directly as now. In 2018 he co-produced the documentary The Silence of Otherswhich deals with the long-standing struggle to repeal the amnesty law passed in 1977, to come to terms with the crimes of the Franco regime and to find a dignified memorial for the bereaved. parallel mothers started in 2016, when Spain was still governed by the right-wing conservative Partido Popular under Mariano Rajoy, who balked at the conflict and refused state support. It is also a non-profit organization that carries out the exhumation in the film and thus brings what has been buried into the collective consciousness.
The division in society is still deep almost half a century after Franco’s death and the rifts extend into the private sphere, dividing entire families across the generations, as Almodóvar shows masterfully and subtly. While Janis fights for the implementation of her great-grandfather in her home village, Ana’s conservative father is strictly against any form of coming to terms with historical injustice. And Teresa, who describes herself as apolitical, complains about the “left” theater milieu, where she is of all people Doña Rosita or The Language of Flowers late success, a play by leftist and gay playwright Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by the right-wing during the Spanish Civil War. With its fictional search for traces of a very real trauma with all its contradictions, the film hits a nerve in polarized Spain, precisely because it is more of a healing memory work than a combative pamphlet. And the tears flow against forgetting at the end.
parallel mothers Pedro Almodovar Spain 2021, 123 minutes