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Interview: Pedro Almodóvar on the Interlocking Themes of Parallel Mothers

Almodóvar discusses his decades-long development of Parallel Mothers’s ideas and how its themes resonate with his other work.

Pedro Almodóvar on the Interlocking Themes of Parallel Mothers
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Now in his fifth decade making movies, Pedro Almodóvar is still pushing himself to explore new directions in his art while at the same time staying true to his playfully provocative roots. The filmmaker made ingenious use of lockdown-era limitations to make the short film The Human Voice, a chamber piece starring Tilda Swinton that served as his first project not in his native Spanish. The short also serves as a springboard for his first English-language feature, A Manual for Cleaning Women, with Cate Blanchett attached to star.

Just because Almodóvar has begun turning his sights beyond Spain, though, doesn’t mean that he’s done exploring and interrogating his homeland and the nature of Spanish identity. His latest feature, Parallel Mothers, may suggest a familiar variation on the tropes that have long obsessed Spain’s most celebrated living filmmaker. The film offers Pénelope Cruz another complex role as Janis, a photographer interested in uncovering the truth about her family history at the same time as she prepares to welcome a child into the world.

Complicating Janis’s present and future is Ana (Milena Smit), with whom she crosses paths at the maternity ward. Their melodramatic and psychologically fraught relationship takes on an atypically reflexive bent for Almodóvar, who utilizes it to explore both the historical origin of his artistic obsessions as well as the traumas that have gripped the nation that made him.

I spoke with Almodóvar in New York shortly after he presented Parallel Mothers as the closing night film of this year’s 2021 New York Film Festival. Our conversation covered his decades-long development of the film’s ideas, how its themes resonate with his other work, and why the role of Janis wasn’t necessarily a natural fit for his longtime muse.

At the New York Film Festival press conference, it was revealed that you originally floated the idea for Parallel Mothers to Penélope Cruz when promoting All About My Mother over 20 years ago. Would she have been Ana in your imagination then?

I talked to her about the theme of the two mothers when I was writing the first pages. She said that it was during All About My Mother, but there’s a sequence in Broken Embraces where we see the filmmaker and one of the movies that he has done before and there’s a poster. It was for Parallel Mothers. So it means that, in 2009, I really had at least the first draft.

With the exception perhaps of Pain and Glory, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and The Flower of My Secret, which I wrote in about three to four months, the rest of my films [took a really long time to concoct]. It has really become my preferred way of working. I have one idea, and then I write 10 or 15 pages immediately at home. I put it on the computer, and if the story still interests me, then I start taking notes over one year. And then when I have like 100 pages of notes, I write the first draft. I have many stories in this [state]. So, after making the movie that I’m doing, I always go back to these stories and continue working on them. For example, Talk to Her and Bad Education are the films that took me the longest to write because I worked on the structure until I found the thing that made the whole thing click.

You sat down and wrote Parallel Mothers during the pandemic lockdown. Was having that time and space helpful? Not only just to get it all out, but also to think about some of the deeper themes and the historical resonance?

I don’t know! I just needed to fill my time with an activity that consumed me completely. One of the things that I do to consume time is write, and so I went back to the script of Parallel Mothers. It was not so much that the thematic elements sort of coincided with the time period. It had nothing to do with death or with any of these things. It was really the fact that I actually had the time to fully concentrate on the script and to be able to begin to resolve some of the issues with a script that I did not like. The part about historical memory was in the script from the first draft, [along] with the relation between the two mothers.

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Do you think you could have made the movie 10 or 20 years ago? Or did it really need to be now both for you or society to catch up with the idea?

I mean, there’s no reason that I could not have done this 10 years ago because this is a topic that was relevant then and is unfortunately still quite relevant. Spain really has a moral debt to pay, I feel, to the families [of the victims of the war]. What needed time was my resolution of the story and my being able to come to the story at a point where I was ready to shoot it.

Do you think that debt can be paid?

Yes, I think so. Well, I want to think so. The movie spans three years, between 2016 and 2019. And last July, the government passed the Historical Memory Law, where everything changed related to the mass graves. Thanks to this law, it is now the state’s administration that is responsible for exhuming the graves and financing this. They have also committed themselves to opening all the mass graves. We hope that this is going to change everything now.

Pedro Almodóvar on the Interlocking Themes of Parallel Mothers
Pedro Almodóvar and Pénelope Cruz on the Set of Parallel Mothers. © Sony Pictures Classics.

You said recently that the great movie about the Spanish Civil War has yet to be made. If that’s not Parallel Mothers, what does that film need to do or be?

I’m very proud of Parallel Mothers. But this film is addressing it from the vantage point of a woman who lives in the contemporary world looking back. As you know, I think Víctor Erice made these two great masterpieces [The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur] that don’t deal directly with the war but very metaphorically. So, what I meant by that is to say that we have to yet to have a film that objectively and directly talks about the war.

Did making this movie cast any of your other movies in a new light? It feels like the image of the women walking to the mass grave at the end of Parallel Mothers is something that your entire body of work has been building toward.

You are correct that a lot of themes interlock between my films. Speaking specifically about this reference between Volver and Parallel Mothers, we have the women at the cemetery and the women at the excavation site. Volver begins with the women at the cemetery cleaning the graves, and this great group of women surrounds that space. It also deals with the topic of death in an almost celebratory way. Which, of course, by the time you get to Parallel Mothers, it’s a tragic relationship to death. What I can say about the mothers that arrive at the grave in Parallel Mothers is that they wish to be able to behave like the ones from Volver who have a place to go visit their loved ones, to bring flowers, to actually pay homage their dead.

Even beyond Volver and the similarities between those two scenes, in so many of your films it’s obvious that women—especially single mothers—have lifted you up personally. At the end of this film, we see how it’s not just you. It’s all of Spain.

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You’re right because I grew up surrounded by women: my mother and all our neighbors. Even when my mother couldn’t be with us and needed us to be taken care of, she would take us to the neighbors. All throughout the ’50s and ’60s, I grew up surrounded by women. I think of all the female characters I’ve written and being inspired by these women and their stability to overcome anything. By their ability to fight and by their strength. However, I think the big difference in Parallel Mothers is that these are contemporary mothers. These mothers are not mothers that have resonances, say, to my own mother. One mother is a very conservative mother. Then you have Ana, who’s a very young woman with a new maternity linked up to the tragic story of her rape. And then you’ve got Pénelope’s character, a contemporary mother and a single mother who has to really struggle to balance her role as a mother and as someone who has to sustain a family. I do really like this idea that you bring up the fact that the women are sustaining the country. I think particularly the character of Janis, in her sense, does represent this. Her personal, intimate problem resonates with a collective problem.

Even though it’s a newer maternal model for you to depict, was it helpful to have written so many maternal roles in particular for Pénelope?

This was actually a difficult role for Pénelope. I have a very deep relationship [with her] as a friend and as a director, and I have a lot of faith in the fact that she’s going to give me everything I ask for and everything I need in order to be able to fully inhabit the character. This particular character was not a natural one for her to play. Pénelope is a very different kind of mother. In fact, she had a really hard time arriving at and being able to come into contact with the more conflicted and guilt-ridden areas of the character. But I again had the trust and faith in her that she would be able to play a character that in no evident way was made for her.

I’ve seen the film twice now, and the first time I latched on to the mothers. But the second time I latched on to the concept of family, both in terms of reuniting families and reconstructing the unit as a whole. Can we both reconnect with family in the past while also making changes to it in the future?

What unites the two characters is the sense that they both want to form a family. They’re also both orphans. One’s an orphan because the mother doesn’t pay any attention to her, and the other one is an actual orphan. I was very interested in this desire to form a family, and then I was also very interested in the idea that I present at the end of the film of having this sort of multiform kind of family—a much more open kind of family that is not dependent just on gender or sex but really on the desire to take care of, say, a young one.

So, there’s this sort of double-edged purpose. On the one hand, I wanted to bring visibility to the issue, the problems, and the pain that the relatives who are looking for their loved ones are undergoing. I wanted to shine a light on that. At the same time, I wanted to speak to the young generation represented in this case by Ana, who needs to not only appreciate what the past is but also understand where their families were at the time of a conflict. To come to understand their own place in the world as well as the problems that they’re inheriting that will affect them from this point moving forward. I think you should know the history of your country and family. And, also, the darkest part of that history, because it’s the only way that you can overcome, move forward, and not repeat the same mistakes.

Translation by Carla Marcantonio.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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