We Are Movie Geeks

Pedro Almodovar is famous for Oscar-winning dramas like TALK TO HER and ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER but the brilliant Spanish writer/director alternates those dramas with lighter fare, soapy melodramas, sometimes with a campy mystery/thriller side. In his latest, PARALLEL MOTHERS, Almodovar re-teams with favorite collaborator Penelope Cruz for a drama that combines these two film types running on parallel tracks, in which a drama about the devastating impact Spain’s political history on families serves as a kind of framing story for another one, a soapy mystery thriller about two mothers, although the two threads come together in the end.

It begins with two expectant mothers, one older and the other younger, sharing a room in a maternity hospital. Both are single and their pregnancies are accidental but while Janis (Penelope Cruz), a successful photographer approaching 40, is delighted by the prospect of motherhood, 17-year-old Ana (Milena Smit) is terrified. An unexpected bond forms between them, with the older one offering encouragement and support to the teen mother, who seems to get little of that from her narcissistic mother, Teresa (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), an actress more focused on her career than her daughter. When the two new mothers part, each with a newborn daughter, they exchange phone numbers with promises to stay in touch.

Penelope Cruz gives one of her best performances as Janis, a photographer at a high-end women’s magazine run by her best friend Elena (frequent collaborator Rossy de Palma), played with de Palma’s usual bold flare. During a photo shoot, Janis meets a handsome forensic anthropologist and archaeologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde). After the shoot, Janis asks him to exhume the mass grave where her great-grandfather, an early victim of Franco’s death squads, is buried, and he agrees to push for the project with the non-profit he works for, which is investigating the history of the mass killings under Francisco Franco’s fascist rule. The disappearance of her great-grandfather and others in the small village where she was raised by her grandmother has haunted both her and others in the village for decades and they want the right to recover and properly re-bury the bodies. Janis and Arturo also start an affair but when she becomes pregnant, she breaks it off, as he is married and his wife is battling cancer at the time.

The story about Janis’ missing great-grandfather and, more broadly, Spain’s legacy from Franco’s fascist regime, starts the film but then recedes as we focus on the story of the two mothers. That central story is both a soapy mystery/thriller and a drama exploring the challenges of motherhood, balancing work and family, and the connections between women. The more political framing story also explores family connections across generations, particularly between women, and the importance of history.

The soapy thriller starts after the two women leave the hospital. When Janis gets home, Arturo gets in touch with her, asking to see the new baby. She agrees but when he does see her, reacts to the baby’s swarthy appearance with questions. Although Janis quickly attributes the baby’s looks to the Venezuelan grandfather she never saw, and is offended by Arturo’s questioning, it still raises doubts in her mind, eventually leading to a shocking discovery.

Although Janis and Ana eventually lose touch, they reconnect when Janis spots Ana working at a nearby cafe. While Cruz is marvelous, young Milena Smit holds her own, with a finely crafted performance as Ana. One reason for the lack of connection between Smit’s Ana and her ambitious actress mother Teresa is that Ana has been living with her father, mother’s ex-husband, but he sent their daughter to her when she became pregnant. While Cruz’ character is emotional, confident and optimistic, Smit’s performance is more understated. Yet Smit masterfully takes the character from a frightened teen dependent on her emotionally-distant mother, to a more confident young woman, ready to face the world on her own.

While the central thriller story is soapy, it is never campy, handling the story’s twists and surprises as drama. Like all Almodovar films, strong color and design elements suffuse this film. Cruz often appears in red, signaling boldness, while quieter Ana is often in green or blue. The string-heavy music soundtrack, by composer Alberto Iglesias, frequently recalls Hitchcock films, particularly VERTIGO, as does the use of color in the central mystery story, The film also has one of the best uses of Janis Joplin’s “Summertime,” as Janis, who was named for the singer, describes her complicated family history, including the death of her hippy mother from an overdose at age 27, like Joplin.

While the mystery is not very hard to figure out, it does create a dilemma for Cruz’s Janis, a situation that is resolved in a pivotal scene in the second half of the film. However, that scene begins with Janis confronting Ana about Spain’s troubled history, after Ana, parroting her presumably-conservative father, says that the past does not matter, leading a fiery Janis to tell her to find out what her father did during that time. The scene is a crucial moment in the central story but also serves to tie the personal drama and the historical themes together by the film’s end.

Almodovar’s films are always about his unique, striking characters, which is true for this film as well. Almodovar’s ability to tell women’s stories is remarkable as always, and he puts that message right out there, on a tee-shirt Cruz wears in one scene, reading “we should all be feminists.” However, in PARALLEL MOTHERS, the director uncharacteristically dips a toe into the political, by focusing on the lingering pain of Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, during which 100,000 people went “missing,” a regime under which Almodovar grew up. But it is just a toe in the those troubled waters, raising the topic rather than exploring it deeply, and more focused on human rights than anything. Still, the film ends on a strong image of the opened mass grave, and a powerful quote on screen: “No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, no matter how much they break it, no matter how much they lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.”

This dual film, with serious and soapy sides, is usual for Almodovar but it is a strong, striking drama which might win the director both audience and award attention. In a funny way, it is DNA which ties both tracks of the film together, as a technology that makes discoveries like family connections possible and as the stuff of those family lines, as the past and the present come together in this fine drama.

PARALLEL MOTHERS, in Spanish with English subtitles, opens Friday, Jan. 28, at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinema and at other theaters nationally.

RATING: 4 out of 4 stars