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Parallel Mothers
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How enticing is this official, widely-used synopsis of
Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers? “Two single women – one
middle aged, the other quite young – meet in a hospital room where they are
both going to give birth”. It’s about as enticing as “angry stand-up
comedian falls in love with ethereal opera singer” for Leos Carax’s Annette (2021), or “college professor
meets a younger woman while on holiday in Greece” for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021).
In all three cases, the central element that
kicks off the real story, the intriguing inciting
incident (as it’s called in the screenwriting trade) or detail, goes
unstated. Why? Because this element is held off until well into the film, and
to divulge it in a first-release review would constitute a dreaded spoiler.
When it comes to the
pleasure that Almodóvar’s movies frequently give, spoiling is indeed a problem.
Intricate plotting with a melodramatic flair is among his specialities.
Revelations, reversals, outrageous coincidences, seemingly marginal digressions
that turn out to be central to the narrative: Almodóvar is a past master at
orchestrating these storytelling delights. He engineers his films so as to
surprise and amaze as they unfold on our initial viewing of them. There is time
enough on later viewings, he wisely reasons, to dig into the other layers of
style and theme.
So, you are going to
have to make do with an elaboration of that bland synopsis for Parallel Mothers, and just take my word
for it that what really happens in
the course of its events connects up with the ideas it explores. Those ideas,
to which I will allude, are inevitably going to seem a little abstract,
unmoored. And, to tell the truth, this film is among Almodóvar’s more schematic
“dramatic essays” (and, in this, it’s a disappointing follow-up to his
lacklustre half-hour adaptation of The
Human Voice [2020] with Tilda Swinton). It’s as if he reverse-engineered the
plot of Parallel Mothers from a broad
issue that he wished to address.
More on that later; for
now, back to the synopsis. Janis (Penélope Cruz) is a photographer. Her line of
work puts her in contact with someone she is keen to meet: Arturo (Israel
Elejalde), an archaeologist who has some influence over which suspected
gravesites, dating from the years of the Spanish Civil War and Francisco’s
Franco’s subsequent dictatorship, can now be excavated.
For Janis, the stakes
are high: her own great-grandfather and his other comrades were reportedly –
according to knowledge passed down the family line – executed by the Falangists
and buried in one of these secret, unmarked sites. Almost incidentally, as this
historical and political campaign to uncover the past gains momentum, Janis and
Arturo become attracted to each other sexually.
That’s what lands Janis
in the maternity ward. It is there that she encounters Ana (Milena Smit), a
troubled teenager whose backstory is recounted only much later in the film.
Both are, effectively, single mothers; the crucial partners and carers in their
lives are not men, but other women: Janis’ no-nonsense pal, Elena (Almodóvar
regular Rossy De Palma), and Ana’s rather more difficult mother, Teresa (Aitana
Sánchez-Gijón). The dilemma of Teresa in fact recalls that of Leda (at two
ages: Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley), the central character in The Lost Daughter: an opportunity to
fulfil an intense professional ambition – in Teresa’s case, to finally break
through as an actor – conflicts with the emotional demands of motherhood.
Almodóvar has long been
the poet laureate of chosen
families – meaning, the
families we actively make through friendship, allegiance and intimate
experiences, not the biological families into which we are born. Chosen
families are expansive, inclusive, queer – if not always smooth sailing.
This vision has constituted
the core achievement of Almodóvar’s best films, including Live Flesh (1997) and The Skin I Live In (2011). Over the
course of four decades, the writer-director’s viewpoint has increasingly
mellowed, without ever really altering its basic conviction: biological ties
can now also be drawn into the chosen family circle, as in his touchingly
autobiographical Pain and Glory (2019).
In this regard, Parallel Mothers marks a curious
inflection in Almodóvar’s evolving sensibility. Biological connections matter
more here than in any previous story he has spun. To make that a convincing
proposition on the interpersonal plane, the film overlays its big political
concern: Spain must know, acknowledge and teach the hard lessons of its
repressed history.
In Almodóvar’s case,
this commitment to the political cause of remembering and witnessing surely
carries a special, possibly even guilty resonance. After all, in the merry post-Franco
days of the Movida Madrileña movement – the early ‘80s punk scene in which he
launched his career as a prominent artist, actor and musician – he once made
the dreamy, Utopian proclamation: “My films are the imagining of what things
would be like if Franco had never been born”.
Parallel Mothers is his strenuous
attempt to assert and affirm the exact opposite of that sentiment.
However, as I have
suggested, there is something mechanical about the film’s overall construction.
On the level of style, Almodóvar plays it relatively cool: the primary colours in
José Luis Alcaine’s cinematography occasionally pop, the smallest details in
Antxón Gómez’s production design are always telling, and the actors do
uniformly splendid work – but we are far from the exciting, tightly patterned
extravagances and artifices of Law
of Desire (1987), for instance.
The major Queer Moment (no spoiler!) in the convoluted plot is rather flat, and
goes nowhere in the overall schema – it’s as if Almodóvar desperately wanted to
reassure his faithful fans that he can still go there if he pleases.
Parallel Mothers, however, simply does
not have the same taste for subversive transgression that registered, for example,
in Banderas as Salvador (the director’s alter ego in Pain and Glory) deciding to adopt hard drugs at a relatively
advanced age. Reconciliation is the keynote of this latest work – and
reconciliation is not always the best ingredient in a melodrama.
Only a few, fleeting
interactions between characters hint, with fine irony, at a more complex,
nuanced arrangement between the generations depicted – such as when Janis
explains that her feminist mother named her after Janis Joplin (playing in the
background during the scene), only to be greeted by Ana’s deflating question: “Who’s
Janis Joplin?”
I have a theory about
how Almodóvar works as an artist. He has declared the crux of it himself on
numerous occasions: he begins (just as David Lynch does) from the dreamlike apparition,
arising in his mind, of a particular scene or situation. It is not necessarily
the start of a story, or its central premise; it could simply be an arresting
exchange of dialogue or a sequence of gestures that ends up landing literally
anywhere in the finished film. Initially, it can be an entirely enigmatic
fragment, mysterious even to himself. But it is from that initial vision that
he organically created the deeply satisfying web of The
Flower of My Secret (1995) and All
About My Mother (1999), among other highlights in his career.
Parallel Mothers seems to have taken a
different path of genesis. Almodóvar (I suspect) began from a concept about
history and collective memory, and from there worked backwards, sculpting
characters and events to illustrate it. As a result, the different, multiple
levels of the script do not mesh in an entirely convincing way.
At its worst, this
tendency to schematisation has all but wrecked the work of once-revered
directors including Atom Egoyan and Wim Wenders, rendering their stories
lifeless and pre-programmed. Almodóvar, even at his least inspired, mercifully
retains a good dose of wit, spunk and crafty flair. Let’s hope he gets his full
creative mojo back in gear for his English-language feature
starring Cate Blanchett, A Manual for
Cleaning Women.
© Adrian Martin January 2022 |
