Pedro Almodovar’s new film Parallel Mothers brings back Penelope Cruz in a role that plays on the Spanish actress’ strength of personality. Cruz has always brought more vehemence and fire to her Spanish speaking roles and in this film, she plays a photographer called Janis who unexpectedly becomes a mother at the age of forty. The film begins with her shooting photos of forensic archaeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde). After their session, Janis asks Arturo if he will exhume the mass grave where her great-grandfather and other men from their village lie. They are casualties of the Franco regime and the Spanish civil war; Janis and her family would like to identify the body and give it a decent burial.
Arturo helps Janis facilitate the process of petitioning his organization to exhume the bodies and then promptly asks her for a date. At this point, the film establishes itself much more firmly on Almodovar-ian territory. Janis and Arturo begin an intense affair (he does not live in the same city as her) and she becomes pregnant. Arturo is married, his wife suffering from cancer, and begs Janis to terminate the pregnancy. She refuses, stops seeing Arturo, and has the baby on her own. At the maternity ward, she bonds with her ward mate, Ana (Milena Smit), a teenage single mother and since they are both single moms, they bond. Ana is in a very different stage of her life in terms of age and social standing (her wealthy parents are ashamed of the circumstances surrounding her pregnancy) and for a while, their lives progress as the two remain friends.
When Arturo pops back into Janis’ life and asks to see his son and then declares that the baby cannot be his, Janis’ life is troubled. Though she refuses his requests for a paternity test, assuring Arturo that she has seen no one else, Janis gets a genetic test of her own that determines that her baby is indeed not hers. As the reader may have surmised, Janis’ baby is not hers but Ana’s, and vice versa. The complications build from there.
Fans of Almodovar will perhaps recognize a similarity in the conundrum with those in Talk to Her, an earlier Almodovar film where a male nurse’s ‘love’ for a comatose patient led to him not only taking exquisite care of her but sleeping with her and raping her. Why does Janis in Parallel Mothers simply not tell everyone the truth from the get-go once she finds out and thus rectify the situation? Not that much time has passed (it has only been a few months perhaps, certainly less than a year) – wouldn’t she want her own biological baby back anyway? If her own inaction isn’t enough, she hires Ana to live with her and be her nanny and even sleeps with her. This is highly problematic to say the least.
In all of this, the sub-plot with the exhumation of the mass grave gets lost. It comes back at the end when things unravel with Ana and Janis reaches out to Arturo and tells him what happens. There are some parallels between what has happened during the Franco regime and what Janis herself perpetrates (the lies, the mistaken identities, the need for accountability and justice which Ana is sorely missing in her personal life). The director emphasizes this by parallel shots of both Janis’ child and her aunt giving saliva samples for DNA testing, one to determine matrilineal lineage and the other to connect her living relatives to her murdered one.
Almodovar has never been a particularly political filmmaker so this connection feels at best tenuous and haphazard and at worst, empty and forced. His drama and personal complications feel much more in line with his body of work and in this film, they are excellent and excellently told. I feel some hesitation to use the word ‘excellent’ to describe the dramatic complications, especially because they are so ethically problematic. Back in 2002, when I was talking about how much I liked Talk to Her, an older friend chastised me for being interested in such a sick premise (the subplot of the male nurse and his patient). Now, I myself am a little perturbed and am trying to figure out Almodovar’s intent with his amoral situations. On the one hand, he seems to be sensitive to what his protagonists endure. On the other, this does not seem to make them better than anybody else and the way they breeze through their emotional confrontations so forcefully makes you wonder if empathy is truly present or only nodded towards.
I had always taken for granted that this emotional breezing through was part of the director’s style. It is not a realism so much as a kind of artificial drama about real concerns, in line with Almodovar’s immaculately beautiful and colourful stylized sets. The last film he completed, Pain and Glory (2019) is a perfect example. So much of what I loved about that film was the sympathy accorded towards its aging protagonist dealing with a host of maladies and painful conditions. However, the way in which he begins to abuse drugs without hesitation in order to deal with his problems is breezed through and slightly troubling. I’ve always liked that Almodovar is a provocateur but now I’m wondering if this might also be a function of some major insensitivity. Nevertheless, he is an excellent filmmaker and I can’t deny that I’m extremely drawn to his movies.
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