Pedro Almodovár has written a new star role for Penelopé Cruz: the melodrama “Parallel Mothers”
What would film history be without the wonderful connections that often develop over decades on both sides of the camera? Perhaps none is marked by greater innocence and mutual devotion than that between Penélope Cruz and her mentor Pedro Almodóvar. Fifteen years ago, after he had just written her the most challenging role of her career for “Volver”, she told us in an interview: “I’m 32 now … and I feel like I still have sixty years of work ahead of me. I’ve already planned my wrinkles and lines. Fifteen years from now they’re going to let me play great roles that I couldn’t play now. I was actually frustrated when I heard a few years ago that I was too young for what I was interested in. Now, at 32, I have a lot more options because I can change a lot physically, both forwards and backwards. And it doesn’t scare me at all that I might not look so good doing it.”
Now, at 47, of course, everything turned out very differently. Penélope Cruz looks almost exactly the same and plays an expectant mother. She develops her part into an enormously differentiated role; she shoulders the complex atmosphere of the melodrama almost alone and with bravura.
On one level, it’s the story of the unlikely relationship between two mothers – Milena Smit plays the younger one – who meet in a maternity ward. Motherhood is one of Almodóvar’s favorite themes, another is death, which he wove into his bittersweet symphony as a counterpoint.
At work, the photographer played by Cruz meets a forensic scientist and archaeologist. This is not just the beginning of a short love affair that ends abruptly with pregnancy. Beyond the separation, the specialist pursues her wish to salvage the bones of her great-grandfather, who was murdered by fascists in the civil war, from a mass grave.
The subject of genealogy also determines the other story: when the man sees his baby, he spontaneously doubts his paternity. In fact, a maternity test then leads to a negative result, which can only be explained by a mix-up in the hospital.
What sounds like the whole film content, which was hastily revealed, is only the somewhat boldly constructed exposition. Almodóvar and Cruz develop and orchestrate them to the highest level of emotionality, and the ubiquitous Hitchcock-esque music composed by Alberto Iglesias was probably unnecessary. In fact, the notes sometimes know a little more than the characters, which, of course, further emphasizes the elegance of the scenery and costumes.
It sometimes gets interesting at Almodóvar when connections no longer interlock as desired. The film is called “Parallel Mothers”, but it is even more about a kind of parallelism of the past. The legacy of the Franco era usually plays a rather indirect role in the work of the director, who was born in 1949.
For the young artist, who still suffered when dictator Franco closed film schools, his own work is a celebration of liberation. Now, for the first time, he is targeting the burden of coming to terms with the past, which has never been consistently pursued in this country. The crucial intersections between the stories mark acts of violence in the present: the rape that made the young mother pregnant; a cruel treatment by the older one, which she later confesses to her. But as much as these themes are to be merged with the historical level, the late honoring of the victims of the Spanish Civil War, they do not want to be connected.
That doesn’t change the fact that, as always, one admires the light-heartedness of a production that leaves nothing to chance without losing its dreamlike flow. Equally admirable is the tour de force with which Penelopé Cruz succeeds in giving her figure a deep black facet while at the same time maintaining her loveliness.
But more than ever, signs of a social location are missing behind the ravishingly chic outfits of the Milena Smit character. More than other films by the great Spanish director, this one seems a little trapped in its exquisite settings. Which isn’t to say we wanted to miss him at any cost. But if you’re looking for a masterpiece, you’d better watch “Violence and Glory” for the third time. It gets even better.
parallel mothers. Spain 2021. Director: Pedro Almodóvar. 123 mins
