Pedro Almodóvar
Madres paralelas

With Madres paralelas, presented as the opening film at the Venice Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar revisits one of his favorite themes, motherhood, creating female portraits that aim to unite past and future and reaffirm the importance of the female figure as a junction point between the two dimensions. It is an attempt that does not fully succeed, with a somewhat forced juxtaposition of two storylines that do not truly intertwine except in an artificial manner.

The protagonist, Janis (the Oscar-nominated Penélope Cruz), meets forensic anthropologist Alvaro during a photo shoot, after which she asks him to help her open a mass grave outside the village where she grew up to search for the body of her grandfather, desaparecido during the Spanish Civil War, like many other men from the village. A relationship develops between the two, and months later, Janis discovers she is pregnant.

Shortly before going into labor, Janis meets the young Ana, also pregnant. The two give birth simultaneously, and a certain bond is established between them. Ana, a teenager, now lives with her mother, a theater actress who has just been cast in a role that could finally boost her career—the Maiden Lady Rosita by García Lorca—and decides to prioritize her personal realization over her daughter and go on tour. Ana and Janis meet again months later in a bar where Ana works as a waitress, and Janis proposes that she replace the inattentive Irish au pair and move into her home.

In the meantime, something drastic has happened to both mothers: Janis has discovered she is not her daughter's biological mother, while Ana's daughter has died of crib death. Despite several elements indicating the truth, Ana suspects nothing: naive, sweet as her physical appearance would suggest, the 'pixie cut' she sports hardens her features. The death of her daughter hasn't destroyed her, nor did the rape she suffered, but the loss of the baby has intensified her desire to be an independent adult woman; certainly, in the relationship between her and Janis, there is an element of maternity, with Janis being a maternal figure for Ana—a more mature one, different from her own mother, who was never really present for her due to their personal history.

There is never, in Almodóvar's approach to femininity, anything forced or contrived: his female portraits are always genuine, honest, and the peculiar style that accompanies them does not render them caricatures but only further affirms the director's authorial style. Thus everything in the film seems to bear his name, like a designer who has orchestrated every detail of their collection: the color red, always present in his color palette; the modernist-style decorated interiors, the flashy clothing with geometric cuts (and a T-shirt worn by Janis with the slogan "we should all be feminists") and then the photo shoots, particularly the one where Janis photographs a group of transgender women for the cover of her best friend Elena's fashion magazine.

However, the homosexual drift in the relationship between Janis and Ana seems a bit more forced, which from one side appears to respond more to Ana's need for affection than to a real sexual attraction between the two; perhaps this is indeed the case, in the director's intent, but also the sex scene does not convey the same passion and sensuality that characterizes much of 'Almodovarian' cinema.

Once again, however, women are practically the only protagonists, and Almodóvar delivers portraits that do justice and dignity to each of them; the only male role of some relevance is that of Arturo, a figure unintentionally comedic in his marginality and his role as an educated and charming man, clearly subordinate to that of Janis.

Thus, the main storyline, the terrible secret Janis hides from Ana, becomes secondary, a device to closely portray different female characters, rather than focusing on a plot that could develop into a thriller. And unlike many other films by the director, it's not even a dramatic film, because Janis's character redeems herself before it's too late, confessing the truth to Ana. And after a brief moment of crisis, everything is on the rise again towards a bright and positive ending for all the characters involved.

Only the storyline dedicated to memory and history, and its ever-relevant political implications, never truly intersects with the main one, except at the moment of a conversation—which probably aims to be significant, but sounds a little forced—between Janis and Ana, where the former firmly affirms the importance of looking at the past as well as the future, even for someone as young as Ana who feels no connection with the Civil War. Only at the end, in the last part of the film, Janis and Pedro head to her native village, and listen to the memories of the women who recount the deaths and disappearances. Janis is now pregnant with Pedro again, and holding his hand on one side and Ana's—who quickly forgave her, apparently accepting the end of their relationship with docility—on the other, she witnesses the opening of the grave, after a procession of women approached, marching, to the place where their loved ones were thrown without name and without memory. Once again, women are protagonists, but if there's an intent to create a parallel between being a mother—the future—and the memory of the past, it comes off a bit forced in its narrative construction, like a tribute that finds no space in the plot.

Watching Madres paralelas, I thought of another film, Nuestras madres by César Diaz, a film whose protagonist is a Guatemalan anthropologist embarking on a mission to find his father's grave, disappeared during the civil war. Even in that case, the title matched the important and symbolic presence of the female figure while also being a search for the lost father. Yet, a much larger film, in terms of production and experience, such as Almodóvar's, fails to convey the same genuine breath in this search for one's past, which seems a little forced, almost a message trying to be slipped in not subliminally but too overtly, without conveying the urgency.