Review: Parallel Mothers Movingly Reckons with the Past’s Hold on the Present

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers is haunted by absences, by how a country informs its citizens’ psyches on a granular level. Its central mystery involves the connection between a woman’s quest to recover the bones of ancestors who were murdered and mass-buried during the Spanish Civil War, and two new mothers’ attempts to make peace with their families. The cross-associations that Almodóvar weaves between these threads are startling, suggesting the ripple effects that are inherent in even casual interactions. The filmmaker creates a slipstream of history, art, architecture, and lineage, folding every element of his society effortlessly into one of his most robust and moving melodramas.

The film’s war thread may initially strike one as a MacGuffin. A high-end photographer, Janis (Penélope Cruz) meets a forensic anthropologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), whom she’s shooting for a magazine, inquiring about his involvement in recovering bones from hidden burial sites across Spain. Arturo belongs to an organization that can potentially help Janis exhume the remains of her grandfather, though an approval procedure is involved that could take months.

Janis and Arturo fall into bed together, after which Almodóvar skips ahead to Janis in the hospital on the verge of giving birth to their child, where she meets a pregnant teenager named Ana (Milena Smit). The women bond over their experiences and a friendship blooms. Their story is so immediately involving that one may assume that the victims of the Spanish civil war will be left in hindsight, having served the narrative purpose of bringing these characters together. But, like all of history, these lost people inform the present day.

Almodóvar deftly establishes a potentially convoluted setup with Parallel Mothers. In the tradition of Sirk and Hitchcock, the Spanish auteur has become a master of crafting scenes that casually reverberate with endless levels of subtext. For instance, one moment in Janis and Ana’s shared hospital room sharply contextualizes their differing support systems. Janis’s magazine editor, Elena (Rossy de Palma), is warm, supportive, and good-humored, while Ana’s mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), talks mostly of her acting career, regarding Janis and Elena’s effortless bonhomie with the befuddlement that one might reserve for the behavior of an alien species. Each woman takes their respective baby to their respective home, and the tensions of each character’s particularly drawn family arise to the surface.

The women of this film suffer, particularly Ana, but they aren’t condescendingly painted as martyrs. They have clear identities, and they make choices that are understood to be at least partially defined by cultural traditions and political influences. And while Arturo is married, he’s not demonized as an ambitious philanderer, as he clearly loves Janis and wishes to be in her life and that of her child. It’s history that separates them, because Janis prides herself on being a single mom like her mother and her grandmother, though this pride is laced with pain, a sense of isolation as not only admirable but inevitable. Janis is a poignant, loving, adrift control freak, and she’s among Almodóvar and Cruz’s greatest creations.

Which is to say that, unwittingly, Janis is duplicating and carrying forth a tradition of male absence that began with her great-grandfather’s killing during the Spanish Civil War. Janis is only semi-conscious of this behavior, and Almodóvar somehow makes the neuroses of these actions lucid without thuddingly underscoring them for his audience. And while Teresa initially comes across as a caricature of the self-absorbed careerist, we eventually learn that her life is riven with the sort of baggage that connects her viscerally to her daughter and even to Janis as well. As other critics have written, there are no villains in Parallel Mothers, as everyone here is granted the gift of Almodóvar’s warm, empathetic embrace.

The film exudes the same hauntedness of Almodóvar’s Pain & Glory, as well as the narrative curveballs of the wild films he made during his early days. Quite a bit happens in Parallel Mothers, and much of it doesn’t need to be revealed, except to say that Almodóvar continues to toy with notions of heritage and erasure. Janis’s great-grandfather figures into the film in unexpected ways, especially when it comes to how Janis and Arturo regard their child’s face, looking for traces of familial resemblance. As the years pass, Janis and Ana become lovers, which, given their age differences, suggests on Ana’s part an incestuous working out of issues with her mother. Almodóvar piles on cross-associations that enrich the braided nature of the film: a linking of past and present women holding macro and micro societies together.

Parallel Mothers is also intensified by Almodóvar’s characteristically wild and resonant sense of décor. His characters live in homes filled with vivid colors and art and eye-tickling bric-a-brac, and the filmmaker often utilizes these hues and props to deliver piercing insights. As Janis approaches her doorway to let Arturo in after a long time apart, for him to see their child for the first time, she’s dressed in bright sensual colors. But before she opens the door, Almodóvar cuts to a flashback of Janis telling Arturo not to be in their lives anymore, and she’s wearing a drabber, dispiriting outfit. The contrast tells us, visually, nearly subliminally, that she’s hoping for a reconciliation in the present tense that doesn’t ultimately happen.

Elsewhere, when Ana moves out of Teresa’s home, she fashions her long, brunette hair into a blond pixie cut, suggesting a young adult’s moving efforts to appear grown up. Parallel Mothers abounds in these sorts of flourishes, which suggest how even our most seemingly spontaneous decisions are dictated by submerged impulses that are in turn informed by every subatomic element of our lives and enveloping society. The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Almodóvar understands to be one in the same.