Title: Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas)
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Language: Spanish
Running time: 123'
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a mother? I didn’t think I even needed to until I saw Almodóvar’s latest movie, Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas), which premiered at the 78th Venice Film Festival this year. It might seem like not really that great of a story, but the movie really left me with a lot to wonder about. If I had to describe it with one word, I would say “conceptual.”
It’s the story of Janis (Penélope Cruz) and Ana (Milena Smit), who are roommates in the maternity ward at the hospital and become mothers the same day. While Janis is a 40 year old photographer decided to raise her baby alone, Ana is a teenager stuck in an accidental pregnancy not even sure why she has kept the baby. Janis encourages and supports Ana through the ward, while Ana’s mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) makes us wonder why she even became a mother in the first place (which will be clarified later in the movie). What the two new mothers don’t yet realise is that their babies will be swapped while under observation, and this will create an even stronger and stranger bond between them.
The title of the movie may seem to refer only to Janis and Ana, but the reality is that there are many other mothers to be considered in this movie. There’s Teresa, Ana’s mother, who doesn’t seem too fit for the role, and so Ana is left to learn about motherhood a lot by herself but also through Janis, who welcomes her in her home and later in her bed too (one twist I didn’t quite understand, if I have to be honest). Next to them, always looming are Janis’s mother and grandmother, and with them the women of her pueblo. In fact, Janis’s baby-daddy is Arturo (Israel Elejalde), an anthropologist to whom she asks for help to open the mass grave where her great-grandpa was buried with many other men of the pueblo, as they were killed by the Falangists during the early years of Franco’s regime. So, all of these mother-figures come around in circles and accompany us through out the whole movie. It really is a tale about different stages and ways of motherhood. A tale of birth, but also loss and removal.
Emblematic of the removal side of the story is the last scene of the movie. The women of the pueblo reach the gravesite and watch as the team of anthropologists show them the mass of skeleton bodies laying exactly where they knew they would find it. And as the camera trucks over the bones, it starts trucking over fully clothed flesh bodies, that look just like they were left to sleep there. A really powerful image that passes by so fast, one doesn’t even realise its true force and meaning until later.
For the rest, the cinematography is what you would expect from Almodóvar: the Director of Photography José Luis Alcaine uses warm and classic camera movements that follow perfectly the director’s flow, and the colours pop out of the perfectly average bourgeois houses. However, there are quite a lot of narration and meaning hidden in the camerawork and tones, which also get exalted by Alberto Iglesias’s perfect soundtrack, that gets so somber that at times it seems to be from a thriller.
I have seen many describe this movie as boring, and I have to disagree. I think that maybe the story might not seem like the most original one, and it’s not as full of twists and turns as one might expect. But we get to feel with the characters, they are relatable and human, we see where they are coming from even when they take the most disagreeable decisions. I left the theatre with a sense of normalcy, as if what I had just watched was the most average and everyday tale I could have ever seen, but in the days after the screening I couldn’t stop thinking about the themes of the movie. And the more I thought about Parallel Mothers, the more I excavated layers of meaning. And personally, I think this is the best achievement a movie could wish for.
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