In 2019 while blabbering on like TV, I came across a documentary called “The Silence of Others,” produced by Pedro Almodóvar’s production company. The film revealed to me a terrible piece of history that Spain has refrained from dealing with. During Franco’s dictatorship, tens of thousands of people were abducted, tortured and murdered, and their bodies buried in unmarked mass graves throughout Spain. For years their relatives have been waging a struggle to search for their bones and bring the criminals to justice, but have encountered “pathological silence” (as Almodóvar put it) and opposition from conservative forces in Spain, who insist on keeping the past buried. The film featured testimonies of old women laying wreaths at the sides of roads paved over the bones of their loved ones. This is the first time I have seen the name of Almodóvar, a senior Spanish director, linked in a cinematic text that deals with the dark history of his homeland.
This struggle is the starting point of Almodóvar’s new film. He began writing the script many years ago and completed it during the corona closure. Evidence that the project employed him even before the production of the documentary (the work on which lasted seven years) can be found in “Broken Hugs” from 2009 – a poster of “Parallel Mothers” hangs on one of the walls in the film.
Penelope Cruz (who was nominated for an Oscar for the role she does here) is Janice, a magazine photographer sent to photograph a forensic archaeologist (Israel Alhalda) named Arturo. At the end of the session she asks for his help – she wants to dig the field in her home village, where according to the testimonies her father and grandfather and other people are buried. Arturo tells her it will take years until she gets an answer from the foundation where he works, and meanwhile an affair begins between them and the story of the tombs is set aside. They lie down and in the next scene she is already in advanced pregnancy and estranged from Marturo because he is married to a woman with cancer.
The struggle to expose the crimes of the Franco regime is still in full swing. Parallel mothers (Photo: PR)
In her room at the Janice maternity hospital she meets the teenage Anna (Milena Smith) and the two’s fates are intertwined. Both are single mothers – like her mother and grandmother, Janice says – and the bond formed between them is reminiscent of the “All About Mom” plot. A typical Almodóvar plot develops here, though this time the surprises are a bit too predictable and sometimes the film seems to skip too fast between scenes (as I described above). The artistic design is as meticulous and beautiful as ever, but it felt too polished and clean to me, mainly because Janice’s apartment for a moment did not look like the living space of a mother to a newborn baby. So, despite Cruz and Smith’s fine performances, and despite the great music of Alberto Iglesias (who earned him his fourth Oscar nomination), I felt the film had a degree of emotional sterility.
“Parallel Mothers” has another mother – Teresa (Itana Sanchez Gihon), Anna’s actress mother, who follows her career instead of helping her daughter. Although as Janice and Anna mothers deal with great pains – some of which are only told to us after they have happened – the film seems more like the well-groomed and motherless emotion terrace.
As mentioned, throughout most of the film it seems that the matter of the graves that started the connection between Janice and Arturo has been abandoned on the side. But when you look closely at the plot details you realize that history is present and influential, and that some of the dramatic complications would not have happened if, for example, Janice had known her father who disappeared when she was a little girl. In the epilogue, after all the problems in the mothers’ melodrama are solved, the plot returns to dealing with the exposure of the bones. The narrative style changes and resembles the documentary I mentioned in the opening – Janice and Arturo meet old relatives and hear their stories about the missing men and the things they took with them.
Justifiable Oscar nominee. Penelope Cruz in “Parallel Mothers” (Photo: PR)
As a viewer I felt I wanted to know more and that there was a certain imbalance between the frame story and the melodrama at its center. However, according to Almodóvar’s testimony, the film was better received in countries other than Spain – where the younger generation is now waking up to demand the revelation of the past – so it may be that even the little that was there was perceived as too much. As you may recall, Spain preferred to send to the Oscar the “good boss” of Fernando Leon de Arnoa (with Javier Bardem as factory manager), who failed to win the nomination, although it was clear that Almodóvar had more chances.
★★★✯ 3.5 stars
Madres paralelas Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. With Penelope Cruz, Milena Smith, Israel Alhalda, Rossi de Palma. Spain 2021, 123 min