Penelope Cruz as professional photographer Janis in Parallel Mothers
Parallel Mothers (2021)
There are a number of parallels in Parallel Mothers. Keeping track of them is part of what makes the movie such intriguing fun to watch. Pedro Almodóvar, the writer-director, toys with the geometrical axiom that parallel lines never intersect. Here they overlap, entwine and juicily rub up against one another.
The story begins placidly enough. In Madrid in 2015, Janis (Penelope Cruz) is a near-40-year-old professional photographer. She’s been out of circulation for a bit, so instead of being assigned to shoot high fashion models, she has to settle for photographing glittery shoes, handbags and jewelry. In her world that’s a bit of a comedown, but she actually finds it a relief to photograph shiny things instead of moody people.
And almost everything she photographs comes in hot colors: pink, red, green, yellow, glistening black. So do most of the movie’s props. Almodóvar and his cinematographer José Luis Alcaine create an almost cartoon-like dayglo color spectrum that at first lulls you into wondering just how serious these people can be.
The pop color scheme slowly recedes into an ironic backdrop, as the characters reveal their complexities. Janis’ undemanding photographic work suits her, because her mind is elsewhere. She’s determined to excavate and properly bury her great-grandfather and other Loyalists from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The men from her hometown were slaughtered and buried in a mass grave by Franco’s fascists.
The faces of her grandparents and great-grandparents shine out from the burnished black and white photos of them she cherishes. Their handsome, solemn, innocent faces bring out something wistful and poignant in Janis. She wants to honor them by returning home to give her great-grandfather and his compatriots a proper burial, without quite understanding why this undertaking carries such urgency for her.
To complete the task, she seeks help from Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic archaeologist experienced in unearthing remains. He tells her that red tape will delay the start of the job. While they wait for the paperwork to be completed, he and Janis become sexually entangled, and, quite unexpectedly, Janis becomes pregnant.
To her surprise, Janis finds she’s eager to become a single mother, and we meet her again months later in a maternity ward when she’s hours away from delivering. Her suite mate is Ana (Milena Smit), a teenager whose pregnancy was accidental (the baby’s father means nothing to her), and who dreads rearing a child on her own.
What’s more, Ana can’t count on much support from her chronically absent mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), an older actress who’s just beginning to hit her stride professionally. Here we come across a third parallel mother, this one self-absorbed and critical of her struggling daughter.
Arturo has demanded that a paternity test be performed. Janis, swearing that she hasn’t had sex with anyone but him, flatly refuses. Arturo won’t consider leaving his wife and declines to pay for the welfare of a child he isn’t sure is his.
Penelope Cruz as Janis and Milena Smit as Ana in Parallel Mothers
Months after Janis and Ana have left the hospital, they’re reunited, and single motherhood seems to have matured both of them. Janis has worked her daughter Cecilia into her busy life. And Ana seems to have found the strength to live on her own in spite of her own father’s insensitivity and her mother’s lingering doubts.
But a revelation arrives that sends both women into life-altering turbulence. Janis discovers a secret that will change their lives. The motherhood they’ve struggled to embrace is more fragile than either could have predicted.
Almodóvar focuses on a strength in women that the society, and not just Spanish society, can take for granted. Cruz’ exquisitely balanced performance shows that Janis’ love for her daughter Cecilia, though it runs deep, doesn’t entirely satisfy her. And why, the movie is bold enough to ask, should it? Motherhood can sometimes fall into the netherworld of asking, whose motherhood is this anyway? And at what cost to herself is any individual mother able to nurture a child?
The profound cause of unearthing and properly burying the remains from a brutal Spanish past is at one with Janis’ passionate nature, her grit in facing and overcoming hard truths. Janis is driven both to transcend the challenges that single motherhood throws at her and not to accept the cruel fate that history dealt her forebears.
They’re parallel struggles and also twin urges, to seek fairness as well as do the right thing. Cruz deftly keeps these fraught ironies spinning and lucid. We never lose sight of the whole woman Janis, as life pulls her in multiple directions.
Smit, the younger actress, probes as deeply because Almodóvar hasn’t let Ana’s dilemmas be shunted aside as the whining complaints of a heedless teenager, especially when they take a fateful turn. Ana’s pain is as wrenching as Janis’ and her wish to live an honest life hangs equally in the balance. They’re on different paths, because of their different ages, but their longings are equally urgent. Almodóvar is no respecter of age disparity. All souls can come to trouble and can rise to new heights.
Almodóvar's direction is so assured and his ever-shifting storytelling so free of artifice that these two women never seem far from us or from each other. The movie doesn’t descend to soap opera because no one in it is pleading for “forgiveness” or “understanding”.
Such cheap appeals, Almodóvar seems to believe, can serve as excuses for not looking into peoples’ capacity to survive and see beyond themselves. Our individual lives aren’t entirely ours to “own”, Almodóvar suggests. The past re-emerges right alongside us and continues to live parallel to us. Maybe we’d do well to turn and acknowledge it, since we can never outrun it.