Parallel Mothers is a film by Almodovar. (Like Picasso, the Spanish director uses only his last name to identify his works.) The movie challenges the viewer to devise thematic or metaphorical (even allegorical) connections between it's two divergent narratives -- clearly the two "parallel" stories are supposed to reflect on one another. However, the connections between the two plots are abstruse and rather formalist, I think. The movie is intriguing and boldly designed but not wholly successful. I remain unconvinced that there is much tying the two plots together other than some arbitrary narrative elements. But, perhaps, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about modern Spanish history to draw the connections that Almodovar has probably worked into the material. Fortunately, each of the narratives is sufficiently compelling to stand on its own and the apparent disjunction in mood and theme between the two stories (intended as the title suggests to run freely "parallel" to one another) isn't an obstacle to understanding Almodovar's intricately crafted and well-appointed melodrama. One of the narratives involves two plot twists, one of them very obvious to everyone but the poor people trapped in the story, but the other quite surprising. So proceed here with caution.
A stunningly beautiful fashion photographer, Janis, takes pictures of a famous forensic anthropologist named Arturo, apparently illustrating some kind of Sunday supplement about the the man's adventures. Arturo is famous for exhuming mass graves and applying his skills to identifying the disinterred skeletons. Apparently, he investigates war crimes and atrocities, an aspect of the story that is unfortunately more relevant today, while the war in Ukraine is in progress, than when the movie was produced in 2020. All of rural Spain is apparently a war crime site and various commissions for truth and reconciliation have retained Arturo to exhume the victims of the Civil War and identify them. As it happens, Janis (played by Penelope Cruz) is aware of a mass grave near the village where she was raised. She pleads with Arturo to work with authorities to disinter the cadavers in that grave, one of the ten "disappeared", her own grandfather. One of the pleasures of Almodovar's films is the beauty of his actors. Arturo is gorgeous and, of course, Janis is fabulously beautiful and, since she works as a fashion photographer, spectacularly dressed and accessorized. (I've observed that all the performers in Spanish movies and TV are incredibly attractive athletic, and fantastically well-dressed -- it's an expected component in Almodovar movies and obvious even in TV shows like Money Heist.) Of course, Janis and Arturo have a love affair. Apparently, it takes a long time for forensic disinterment to be conducted in Spain -- full archaeological methodology is employed and, while Janis is waiting for the excavations in her home town, she gets pregnant with Arturo's child and has the baby. Arturo isn't too excited about the pregnancy -- he's married and his wife is battling cancer. When he shows reluctance for Janis to have the baby, she breaks off the affair, although remaining in contact with Arturo with respect to the project to disinter the victim's of the Fascists in her home town.
Janis has her baby at a Madrid maternity ward. Her roommate is a waif-like teenage girl, a sort of orphan of the storm, named Ana. (Everyone in the movie seems to be fantastically wealthy and so it is odd that Ana and Janis are sharing a room in the maternity hospital.) Both women have their babies, each delivering baby girls. But the two infants are distressed and have to be removed from their mothers for "observation" -- all turns out to be well, but with one serious complication. The hospital staff mixes up the baby girls -- Ana leaves the hospital with Janis' child; Janis goes home with Ana's baby whom the fashion photographer names Cecelia. The plot involving the mix-up in the babies is the second strand to this movie's plot and its complications comprise most of the film's running time. Arturo has a good eye. When he comes to visit Janis and sees Cecelia, he doesn't think that the baby looks anything like him -- in fact, the infant has very dark skin and a head of black hair. (Ana, as it happens, was raped by three boys when she was drunk and one of them looksNorth African.) At first, Janis thinks the baby resembles her mother's boyfriend, a Venezuelan drug dealer who was her father -- Janis' mother died of drug overdose when she was only 27 and seems to have been a lost soul. (She has named her daughter, the film's heroine, after Janis Joplin and that singer's version of "Summertime" plays an important role in the movie's soundtrack -- first, we hear Joplin's version and, then, the song is echoed in the anxious, twitchy horror film soundtrack as the movie proceeds.) Arturo's remarks that the baby doesn't look like him lead Janis to undertake some genetic testing and she discovers that, in fact, the child isn't her infant at all. Janis is shocked, but rather inexplicably doesn't do anything. Later, she encounters poor Ana, working in a bar and cafe near her home. Her conversation with Ana leads to the film's unexpected plot twist which I won't reveal here except to say that it is very dire. Janis has trouble finding a baby-sitter for her child and ends up hiring Ana to care for the little girl (who is, in fact, Ana's daughter). Janis and Ana become lovers -- Almodovar luxuriates in scenes like this, gratuitous sex but handsomely lensed. Then, Arturo returns to further complicate the relationship. Janis remains sexually attracted to Arturo whose wife has now recovered from her cancer sufficiently for the husband, love-smitten with Janis, to divorce her. The film adjourns to the country where Arturo maps out his planned disinterment of the mass grave. Surviving relatives of the long-dead men are swabbed for DNA so that the individual skeletons can be identified. The dry earth is broken open and the bones emerge. The corpses show wrists tied with barbed wire. One murdered man had a glass eye: the dusty prosthetic emerges from the grave. Another man put his baby daughter's rattle in his pocket when he was hauled away to be killed. The toy is disinterred with his bones. The townspeople march to the grave carrying pictures of the dead. Janis is now once more pregnant with Arturo's child. In a brief concluding shot, we see the dead men sprawled in the grave as they appeared ninety years before.
The central narrative involving the switched babies is melodramatic, featuring vehement confrontations, betrayals, and love affairs. The frame story about the mass grave and the disinterment of the skeletons of the murdered men has a spare, objective documentary tone. The two stories are pictorially linked by the motif of the DNA swab -- Janis tests herself, and, then, the baby, and Ana by swabbing their cheeks for a saliva sample. The old women in the rural village are similarly swabbed for DNA samples. Figuratively, it seems that we think we know who we are, but, in fact, no one knows their true origins nor does anyone know where they are going -- both birth and death are enigmas into which no one can really penetrate. Similarly, we think we know our present but, in fact, much around us is mysterious. Furthermore, the young don't know the past and don't even care about it -- Ana has never heard of Janis Joplin. Things that happened before we were born are profoundly mysterious and, perhaps, it isn't productive to seek the truth about events that occurred ninety years ago. Ana, at least, doesn't see the utility of digging up mass graves from the Fascist period. Janis berates her: "So you don't want to know anything about your country?" But the mass graves aren't a revelation -- the movie isn't about the surprising discovery of such things. Rather, everyone in the village knows where the men are buried; they know who died and why. They just haven't snatched the corpses out of the earth to display them in the light of day. Does disturbing the dead really serve any useful purpose? An old lady who is now dying herself says that she wants to see her father's skeleton identified so that he can be buried in the family plot where his widow is interred and where the old woman will soon be laid to rest. But is this sufficient justification for excavating the corpses. The film posits that birth and death are equally obscure and unknown and we don't really even know ourselves in the midst of life: is Janis lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual? She seems to opt for the latter identity at the end of the film. But who knows? Identities are fluid; and people change and the end can't be predicted from the beginning.
On careful analysis, about a third of the film is a series of contrivances to drive the elaborate and intricate switched identities plot. Most of the minor characters, all of them women, although vividly drawn, are really just engines to make plot points. For instance, Ana's mother, an actress who has just achieved a modicum of modest success at age 47, is skillfully acted and has some compelling scenes -- we see her on-stage reciting verse from a Lorca play -- but actually the part is written to give the teenage girl a sounding board and, then, to drive the plot when the woman (who is helping to care for Ana's baby) has to leave Madrid with a touring production of the play in which she stars. (This isolates Ana and sets the stage for her to re-connect with Janis.) Almodovar directs the film as if it were a Hitchcock thriller. He contrives tidy, efficient montages connecting Janis and Ana when the two women give birth. The film features some disorienting jump cuts -- for instance, a flashback signified by a change in Janis' clothing; she approaches the door wearing one garment but is dressed differently when the door is open in a reverse shot staged in the apartment corridor. Everyone is stylish -- the film is inhabited by different versions of the cool femme fatale (like Grace Kelly) in Hitchcock's movies -- and the decor is spectacular: rooms and streets are spotless and look unlived-in, in fact, like movie sets. Almodovar uses huge inserted close-ups of inanimate objects to make his points: giant close-ups of bones and cell-phones and documents. The sound cues are oddly disjunctive, suggestive of suspense and horror that we don't really see on-screen. The switched babies plot is garish with lurid overtones and luxury items photographed by Janis sometimes crowd the scene -- there's one sequence in which Janis shoots a beautiful fashion model that has lesbian overtones that foreshadow the brief romance between Janis and Ana, but that otherwise doesn't seem to have much function other than to allow Almodovar to focus on a lusciously beautiful model filmed against a post-modern white studio. The frivolity of the fashion world is made monumental in this movie and contrasts uneasily with the documentary style sequences in the rural village and at the excavation. Probably, Almodovar's intent is to dramatically chronicle the contradictions that exist in modern Spain, but the parts of the picture don't really fit together well. Nonetheless, movie is beautifully made and has a gripping plot and, notwithstanding a few tedious scenes (it's slightly too long at 122 minutes), the film retains the viewer's interest. In the end, the picture suggests a little more than it delivers. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing -- most movies aren't nearly as ambitious as Parallel Mothers.
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