Parallel Mothers movie review: Pedro Almodovar’s film is an endlessly rewarding ode to cultural identity

Language: Spanish One might assume that _Pain and Glory_  was Pedro Almodovar’s most personal film. The 70-year-old Spanish director drew on his own life to paint a self-reflective portrait of a gay storyteller enslaved by the mortality of his own story. Yet, Parallel Mothers, Almodovar’s latest, feels just as personal. On its surface, the tale of the intertwining fates of two single mothers in modern-day Madrid may seem unrelated to the filmmaker’s being. But the roots run deeper than the rot. As the film unfolds, it emerges that the narrative is based on the relationship between the foreground – featuring these two women caught in a baby-swapping melodrama – and the background, featuring the excavation of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War. The story of the mothers becomes a parable for the director’s – and by extension, the nation’s – conflicted relationship with its fascist past. Parallel Mothers opens with a 40-year-old photographer, Janis ( Penelope Cruz ), doing a shoot with a forensic anthropologist named Arturo (Israel Elejalde). She asks if he can aid her quest to recover the remains of her great grandfather in her ancestral village – the man, like thousands of others, was abducted by Falangist militants at night, forced to dig his own grave and then buried in it. Arturo agrees to present her case to his foundation. This chat is fleeting, however, in terms of the film’s timeline. Barely ten minutes and a lovemaking scene later, Janis is giving birth at the exact same moment as her hospital roommate, a teenager named Ana (a magical Milena Smit). Unlike Ana, Janis has embraced her accidental pregnancy, determined to be a single mother in keeping with her family’s long tradition. Her feminism – like her newborn, Cecilia – is alive and kicking. She has also rejected Arturo’s involvement. They go their own ways until, one day, Arturo drops in to see the baby, whose ethnic “look” raises doubts about her parentage. [caption id=“attachment_10450421” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit in a still from Parallel Mothers[/caption] The film turns into a suspenseful domestic drama of sorts here. Janis’ womanhood gets stranded at the intersection of morality and self-preservation. When she realises that Cecilia might not be hers – thanks to an institutional failure parading as a hospital gaff – the first thing she does is change her phone number. She snaps all connections to her immediate history. Denial takes over; ignoring the truth will perhaps make it go away. Until, of course, Janis runs into Ana and her new haircut. Despite the director’s typically soapy treatment, Parallel Mothers resists turning into the film we think it is. At times, it resists turning into any film at all. Janis hires Ana as a nanny, and this is when the domestic drama morphs into something far more pragmatic and honest – eschewing storytelling tricks in favour of historical gravity. Janis is in fact not as scheming as her decision made her look; Ana is not as emotionally unintelligent as her darkness made her seem. One might accuse the film of diffusing the tension to unshackle itself from the red herrings, but the real complexity of Parallel Mothers only dawns upon us in its final stretch. Suddenly, we realise that the trials and tribulations of motherhood – so precisely designed by Almodovar – speak to the troubled evolution of Spanish democracy.

Through the micro-experience of Janis and Ana, the film examines the macro-distinction between leaving behind and moving on, suppressing and forgetting, trauma and remembrance, and most of all, cultural progression and social closure.

The parallels aren’t easy to locate. Millions of Spanish citizens were conditioned by the Pact of Forgetting (and the subsequent Amnesty Law) to avoid directly confronting the atrocities of the Francisco Franco regime. Graves were left unmarked; the “disappearance” of victims was left unaddressed. The Pact – which ensured there would be no persecution or acknowledgement of crimes committed during his 36-year-long dictatorship – was a misguided attempt to make a smooth transition from autocracy to democracy in 1975. The equivalent of the pact in Parallel Mothers is Janis (named after ‘60s singer Janis Joplin) changing her number and willing the “mistake” to go away. This is when the foreground is still a direct reflection of the background. Arturo, too, is a version of the Arturo from _Money Heist_ : a married man who impregnates a woman and stays absent. Once Janis invites Ana into her life, though, it’s no coincidence that the foundation approves her request for excavation of the mass grave – and her ancestor’s remains. Her change of heart is linked to a nation’s change of approach. [caption id=“attachment_10450431” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit in a still from Parallel Mothers[/caption] Just as Janis addresses the mess that stemmed from an institutional failure – and as Ana addresses her own difficult past – Janis’ village finds access to their own difficult history. What happened to their ancestors is no more a secret, just as Cecilia’s identity can no more be a secret. It’s worth noting that Arturo, the excavator, is actually a symbol of the Historical Memory Law, which recognises the rights of the oppressed; his role in Janis’ life is not negative but necessary. In other words, Janis’ actions as a mother go hand in hand with Spain’s own conflicted adulthood. The connection is not distant but profound, as Almodovar’s genre-fluid craft and Penelope Cruz’s superbly measured performance suggests. Her rendition of Janis – who switches between aggressive tropes of independence – raises tough questions about feminism and its automatic link to (single) motherhood. Her ancestors were not single mothers on their own terms, and neither is Ana’s mother, who abandons her teen daughter to fulfill her own ambitions of an acting career. Agency and growth play a big part in the reading of feminism, a truth that Janis’ – unlike several of her new-age girl-boss contemporaries – discovers the hard way. Cruz is adept at playing messy and impulsive artists, but her control of Janis reveals a new weapon in the actress’ armour: a stillness that betrays the storm within. This stirring character trait ties into Janis’ profession as a still photographer: she captures moments and objects and people for both commercial memory and personal posterity. Her Madrid apartment is picture-perfect, colour-coordinated, tasteful but also rootless – a circle that gets completed only towards the end of the film. Most movies might have morphed into a chamber thriller at that apartment. But Almodovar not just employs narrative subterfuge in Parallel Mothers, he also humanises it. The film isn’t afraid to sacrifice fiction at the altar of narrative nonfiction, and individualism at the altar of national plurality. What we call an anti-climax is perhaps the culmination of catharsis. What we call feminism is perhaps the excavation of lost identity. After all, when a woman transitions into motherhood, she enables the future by becoming the past. Parallel Mothers is playing at select theatres in India. Rating: 4/5 Watch the trailer here

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.