Original Title: Madres paralelas
Spain/France – Drama – Year: 2021 – Running time: 123 mins
Language: Spanish
Audience Response: (20 slips returned)
- ‘Excellent’: 13 votes
- ‘Very Good’: 6 votes
- ‘Good’: 0 votes
- ‘Satisfactory’: 1 vote
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
Read the comments here or visit our “Parallel Mothers” discussion page
Synopsis:
Penelope Cruz, again, in Almodóvar’s latest movie. Two women meet in a maternity ward as they give birth under difficult circumstances. Their personal, tragic histories are eventually mirrored in that of Spain itself during the Civil War.
Most of all, it’s Cruz who sets the tone, with a performance that radiates warmth and is refreshingly forgiving of her character’s flaws. She has never been better.
Wendy Ide (Observer)
Director/Writer: Pedro Almodóvar
Main Cast:
| Penélope Cruz | Janis |
| Milena Smit | Ana |
| Israel Elejalde | Arturo |
| Aitana Sánchez-Gijón | Teresa |
| Rossy de Palma | Elena |
| Julieta Serrano | Brigida |
(for full cast list, reviews and more information, see IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes)
Chelmsford Film Club Notes:
If you were to believe purveyors of ‘ID bracelets for new borns’ (yes, check out the DNA kits for sale on the internet) about 28,000 babies get ‘switched’ at birth every year, a parent’s worst nightmare. If you don’t… relax: the baby’s your very own! So yes, Almodóvar’s latest movie trades on a well-established myth: what disgruntled teenager hasn’t vehemently subscribed to it, as in “these can’t possibly be my real parents, I was swapped at birth!” Members might recall the same theme being explored in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Like Father, Like Son’ from 2013.
At the heart of Parallel Mothers is the‘swapped at birth’ device, but there is much more, notably buried secrets from the Spanish Civil War. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian sang its praises:
Not ‘parallel’ actually: that would mean [the mothers] don’t touch. Here are ‘convergent’ mothers, interesting mothers whose lives come together with a spark that ignites this moving melodrama, audaciously drawing a line between love, sex, the passionate courage of single mothers, the meaning of Lorca’s ‘Dona Rosita the Spinster’ and the unhealed wound of Spain’s fascist past. Almodóvar’s movie has the warmth and grandiloquent flair of a picture from Hollywood’s golden age (something starring Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine maybe, with music by Max Steiner) and the whiplash twists and addictive sugar rush bumps of daytime soap. … there are gorgeously designed interiors with fierce, thick blocks of Mondrian colour, huge closeups of the female leads and overhead shots of food preparation… we just feel grateful that Almodóvar is still so fluent, so creative, still making us a gift of these films… perhaps the emotions spill over the edges of the narrative form… but let yourself travel down stream on this film’s emotional surge…
One mother is Janis (Penelope Cruz), a stylish photographer in her late 30s. The other is Ana (Milena Smit), a serious-looking teenager whose family background is troubled. Sharing a hospital room they bond over their decision to go it alone.
The father of Janis’s child is Arturo (Israel Elejalde) whose work involves trying to trace the victims of Francoist executions, buried in unmarked graves. Janis believes her great-grandfather was one of them.