Pedro Almodóvar | Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers) / 2021

the fathers who were never there

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers) / 2021

 

You might describe Pedro Almodóvar’s excellent new film Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers) as a work that keeps changing direction, or to use a more appropriate metaphor, a film that keeps reblooming but in completely different configurations. The body of the plant is the same, in this case two intertwined stems, but the flowers they produce shift and alternate at important junctures in their interrelationship, allowing the plants to keep growing—and the narrative to keep moving— in ways that you might otherwise have not expected.

     

 

     The two “mothers” at the center of this work are Janis Martinez (Penélope Cruz), in her late 30s who has had an affair with a married man, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), and discovers herself pregnant as a result; and a young college student, Ana Manso (Milena Smit) who we later discover has been gang rapped. Janis is positive and even excited about the situation, having carefully thought it out and determined to have the baby with no support and involvement of the father, although she has told him of the situation. As a successful photographer she can afford to hire an au pair and already has a maid to help her. Ana, on the other hand, has been sent by her father back to her mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) who as an actress who has just won a plum role in a new production of a Federico García Lorca play who has little time for her daughter, let alone the desire to play grandmother for the new baby. Accordingly, Ana is as unsure and frightened about her future as Janis is certain.

      In the Madrid hospital where they meet up, maternity patients are evidently paired by their estimated times of delivery, and the two women are, therefore, asked to share a room, where Teresa visits Ana and Janis’ wealthy magazine editor, Elena (Rossy de Palma) vists her friend, each also meeting the other woman. In the brief time that the two mothers share they bond, exchanging telephone numbers for when they leave the hospital, hoping to keep in touch and, if nothing else, to share stories about their new babies, Janis’ Cecilia and Ana’s Lucia.

      So, we might presume we have entered a kind the kind Almodóvar world like that of Volver, which also starred Cruz, wherein the story revolves around the female members of a family and the growing relationship between two women. And we wouldn’t necessarily be mistaken if we made this presumption.

      However, the director immediately throws several kinks into what might be a feminist-like tale. Janis’ au pair, Brígida, is not quite working out. As a young college student, she is far too busy attending classes and studying to help out during the day, and by night when the baby is  sleeping in her room, she habitually puts on her ear phones, thus making her unable to hear if the child were crying or in danger. The maid’s husband is ill, and she increasingly asks if she might leave early in order to visit him in the hospital, leaving Janis alone to make dinner for herself and Brígida. Moreover, the father of Cecilia, Arturo, unexpectedly returns just to see his progeny. If Janis is upset by his sudden appearance it is because she still has feelings for him, despite the fact that he is even more attentive to his wife now that she has cancer. But the visit, although polite, seems curt. He seems pleased to see the child, but comments little and leaves soon after. 

      The next day when Janis goes to his hotel to confront him, he explains that he simply doesn’t see any aspect of himself or his family in the child’s appearance, and doubts his paternity, which obviously angers Janis who insists she had no other lovers at the time that they met.

      Ana has also found herself too busy to meet up with Janis. Although Teresa had planned for her play to open in Madrid, the director announces that the theater is unavailable and that the company will have to tour the provinces before returning to Madrid for the opening. The young girl, according, is left in her mother’s home alone with a maid and nanny, but has little experience in even knowing how to make use of their services. She feels as alone and afraid as when her father sent her, unwanted, to her mother upon discovering her pregnancy.

      In short, both women have been betrayed by men in their lives. Janis, moreover, has grown up in a fatherless household and her mother, in turn, had grown up without a father. Now the new male in her life even refuses to acknowledge the child, even though he has been asked for nothing regarding its care and upbringing. Ana, having attended a party with her boyfriend, having gotten drunk, has been raped and photographed, the two boys who observed and photographed the event, later threatening her with exposure if she does not also have sex with them as well. Despite the fact that she has legally been raped, her father, who has long ago been divorced from her mother and raised his own family since, insists that she should not report it to police before sending her off to the career-driven Teresa.

 

      And both are soon about to face even further difficulties they might never have imagined. Disturbed by Arturo’s absolute disavowal of the child and by Cecila’s dark complexion create enough doubts in her mind that she proceeds with a DNA test, only to discover, to her shock, that she is most definitely not the birth mother.

      At the very same time, Ana discovers her beloved Lucia dead of a rare form of crib death that the doctors describe as resulting from her undeveloped brain’s forgetting to ask the body it controls simply to breath.

      By accident the two meet up again in despair, this time at a café where Ana, having left her mother’s house, has taken a job. Feeling forlorn and friendless, and perhaps just a little curious about the obvious situation with Cecilia, Janis invites her back to the house. Upon seeing pictures of Lucia, and recognizing that she could indeed be of her own blood, and then suddenly being told of that child’s death, a wave of emotional responses rushes over Janis, who almost spontaneously  yet perhaps subconsciously with a deep sense of self-protection and even manipulation, invites the now more mature and suddenly quite beautiful Ana to take on the job of her au pair, to live in her own house, and perhaps gradually replace her maid, whose husband has grown even more ill than when she first returned home with the baby. The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane summarizes Cruz’ character and her acting very nicely in this and the following devastating scenes: 

      

"For those of us who deify Penélope Cruz, the new film is a case of déjà vu. In Almodóvar’s Live Flesh (1997), she played a young Madrileña who gave birth on a bus. (A friend had to cut the umbilical cord with her teeth.) But there was a clinging helplessness to that character, whereas Janis, in “Parallel Mothers,” is—or, for a while, appears to be—in mature command of her fate. Deeming Arturo to be surplus to requirements, she raises Cecilia on her own. Circumstances, though, conspire against her, and she winds up employing Ana as a nanny. “I’ll teach you how to run a house and cook,” Janis says, kicking things off with a lesson in peeling potatoes. Here is Cruz at her least showy and yet her most adventurous, allowing a storm of confusion to sweep across her face as she sits at a café table, and guiding us through the stages of one woman’s self-possession: having it, losing it almost completely, and then reclaiming it."

     The two women not only get on well together but develop a close friendship that suddenly transitions into a sexual lesbian relationship. Although there is clearly love between them, it is dominated by Ana feelings for Janis, and if Janis seems slightly reticent it is not simply because of the age difference but because in the interim she has swabbed both Ana’s and Ceclia’s mouths only to discover, after sending it off to the laboratories, that indeed Ana is Ceclia’s birth mother, quite obviously making the situation almost impossible. And even she realizes what Ana will later accuse her of being, that she is entirely selfish in her inability to reveal the truth. Janis has come to love Cecilia has her own child. 

      In the perfect Almodóvar world the two women, even upon such a devastating revelation, would continue to in their love of each another to raise Ceclia as their mutual child, living happily ever after as a lesbian couple.

      But this director’s worlds are always fallen, haunted by history in ways that none of his characters want to admit. Aunts move in unexpectedly with their nieces, lovers from the past come back to haunt those who have moved on in other directions, buried truths come crashing back to the surface.

       Arturo returns once more, Janis accepting his invitation for a drink and staying out with him all evening. Upon her return, Ana is jealous, worried that her companion has once again had sex with him. She denies it, but Ana is still observant that something is different and challenges Janis, believing it has to do with their love. Again she is mistaken; the discomfort emanates, we realize, Janis’s deep sense of guilt for her betrayal of Ana. And finally, given the situation she reveals the truth about Ceclia.

     

     Ana is righteously horrified to hear the truth, that Janis has long known that the babies must have gotten mixed up in the hospital but has not thought it necessary to report that earthshattering truth, revealing that it is her child who lives and Janis’ who has died. Ana packs her bags, grabs the child, and exits without further discussion, leaving Janis alone to suffer the consequences of her selfishness.

       By morning Ana calls to apologize for her own insensitivity, and it appears that in fact there is a possibility of two coming together again, if only Janis can assure her of a permanent place in her life.

       But the story and history itself again intervenes. The reason that Arturo has returned and Janis has spent the long night celebrating with him takes us back to the very earliest scenes when Janis photographs Arturo for a magazine spread on Arturo, a well-known forensic anthropologist who works with government founding to examine the remains of Franco’s victims in unmarked mass graves. Finished with the shoot, she tells him of just such an unmarked spot in her own town which contains the remains of her own great-grandfather and several friends, querying him whether he might be able to get a grant to dig there as well. Together they write up a grant, which he warns her sometimes takes several years to be answered, particularly since government funds have been severely curtailed.

       We now must return to Spanish history to comprehend the territory we are about to enter. Upon Franco’s rise to power, thousands upon thousands of anti-Franco soldiers and others simply suspected or innocently caught up with the events of the time were brutally killed through methods that might remind us of the two other great tyrants of the period, Hitler and Stalin. Some estimates of such post-Civil War activity suggest more than 100,000 individuals simply went missing. Among those probably killed by Franco soldiers was Federico García Lorca, the outspoken playwright and poet whose work Ana mother’s is performing. Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo (like Lorca and the director film, a gay man) wrote an entire work of fiction, The Garden of Secrets (1997) focused on 28 individuals each presenting their own theory of the death and location of Lorca, whose body has still to be found.

       Estimates of deaths from the Civil War and the atrocities of its aftermath are difficult to determine, and have been estimated from 2 million to 250,000, those numbers reflecting the inclusion or exclusion of those were killed from other wartime conditions and hygiene, those who represented other nations in the war, and those like children and women whose ancillary deaths often when unreported; and of course, the thousands who were later killed by Franco’s soldiers is still unknown. When Franco died in 1975, the government created the “Amnesty Law of 1977,” as part of the pacto del olvido (the pact of oblivion) in order to wipe away all former crimes in an attempt for the country to make a healthy transition into democracy. But obviously that did not satisfy the hundreds of families who still kept their memories of the Franco regime of husbands, uncles, and brothers being taken away from breakfast and dinner tables who in legend were forced to dig their own graves and were never to be see again—precisely what the older women describe in this film of their own and Janis’ relatives.

        Finally, the outcry became so intense that a new law was enacted, the “Law of Historical Memory,” which along with issuing a forceful condemnation of the Franco regime funded a group, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, to seek out the remains of those secretly killed by Franco. It is for that organization which Arturo works; and the reason he has returned to Madrid and celebrated with Janis is because their grant has finally been approved.

        For the rest of Almodóvar’s film, the action shifts away from the personal relationship of Ana and Janis, as through Arturo and his worker’s action of digging and recovering of the dead bodies, Janis teaches Ana and her daughter Cecilia a lesson far more important than how to cook a potato omelet.

        The two remain close friends, but their story also opens up, as Cecilia grows into an inquisitive toddler under the gentle ministrations of Ana, and Janis and Arturo—the latter who has told his now healthy wife about Janis, the two agreeing upon divorce—have produced another unborn child still in her womb.

       Together this little family (Janis, Ana, and Cecilia, Elena, and Arturo), finally march en masse with the others remaining who recall the past the Foundation returned to them through the unearthed graves that permits them to witness the bones of their long ago dead and the artifacts they took with them: a child’s rattle, a glass eye, a gold tooth. By film’s end the personal has become universal, as the individuals have finally taken history back into their own hands, and are ready to face a future with a less haunted past.

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).